What does the future look like for cross country, a corner of the sport that has been “taken for granted” and needs to modernise, but could continue to play an important role for athletics?
“The short answer is yes,” says Jakob Larsen, responding to the question of whether or not he feels there is untapped potential in cross country running. At its core, the discipline that has been used by so many athletes as a foundation stone of endurance running is largely unchanged from its inception in the 19th century.
It remains a mainstay of the calendar, too, but Larsen – the man who led the organising committee behind the innovative 2019 World Athletics Cross Country Championships in Aarhus, Denmark – believes it is one of the areas of athletics that has been “left behind” down the years.
“I think the world cross country championships and the 1500m are the Blue Riband distances,” he adds. “They are always extremely competitive, very hard to predict, and just good fun. For cross country, a lot has been taken for granted, and we focused on the functional part of it and less on the just having fun part of it. I do think it has a future but we just need to make it fun for more people.”
The winds of change could soon be blowing across this corner of the sport. The campaign to make it an Olympic event again for the first time since 1924 has long been established but was given renewed momentum by proposals that it could be included at the winter Games of 2030, sharing the same course as cyclocross.
Just recently, World Athletics president Seb Coe reiterated an idea that was also aired in Paris last year. “I think there’s a good chance it’ll happen,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to see cross-country back in for all sorts of reasons. Some are emotional, but it also gives Africa a proper presence in the winter Games which, if we are being honest, it doesn’t really have. Sharing the same course with cyclocross is really where our thinking is going. We’ve already had good conversations.”
Larsen, the now Head of Product Research and Development at the global governing body, agrees that the proposal makes sense. “That’s an interesting thought, which may steer cross country in a completely new direction, but we’ll see,” he says. That note of caution was perhaps apt, given recent comments from Winter Olympic Federations secretary general Colin Grahamslaw, who appeared to pour cold water on the idea.
The Dane is just pleased to see it in the conversation. The topic of innovation is currently a hot one in athletics but, while road and trail running is going through a purple patch and seeing great growth, it has seemed a little like cross country has been quietly left to get on with it.
“There is a future [for cross country,” says Larsen. “I definitely see cross country would have a lot to offer, but we need to think about: ‘How do we make it worthwhile for people who are investing time, money, attention?’ They need to get a return of that investment, if you will. So we probably need to do a better job of not focusing only on the field of play, but actually turning our backs to that and looking at the people watching it. Are they having a good time? I do think it has a future, but I also think that, like everything else, it needs to adjust to the current day and age.”
Larsen is an ideas man and his approach in Aarhus six years ago, with its exacting and innovative course that involved running over the roof of a museum, steep ups and downs, mud pits and fan tunnels, made a major attempt to mix things up. Incorporating a mass participation event to the programme was another fresh piece of thinking.
There are things that Larsen would do differently if he were in charge again but the biggest obstacle to building on the momentum that had been set in motion by that event was Covid, meaning that the next edition of the world cross – in Bathurst, Australia – didn’t come until four years later.
“That is a very long time to wait for a follow-up,” he says, “But I do think the sport as a whole probably didn’t really reflect that much on Aarhus and what worked, and, to be honest, what didn’t work. If there was one thing we got right, it was that we started out with the question of ‘where can we do a race that would be really fun to watch?’.
“We had several options [of what to do with the course], and we looked at them and said: ‘This is generic. This is boring’ but [when we started looking at running on] the roof, everyone was just smiling and I thought: ‘Okay, if everyone is smiling it’s probably right’. So I guess we should be led by smiles!”
Bathurst, and the event location of the motor racing circuit at Mount Panorama, tried to do things a little differently too but the mess of 2023, when the world championships were switched to Belgrade late on after the original Croatian hosts of Medulin and Pula were found to be falling short of expectations, didn’t help. Next up is Tallahassee in Florida on January 10 and, as revealed in the October issue of AW, creative plans are afoot to make this a memorable edition of the championships for the right reasons.
And Larsen sees no reason why the event shouldn’t attract attention. He views the world cross in a category all of its own, in much the same way that the Paris-Roubaix race – famed for its rough terrain and cobbled roads – occupies a unique place in the world of cycling.
“At times, an event can actually grow beyond the reach of the sport itself,” he says. “I tend to compare the world cross country championships to the Paris-Roubaix cycling race, which probably wouldn’t be invented today, yet it’s extremely popular. I think there’s so many similarities. You probably wouldn’t come up with something like this today but it has transcended the sport and become just an important moment.”
And yet it doesn’t always attract the most “important” athletes. Whilst many of the biggest African names tend to compete, the same cannot be said for other nations. That, says Larsen, is largely down to market forces.
“I think cross country got left behind when the sport took off financially,” he says. “You are basically asking the top athletes to choose cross country over road, knowing that they are very likely to give up a decent amount of money and to me that’s an unreasonable thing to ask. This is more a matter of: ‘How do we grow cross country financially?’. Because if we want to have the very best athletes there, we need to pay the going rate.
“The athletes who prioritise cross country right now, they’re doing it because some believe it’s good for preparation, but they also do it because they like it, because their country supports it. I do think, moving forward, we need to grow it financially and to me the easiest way to do that would be mass participation, making sure that you create something that people can take part in. I mean, it’s the road running recipe – we’re 40-50 years late.”
Of course, domestic mass participation cross country, where the elites and masses toe the same start line, has existed for some time – and nowhere is it better known than in the UK.
“[Cross country has] still got a massive following,” says Eamonn Martin – Olympian, secretary of the English Cross Country Association and race director of the London meeting that forms part of the annual UK Athletics Cross Challenge.
“Generally, there’s lots of people running cross countries and there still seems to be a strong commitment to the leagues. The number of league matches is down but I don’t think that’s because of a lack of appetite – it’s more logistics. It’s become harder and harder to get venues. More and more of them want what is large money for a sport like cross country.”
Martin agrees with Larsen in that there needs to be some modernisation in terms of how the sport operates. The former London Marathon winner is part of the discussions currently taking place around the future of the UK calendar and is firmly of the view that the cross country season – which currently runs from October until March – needs to be shorter for a start.
“Cross country is not as popular in March,” he says. “Yes, the English schools and the Inter Counties are on then but people do venture on to the roads a lot more. I think we need to pull the whole cross country season forward. It is popular and I think if we condense it into October through to February, it’s got a really good life.
“Some people still want to run it right through to the end of March but I think that it’s a long season and it’s a little bit unrealistic. And that’s been part of why I’ve been heavily involved in the fixture debate to try and change it. March and April tends to be the general road season, with people preparing for the various marathons. Plus, the same people who
would run cross country generally are running road races.”
Martin also sees merit in turning around and paying attention to the crowd. He was particularly struck, for example, by what he saw behind the ropes at the English National at the renowned venue of Parliament Hill in London earlier this year.
“The National entries were good,” he says. “They weren’t the biggest ever but the buzz, the people there and the number of spectators was colossal. In terms of a spectacle, it was really, really good.”
Martin will also be the Great Britain team manager at next month’s European Cross Country Championships – the annual end-of-year event which has also done great things in terms of format, presentation and quality of racing. Given those championships began in Britain – Alnwick in 1994 to be precise – and that the nation are prolific medal winners, that it hasn’t been staged on British shores since Edinburgh in 2003 seems odd, to say the least.
It would undoubtedly draw the crowds.
“[With cross country], it always feels you have the spirit of the place and to me this is a really strong asset,” says Larsen. “Each meeting is different. It’s really powerful and you can do a lot with it. We just never really thought about it. ‘Who would find this relevant? How can we share it with them? How can we make it easy for them to be part of this?’.”
Perhaps now is the perfect time to start asking.
