World Cross Country Championships: An African Master Class
Posted March 31st, 2008 at 9:00 AM by Jimmie R. Markham
Section: News & Results, Cross Country, SoundOFF, Columns
Just how dominant were the Africans at yesterday’s IAAF World Cross Country Championships in Edinburgh, Scotland? Almost absolutely. Embarrassingly so. Of the 166 finishers, the top 18 were either African or African-born. Of the top 50, 88% were African or African-born. Even when we go all the way down to the top 100, Africans still accounted for 63% of the places! Of the bottom 50, only 30% were African or African-born. Figuratively speaking, Africans hardly even left the rest of the world’s cross-country runners table scraps. That’s dominance. Here’s a chart showing just how dominant Africans were in the race:
The African women were nearly as dominant. In comparison to the men’s race, 15 of the top 18 women were African or African-born. Here are the numbers for that race:
The fact that Kenenisa Bekele could stop for a full 15 seconds to put his shoe back on and still beat the first non-African finisher Jorge Torres of the United States by a minute and 25 seconds (not to mention that he beat “African beater” Craig Mottram by a full two minutes and 2 seconds!) shows just how far the rest of the world has to go to catch up with the Africans.
Let’s stay in denial and pretend for a few moments that the Africans don’t exist. If we take them out of the equation Team USA didn’t fare so badly. In the men’s team competition, the Americans – led by Torres’ 19th place finish in 36:03 – had an average time of 37:05 for the 12km (7.45 mile) course. That’s an average of 4:45.24 per mile and faster than every other non-African team. Of course, that average time put them only in 7th place behind Kenya, Ethiopia, Qatar (which fielded a team loaded with Kenyan ringers), Eritrea, Morocco and Uganda. Here are the results for the men’s team competition, including some statistics that might point out an inherent flaw in the cross-country scoring system:
You might have noticed that the Ugandan team averaged a pace of 4:54.00 per mile yet still finished 6th in the team standings behind Morocco, whose team average pace was only 4:55.09 per mile yet was good for a 5th-place finish. How is this possible? Team places aren’t determined by average times. They are determined by points. Morocco’s team placed a consistent 28th, 30th, 32nd, 33rd, 36th and 38th for a total of 197 points. The Ugandan runners, on the other hand, finished 13th, 16th, 29th, 47th, 50th and 56th for a total score of 211.
Let that be a lesson to you young cross-country runners out there. Consistency in placement, working together as a team, is the key to winning in cross country. The top 3 Ugandans allowed the next three on their team to falter and those last three runners totaled 153 points. The bottom 3 of the Moroccan team scored only 107 points.
You might have also noticed that Team USA averaged 16 seconds per mile slower than Team Kenya. Over the course of 7.45 miles, that’s 1:59.20. That’s right – the average time for American runners was one minute and 59.2 seconds slower than the average time for Kenyan runners. That’s almost half a mile. What do we need to do to win next time: ask the Africans to give us a 2 minute headstart?
So what are we in the United States to make of this cross-country master class that the Africans put on in Edinburgh? Perhaps we should realize that the word “resurgence” is a relative term and doesn’t necessarily apply when comparing our talent to the upper echelons of running on the world stage, at least not yet.
And let’s not forget the man who would take on the Africans: Craig Mottram. He must have been scratching his head after his 31st-place finish. At the Indoor Championships earlier this month, Mottram had been decisively outkicked in the 3000m final by another Bekele, Kenenisa’s younger brother Tariku. After that race, Mottram’s coach had said “the focus is the cross-country. I mean he hadn’t done the preparation for a race like that, which was a sprint home.” So what does it mean when Mottram specifically prepared for this race, yet had his lunch handed to him? He wasn’t even the 2nd non-African. Spain’s Juan Carlos de la Ossa finished in 24th with a time of 36:15, 25 seconds ahead of the Aussie. Maybe this race should serve as a reality check as we head into this 2008 Olympic outdoor track season. The rest of the distance-running world is nowhere close to catching up with the Africans.
Related Stories:
- Kenyan Cross Country Championships Video Available
- 34 in a Row, Hogs Win SEC Cross Country Championships
- Big XII Cross Country Conference Championships Results
- Pac-10 Cross Country Conference Championships Results
- Tyson Gay hopes to conduct 100m dash master class in London
Tags: africam kenenisa bekele, african dominance in running, Craig Mottram, cross country, IAAF, Jorge Torres, World Cross Country Championships
Like what you see? Subscribe to our feed!
The Final Sprint
The Africans dominated; this is true. However, we did not have an “A” team. With Ritz, Hall, (Culpepper, , Tegencamp, Webb, Rupp, Meb, & Abdi etc. who didn’t even race the U.S. team trials)the U.S. would have had the opportunity for a top four finish. The resurgance is there and come trials and into the olympics we may see an American record in the 15, the coveted sub 13:00 5k, or 27:low 10k, and in the olympic marathon 3 top 10 places. To say this is unrealistic is ignoring the talen of Webb, Tegencamp, Rupp, Hall, Ritz, and Sell.
March 31st, 2008 at 1:34 pmYes, yes, I agree the resurgence in American distance running is upon us. If you search through my archives, you’ll see that I have written extensively about this topic, and recently, too.
But enough with the woulda, coulda, shouldas. Don’t make excuses. Instead, give mad props to the guys who did go. We sent 8 out of our top 11 guys to Edinburgh. Don’t call them the “B” team. Sure having Ritz, Hall and Moran there would have helped, but their presence wouldn’t have put us in 4th place yesterday. Recall that Torres smoked Hall at the xc championships and Webb at the 8k championships. That’s hardly “B” team. Yes, Webb was sick that day, but so was Bekele yesterday. Even so, he destroyed the best runners in the world.
Torres is no “B” teamer and neither are the rest of the eight who competed. Torres beat Craig Mottram. That’s saying something. But Torres, Mottram and the rest of the world were flat-out whipped by a whole bunch of very fast Africans.
There’s a big difference between a resurgence and being the best in the world. You can’t deny that our runners still have some work to do in order to best the Africans, who remain the best in the world.
March 31st, 2008 at 3:29 pmA comment about a choice of wording in the original post that I think could have been better made. You said, “The top 3 Ugandans allowed the next three on their team to falter and those last three runners totaled 153 points.” I don’t think they “allowed” the bottom three to do anything. Did Torres “allow” the rest of his team to not run faster?
Cross country is a team sport only by proxy of attaching team significance to a bunch of individuals’ performances. Had Moses Kipsiro slowed down to help his teammates, there is absolutely no way to know that they would have been able to go any faster. The only thing we’d know is that Uganda would have had more points as a result of his not placing higher.
That said, I think you are right that America has a ways to go. We don’t have the depth of an Ethiopia or Kenya at the highest level. But I don’t know that we ever will. It would require a shift in cultural significance for distance running in America. What we should be asking, however, is whether our best match up with their best.
The answer: honestly, I don’t know. We aren’t there in the 10k or cross country, but we are in the middle distances with Webb and Lagat. And it makes it even tougher to know when our best don’t choose to go head-to-head with other countries’ best. Imagine if we had Meb, Ritz, Webb, Hall, Culpepper, Teg, Abdi, Lagat and Torres in that race. Could five or six of them have run with Torres or even faster? Absolutely, based on their past performances. Looking at it that way, we did send a “B” team with one of our “A” guys leading it.
Here’s to sending the full force of American distance running to the World Cross Country meet next year!
March 31st, 2008 at 11:01 pmThanks for the comments, Bryan. I chose the word “allowed” deliberately in order to emphasize my point that consistency in placement in cross country is just that important. Notice that the Moroccans had an average team time that was slower than the Ugandans’ yet they scored fewer points and were ahead of them in the team placement. They all placed within a few positions of each other: 28th, 30th, 32nd, 33rd, 36th and 38th. In looking at their places, I can’t help but think they didn’t “allow” any of their runners to fall back. A couple of them may have actually sacrificed potentially better places to pace their slower teammates and run interference for them. Having six guys on one team within 11 places of each other couldn’t be coincidental, could it?
April 1st, 2008 at 1:07 pmTo a limited extent, running as a pack in a sport like cross country can benefit the team. When I ran at UCLA, we did just that. In 8k races, we ran together through 5k and then we broke off on our own to catch as many people as we could. And it helped to ensure good races from the team at the expense of great races.
Here’s the thing, though. If a guy doesn’t run well, no amount of running next to him is going to make him run substantially faster. But it is likely making you run substantially slower.
I hadn’t looked much at Morocco’s team. You’re right, they obviously ran as a team. And it may have benefited them. But I would also argue that Morocco’s team must not have had a Moses Kipsiro or athlete of equivalent ability and aspiration. Otherwise, they should have been able to leave the group at say 8k and gain a lot of ground on those struggling ahead of them.
Uganda probably could have stood to implement more of a team strategy. The US as well, I suppose. But maybe that’s just not the make-up of their current team. Maybe their top six guys are really that far apart in terms of ability. I simply don’t know enough to say, but I immediately felt the use of the word “allow” implied a little too much responsibility on the part of one runner to make another run fast. In my experience, there’s very little I can do to help a teammate who’s not ready to run.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:21 pm