2023 World Cross Country Championships review
It's too bad the U.S. no longer prioritizes this rare gathering of the best of the best into one set of races
The 2023 World Athletics Cross Country Championships (hyphen omitted to comply with World Athletics styling) were held on Saturday in Bathurst, Australia, the first staging of the event since 2019.
The format and frequency of this awe-inspiring competition has changed over the years independent of its 2021 and 2022 delays owing the world’s first successfully contrived coronavirus pandemic. Through 2011 it was an annual event, but it has since been held in only in odd-numbered years a la the World Athletics (i.e., track and field) Championships. World Athletics has assembled an excellent history of the Championships to mark their fifty years of existence (Paula Radcliffe was born in the same year this event was).
It’s still an every-other-year event, but now the Championships will be held in even-numbered years, beginning next year in Croatia (if Croatia still there).
The 2023 Championships featured five competitions: 10K senior races for men and women, an 8K under-20 (U20) race for boys and men, a 6K U20 race for girls and women, and a mixed 4 × 2K relay (all links go to World Athletics write-ups).
On YouTube are videos of the senior men’s and senior women’s races. The WA results page links to the five team and four individual race outcomes. The most notable occurrence on the day was 1:02:52 half-marathoner Letesenbet Gidey of Ethiopia falling to the ground meters from the finish line, just as Kenya’s Beatrice Chebet was storming past her. A spectator tried to help Gidey up, resulting in the automatic disqualification of Gidey and probably a PayPal ban.
I went to this event in 1992, which is why I’m not using borrowed language, merely a dismal cliche, in calling it “awe-inspiring.”
Lynn Jennings, very much by coincidence, is in the news thanks to a Boston Globe article detailing Jennings’ sexual abuse at the hands of John Babington, a 77-year-old former coach who has confessed to his crimes, and the cover-up of Babington’s crimes in the late 1990s by Wellesley College, which in a touch of the usual grisly irony is an all-women’s institution at the student level.1
The top American man in 1992 was Todd Williams, whose 19th place guided the U.S. team’s 8th-place finish among 22 scoring teams. Jennings and Vicki Huber going 1-4 in the women’s race drove the American squad’s runner-up finish among 19 scoring teams in Franklin Park, 30 points behind Kenya’s total of 47. In these Championships, six individual places were scored for men but only four for women; that number is currently four for both sexes.
On Saturday, the U.S. men placed sixth and the U.S. women fifth among teams in the senior races. That doesn’t look like a horrible slide since 1992, but this year’s event featured only 13 men’s teams and 11 women’s teams in those divisions. And the world’s best runners have been pulling farther and farther ahead of the Americans who wind up at this event, who for years haven’t been close to the best American distance runners on offer overall. [Note: The emailed version of this post incorrectly stated that the U.S. men and women were third in both senior races. The American U20 men and U20 women did both earn bronze medals in the team races.]
The 1992 women’s 6K senior race had 121 finishers; this year’s 10K women’s senior race had 86 finishers. In 1992, the top 30 (a quarter of the field) were separated by 57 seconds, or about 9.5 sec/km. The top quartile this year (22 places) spanned 121 seconds, or 12.1 sec/km.
The men’s finisher field in 1992 was just over twice as large as this year’s (219 vs. 109). In 1992, the top one-fourth of the finishers (55 runners) were 86 seconds apart in the 12K race, or 7.2 sec/km. The gap this year between the winner and the 27th-place finisher over 10K was 121 seconds, or 12.1 sec/km.
The top two women for the U.S. this year and three of the four scoring men were born in Africa. The time of the top U.S.-born male finisher, 31:44, was actually closer to Beatrice Chebet’s winning women’s time (33:48) than to the men’s winning time of 29:17 run by Jacob Kiplimo.
(The usual disclaimer goes here: Different years bring different challenges. In 1992 it was snowing, while this year it was warm and the course was slick more by design than by weather accident.)
This is less a commentary on America’s flailing as its lack of prioritization. For whatever reason, World Cross doesn’t mean much here anymore. While there is no way for the U.S. to reclaim its standing in the days of Craig Virgin (who won the senior men’s races in 1980 and 1981) and Jennings, also a two-time champ, you’d think the Bowerman Track Club could send a few dopers to World Cross and stanch some of the national bleeding. The 10K senior competitions draw many of the best runners on the planet—marathoners, mid-distance types, 10,000-meter studs—into one race, which almost never happens anymore (and rarely ever has outside of World Cross).
The junior women’s race was notable for the performance of Massachusetts junior Ellie Shea, who basically runs professionally already. Shea’s 21:48 put her only 55 seconds behind winner Senayet Getachew of Ethiopia, and as she’ll be 17 until September, she’ll be eligible for the U20 race next year, too.
How hard was the layout used in Bathurst? I believe that even Aussie and Boulder resident Lee Troop, who eats glass with a pensive look on his face, found it satisfactorily excruciating. Given that Kiplimo averaged 4:23.25 per mile in setting the half-marathon world record of 57:31 and 4:42.76 in winning on Saturday over less than half the distance, unusually excruciating. And the gap between Gidey’s pace in running 1:02:52 (4:47.7 per mile) and the pace Chebet ran on Saturday, which Gidey nearly matched (5:26.37) was around twice as large. She’s a funny one, that head of Letes.
I hate to even link to that article from an otherwise happy-enough post; the passage about Melody Fairchild is infuriating. But it’s how power has long functioned in reality, and this story is a major reason women who don’t want male coaches, or specifically sexual predators with ample athletics knowledge. anywhere near girl or women athletes often seem to be on point despite the rigidity of the stance. Yay for Babington’s admission now that he can’t physically carry out his “hobby” anymore and will probably not be around for long.