By Steve Cram BBC Sport

Behind the flurry of excitement about London not being made part of the Golden League lie some very pertinent questions.

First of all, the field at Crystal Palace is already world class.

It's difficult to see how you could have improved on this year's line-up.

The question that follows that, therefore, is why do you want to be part of the Golden League?

The answer to that is that they would have got a slice of the financial cake that they're not getting right now.

But it's a well-funded meet anyway, and I'm not sure how much more money you can throw at it.

You might be able to secure a few more high-class performers, but it won't make a huge difference.

I can understand why people want to be part of the Golden League - if you agree with the concept of the whole thing.

If there is going to be a Golden League, a premier division of meets, you want to be in it.

You want your meeting to be one of the top three in the world.

But there are three or four meets which were outside the Golden League this year, such as London, Stockholm and Lausanne, which the athletes will go to anyway because they are very good meets.

They've got very good budgets and you get very good performances.

Lausanne and Stockholm don't suffer from not being in the Golden League.

Unless from their point of view there are huge financial advantages they would be giving up by not being part of the League, there's no need to change their status.

I worry about the whole Golden League concept.

There are too many meets for the athletes to compete in, a situation that's made worse when you have a year dominated by big championships as we had this season.

And while not all races have the same people in them, there is a tendency for that to happen.

Quite obviously, if you're asking athletes to get six big results, then you will see the same athletes in all six meets.

And I don't think that is good for the sport, especially if those athletes are quite dominant in their event, as Hicham El Guerrouj is over 1500m.