The World Cross Country Championships is in trouble, writes Cathal Dennehy, and the best way to keep it from withering on the vine is to convince the biggest names in distance running to compete.
The first step to fixing a problem is to admit that there is one. The World Cross Country Championships are in trouble and there’s no point pretending otherwise. To do this, the event will only move along the slide to irrelevance.
That may be debatable for those who were in Tallahassee for this year’s edition, who by all accounts had a thoroughly enjoyable experience; An impressive crowd of around 10,000 saw unparalleled displays from two of the world’s best distance runners, Agnes Ngetich and Jacob Kiplimo. But the unfortunate reality is that most of the sports world didn’t even know it was happening, and most distance devotees watching on TV or online were left unimpressed.
Hannah England was alone on commentary for the global stream, but as always, she did a great job. He was insightful, informative and entertaining, weaving in local knowledge as a former Florida State University graduate, including how his former coach used training in the local humidity as a “poor man’s high.”
It was a 10-on-10 screen, but he shouldn’t have been left to carry the can alone. A second person on the sidelines should be a must for an event of this caliber, as it intermittently frees up each commentator to get up to speed on district splits, team scores and spot anything the other might have missed. It also allows for natural back-and-forth conversation, debate, and banter, the kind that’s hard to have when you’re alone. A single commentator is fine for low-profile events, but it should never be the case at the World Cup, even when it’s as brilliant as England’s.
Looking from a distance, many people had the same question about the program: why are the pictures so bad? It had the feel of a domestic event, not a global one.
Given that part of the course was through woods, it didn’t seem possible to have a parallel line to shoot the athletes on quad bikes, so instead we got a flood of drone footage from behind the athletes, with poor resolution and often stuck in the treetops with no idea what was going on below. This is it again World Cross Country:not the Liverpool Cross Challenge.
The shot of the athletes crossing the ring was also oddly spaced, well beyond where it should have been within the event’s branding frame. As such, it all had the feel of a pared-down, low-budget production, but if world athletics president Seb Coe is serious about the Winter Olympics, this isn’t the kind of result you’d put on the table to convince the International Olympic Committee.
However, the problems facing the World Cross go far beyond its broadcasting. It has now been 25 years since a non-African athlete has topped the senior individual podium and 15 years since a non-African woman has done so. The dominance of East African countries has led to a decline in interest outside that region, but even in the last two decades of African dominance, the event has still lost something.
I’m thinking here of how great it was in 2007 when Eritrean Zersenai Tadese ran his legs over Kenenisa Bekele in the sweltering Mombasa heat and tens of thousands of Kenyans erupted as the Ethiopian great left the course. Just because no Americans or Europeans were arguing didn’t make it any less attractive. Kampala 2017 was another great edition, the Ugandan crowd and atmosphere was truly befitting of the event.
Maybe need to go back to East Africa. Or in Aarhus, Denmark, which did a good job in 2019, one followed by a mediocre release in Australia, and then an admittedly poor one in Serbia, which was organized on short notice originally intended for Croatia.
Cities that want to bid for it are often hard to find, but a lot of attention should be paid to making sure it goes where it has a few thousand fans; Tallahassee and Aarhus smartly ensured this by having another race on the same weekend.
But the biggest issue for World Cross isn’t the local or televised venue, or whether purists consider the course to be “real cross-country,” a term I’ve always dismissed as petty, considering “real cross-country” is very different whether you live in Nairobi, Edinburgh, Oslo or Madrid. (On a related note, let’s not make the classes homogenous by default. The nature of the sport is that you adapt to the host country’s terrain, whether it’s flat, boggy grass, climbing soul-crushing hills or wading through knee-deep mud).
No, the biggest problem at World Cross Country is getting the best athletes to show up. Road racing has exploded in quantity and quality over the past two decades, and many athletes have prioritized it this year instead of leaning on the World Cross.
None of the Paris Olympic medalists have run over 5,000m or 10,000m in Tallahassee. Only one of the nine athletes who won medals at those distances at last year’s world championships in Tokyo is on the waiting list. Of the 54 athletes who ran over 10,000m in Japan, only 15 ran the World Cross four months later.
January’s new World Cross matchday should, on paper, have sparked more interest among athletes, but it seems it didn’t. Many European countries have thrown in the towel, seeing it as an unnecessary expense with little to no impact.
That attitude runs from the federations to the athletes, many of whom understandably don’t want to be beaten mercilessly, feeling that the World Cross has no place unless you’re firing at full power, which, let’s face it, nobody is in January, not even Kiplimo or Ngetic. Those who step out onto the line and risk half a lap behind the best in the world are to be fully commended.
Recently, there has been an increasing number of tricks on the course, such as water/sand/mud pits. They are exciting for viewers, welcomed by photographers, but organizers must tread carefully because a course that is starting to look like a recipe for injury is one that the world’s best athletes will avoid.
Right now on the track, distance runners from Europe and the US have closed the gap considerably on their African rivals, but most of them were still reluctant to take them on flat, (mostly) dry cross-country. Why?
Maybe it’s time for World Athletics to start a consultation process with the likes of Jakob Ingebrigtsen, Nadia Battocletti, Cole Hawker, Grant Fischer, Andreas Almgren and others like them, along with their coaches and managers, asking what calendar date, financial incentives and course requirements should be put in place for them. rotates in 2029.
Because for this event to survive and succeed, it needs a majority of the world’s top 10km runners on the line, and right now that’s not happening.
On the Podium Athletics podcast, Hannah England made two good suggestions. and offering automatic qualification to the world championships for the top 20 in the 10,000m.
Last year, 14 of the 16 relay qualifying spots for Tokyo were awarded at the World Relays, forcing countries that would not otherwise send teams to China. In 2029, why not give away 20 of the 27 places over 10,000m at the World Cross, then fill the rest based on world rankings? That, you can be sure, will lead to many more starting lines.
There needs to be more encouragement, because right now many would rather run a glorified time trial on the streets of Valencia or around the indoor track in Boston than represent their country at the World Championships. It wasn’t meant to be.
In athletics, events come and go all the time. Just like athletes, they develop, peak, decline and eventually disappear. It is clear what stage World Cross Country has reached now. But this is too good an event, too prestigious a part of this sport, to be allowed to simply wither on the vine.
