IAAF Ready to Abandon Annual Cross-Country World Championships

(ATR) Track and field’s global governing body is considering scrapping its oldest annual championship due to a lack of sponsorship income and waning European and North American interest.

The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) staged its world cross-country championships last month, in Amman, Jordan, but it has no firm offers to stage the annual event beyond next March.

Isaiah Kiplagat, the chairman of Athletics Kenya and an IAAF council member, revealed the probable changes earlier this week. According to The Standard, Kiplagat said, “the future of the world cross-country championship is currently not certain because no country is willing to host the event and it is lacking sponsorship.

“Next year’s event set for Bydgoszcz, Poland, will go on as planned but after that, the event will be held after a span of two years,” Kiplagat said, adding that the IAAF hopes to be able to announce a 2012 world cross venue when the council meets in Berlin ahead of the track world championships in August.

It seems unlikely that the United States will offer to host the meet any time soon. Estimates put the staging costs at $3 million, with the host city paying for the global TV feed and meeting any U.S. taxes on prize money won by non-Americans.

Asked whether USA Track & Field will be bidding for the world cross-country, spokesperson Jill Geer said, “It’s too soon to say.” The U.S. has only staged the meet twice, the last time in 1992, in Boston, when Lynn Jennings won the women’s race, the last American to win a senior title at this event.

In Jordan, Pierre Weiss, the IAAF’s general secretary, suggested that there were two possible bidders to stage the event in 2011, one of which was Australia. But Weiss also aired reservations about maintaining the standard of competition at the world cross.

The IAAF has been uncomfortable with the event for several years, in 2007 dropping its experiment of staging a two-day distance running festival when it abandoned the four-kilometer “short” races from the program, reverting to the long-established four-race timetable for seniors and juniors, male and female.

The event has been dominated by east Africans for nearly 30 years, with Kenya and Ethiopia enjoying a duopoly of the senior men’s team title since 1981.

In recent years, few European or North American nations have even entered full teams across all events. The last time a runner representing a non-African nation won the senior men’s race was 2001, and then Belgium claimed the honor through Morocco-born Mohammed Mourhit. Before that, the last non-Africa-born runner to win the individual senior men’s title was Carlos Lopes, of Portugal, in 1985.

The African dominance has eroded American and European television coverage of the event and so deterred sponsors.

“Cross-country running has lost its allure,” a senior source at the IAAF’s Monte Carlo headquarters told Around the Rings this week in an off-the-record briefing.

“Why have a world championships for cross-country runners but not for sprinters or throwers, other than for reasons of tradition? It is a nonsense that we insist on having two ‘specialty’ world championships – for cross-country running and race walking – but not in events where we are likely to have winners from nations that actually contribute to the global wealth of international athletics.

“The cross is now not even an African event but an East African event. We should cancel it now. Or hold it every two years and then encourage area cross championships which are at least more interesting for the local member federations.”

The IAAF only took on the event in 1973 from the International Cross Country Union, which had been staging its races annually, except during world wars, since 1903. Despite being usually a winter sport, cross-country races were included on the summer Olympic program in 1912, 1920 and 1924.

Written by Steven Downes.