March 21, 1992: John Ngugi wins his fifth and final IAAF World Cross Country Championship

An American winning the world's most prestigious distance race in her own back yard was special, too

(This is the third post in a planned series of ten, which also makes it the third post in an actual series of three.)

Thirty years ago this week, Franklin Park in Boston hosted what in those days was an annual event and the most competitive set of footraces on the planet: The IAAF (now World Athletics) World Cross Country Championships. I was there, and despite the steady snow during the senior men’s race that made spectating a more dynamic task than usual, I rank the experience the most rewarding among the professional races and meets I’ve attended. That includes the 1988 Boston Marathon, when I skipped school, bolted down I-93 with a friend and found a spot on Boylston Street to watch Ibrahim Hussein edge Juma Ikangaa and successfully defend his crown in the closest finish the race had ever seen.

March 21, 1992 marked the second time in the event’s twenty-year history that the four races of the championships were held on U.S. soil, with the 1984 edition having taken place at the Meadowlands Sports Complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey, near and perhaps right over the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa.

Some history: From the inception of the championships in 1973 through 1988, the late-winter or early-spring event included junior and senior races for men, but only a senior race for women. In 1989, a junior race for women was added. From 1998 through 2006, the championships also included senior short-course (4K) races. Since 2011, the event has been held only in odd-numbered years. In December 2020, World Athletics decided to delay the 2021 edition, to be hosted by Bathurst, Australia, until this year owing to Australian coronavirus-related travel restrictions. It used the same rationale last summer to table the event again, this time until next February. At no point has simply moving the event to a different continent appeared to have been an option for World Athletics. Unfortunately, the imperative for top runners to gather at the event has dissipated over the past fifteen years or so, and any impetus to avoid going four years between global cross-country championships seems to have faded with it.

The senior men have always run 12K (or so). The distance of the junior men’s race was 7K in 1973, and within ten years had settled at around 8K.

Meanwhile, the length of the senior women’s race started at 4K, became 5K by 1977, reached 6K in 1988, was moved up to 8K in 1998 with the addition of the short-course race, and was bumped up to 10K in 2017. It seems that the strongest women runners in the world faithfully kept passing annual survival tests, and were rewarded for this about once a decade. Now, they are in effect running as grueling a race as the men are, measuring difficulty in time rather than distance units. The distance the junior women ran in their first World Cross Country Championships in 1989 was 4K, which remained the approximate standard until 6K courses became the norm in 1998.

At the dawn of spring in 1992, I was a frequently besotted college senior, and my mind was becoming increasingly focused on my then-solid post-graduation plans. I had quit running for the UVM varsity in the winter of the previous year, but my roommates and most of my friends were either on the team or fallouts like me who’d gotten their fill of “Kus” well before their exhausting their eligibility.

Spring break was in mid-March. That year, I had little money and no motivation to do anything traditionally energetic. My roommate Mike, a fellow senior who was the best 1,500-meter runner UVM had at the time, felt the same, and invited me to spend the week at his parents’ house in northern New Jersey. There, we mostly watched television; Mike did some training, while I did some jogging around his deer-infested neighborhood, a lot less than I do even now. It was nice getting to know Mike a little better; spending time with people in their childhood homes, even when they are still young men or women, is usually an opportunity to hear random, entertaining anecdotes whose narrators might not have been inspired to unspool them in a more neutral, less pathos-rich environment.

At the end of the week, taking the long way back to Burlington in Mike’s Jetta, we picked up another UVM runner in Connecticut, a true addict to the sport who years later would run 2:24 and change at the California International Marathon, and then headed for Franklin Park to catch a global running championship—four of them, in fact.

I can’t remember now when exactly we decided to go watch the races. With the Internet still a few years into the future, I assume one of us caught it in a newspaper or in Track and Field News. We may have made out plans before we left Vermont for New Jersey the previous weekend, or maybe we concocted them during our week in repose. Regardless, we made it to Boston, and on a day that promised something between steady snow and a legitimate blizzard.

You can watch the World Athletics highlights video below, in which the announcer, who I assume is Mary Liquori, mispronounces an impressive series of surnames, including “McColgan.” Liz McColgan of Scotland, just a full-on fucking brute on any course, was the returning third-place finisher among senior women, while Lynn Jennings of the United States was vying for her third, and third straight, individual World Cross Country Championships gold medal. But I also recommend this BBC video; it’s decidedly, well, homemade, complete with creaking opening and closing doors, but you’ll at least get to hear one of the announcers very casually mention known longstanding age-cheating among Kenyans in the junior races.

The junior women ran first. I remember trying to decide as we watched whether any of the men on or in the orbit of the University of Vermont men’s varsity cross-country team would have been capable of beating the winner of that race. The snow on the ground made judging times almost pointless, but either way, we watched two future mega-names take the first two spots. That’s an 18-year-old Paula Radcliffe of Great Britain winning the race below, five seconds ahead of Wang Junxia of China.

Both women would go on to obliterate world records—Junxia from 3,000 meters to 10,000 meters the next year, Radcliffe in the marathon ten and eleven years later. Junxia and assorted countrywomen would be immediately suspected of doping, a suspicion that was later confirmed. Radcliffe, meanwhile, was vocally against doping during her athletic career, but got quieter once the Athlete Biological Passport came out. It’s safe to say that Paula Radcliffe’s public reputation remains far more intact than Wang Junxia’s does.

The men’s junior race was, as expected, a parade of relatively young Kenyans and Ethiopians. The second- and third-place finishers would go on to earn considerable renown, although the fame of the bronze medalist, Kenya’s Josephat Machuka, is largely linked to his punching the third-place finisher, Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie, in the back of the head as Geb passed him in the final straightaway of the 10,000 meters at the World Junior Athletics Championships months after their meeting in Boston (video, with an explanation from the assailant).

Machuka, a 13:04/27:10 athlete who finished fifth in the 5,000 meters at the 1996 Olympics, is known locally for his hard-to-process 27:52 at the 1995 Bolder Boulder, a record that will stand forever after the reconfiguration of the pro-race course a few years ago. I say “hard to process” because when factoring in the standard 5,300’-5,400’ altitude penalty and the difficulty of the course, no one on Earth should have been able to run that fast in that race. A just-sub-2:10:00 marathoner typically has difficulty cracking 30:00 at the Bolder Boulder.

Geb, meanwhile, became the Geb everyone still gebbers about.

The women’s senior race was of special interest to me and almost everyone else watching, because Jennings was not only the two-time defending champion, but a product of nearby Harvard (the municipality, not the school; Jennings is a Princeton alumna) who had raced many times at Franklin Park and was now based 50 miles away in Newmarket, N.H. I had met Jennings five and a half years earlier as a Concord High student thanks to her friendship with a Concord grad, and if I could keep better track of things, I might still have a photo she took of me during a race at White Park in Concord.

McColgan had finished third the year before less than four months after giving birth to a daughter. Considering that the daughter, Eilish, has become a remarkable runner in her own right, one would think that the recent spate of stories about women who combine motherhood with top-level running would have expanded to include Liz McColgan’s achievement, even if that would make it more difficult for Wokish pundits to propose that everything we’re* seeing today is part of some revolution they sparked.

Also of note is that McColgan’s sponsor, Nike, dropped her as soon as it learned she was expecting. When she won the 1991 bronze medal, she did so without a shoe sponsor. What a punking—even if it didn’t dent Nike’s standing one iota, and even if it took another 27 years for Nike to unpretentiously stop winnowing pregnant women from its ranks. That was largely the result of public outcry from women like Kara Goucher and Alysia Montano, and despite it being clear that Nike only acted in this case, as it always does, owing to unusually intense external pressure rather than any inherent traces of applaudable ethics. That’s why it would be appropriate for fans of women’s running to quit celebrating every time another established female talent signs with the Bowerman Track Club. Whatever standards and codes the public can’t see are being bent are still being merrily warped to the swoosh’s liking in Portland. Also, World Athletics won’t meaningfully drug-test Ethiopians, so fuck it.

Jennings, who had set a world indoor 5,000-meter record at Boston University Dartmouth College two winters earlier, got out to a quick lead and was never far from the absolute front of the pack. Late in the race, it seemed she had thrown in one too many surges too soon, and Catherina McKiernan of Ireland appeared ready to take her measure. Do Irish people ever lose anything in shitty conditions? Maybe to New Zealanders and Australians. And to gay people just trying to be part of a parade through South Boston.

But Jennings held her off, and it was a crazy wonderful thing to watch. The American women were second to Kenya, bouncing Ethiopia to the bronze team position by 19 points. Jennings would take the Olympic 5,000-meter bronze medal that summer in Barcelona.

The senior men’s race featured a comparatively weak U.S. team, but also John Ngugi, who had won four straight World Cross Country titled from 1986 to 1989 before falling to 20th in 1990 and dropping out in 1991, with both of those contests claimed by Morocco’s Khalid Skah. It seemed that Ngugi might have simply lost the fire after an improbable amount of success. But he was here, and he was still the defending Olympic 5,000-meter champion.

Ngugi was a unique runner to watch. He ate up ground so cleanly and in such gulping strides that anyone watching him run alone in the lead continually had to check to see if the field wasn’t rapidly gaining on him. He was smooth, yet ran as if he’d had several lower vertebral discs fused and was about to tackle a snake.

And he was often alone in the lead. As befitted his style, Ngugi farted around in Franklin Park in about 60th place in the early stages before shooting to a commanding lead and winning easily by 12 seconds, practically an eternity at 4:40 pace.

Ngugi’s redemption would come with a twist. The following year, he refused to take an out-of-competition doping-control test and was slapped with a four-year-suspension, effectively ending the almost-31-year-old’s career. The IAAF reinstated Ngugi in 1995, citing the fact that Ngugi appeared to have not understood who the tester was or what had been expected of him, but never did anything significant after that and hung up his spikes after the 1997 season.

The three of us had an exciting ride back to Burlington, rife with the kind of grandiose plans and dreams for each of our immediate running futures that always follows exposure to something as glorious as a world-cross country championship.

Mike would pass away in the summer of 2020. When I think of him, and he really was a sweet man, I think of those championships and how I wouldn’t have been there had I not been friends with Mike. He may be gone, but he unknowingly helped lock in place my love of this oft-battered sport. That will be here as long as I am, and so in that sense, Mike isn’t really gone at all.

Franklin Park has a lot of wonderful ghosts running around, mostly on Bear Cage Hill. You should check it out sometime.