I missed this when letsrun.com first posted it several days ago, but three legends of long-distance running have written a letter to the IOC requesting that cross-country be re-instated as an Olympic sport.
Athletics legends want cross-country back in the Olympics
The letter, signed by Ethiopia's Haile Gebrselassie, Keninisa Bekele, and by Kenya's Paul Tergat, reminds the IOC that XC was last contested in the Olympics in 1924 in Paris. In the ill-fated individual 6-mile XC race, competitors had to deal with intense heat and the poisonous fumes of a nearby factory. Finnish great Paavo Nurmi won the race, but of the 38 starters, only 15 finished. That was it for XC on the Olympic stage.
For those who need reminding, Bekele is the greatest XC runner of all time, having won the world XC championships a staggering 11 times (six long (12K) course and five short (4K) course titles). Tergat isn't far behind, with five straight world XC titles from 1995 to 1999. Gebrselassie is merely the current world-record holder for the marathon (2:04:26), a two-time Olympic gold medalist at 10,000m (where he narrowly defeated Tergat), and, until Bekele arrived on the scene, widely considered the greatest distance runner of all time. As the article above points out, Geb never won a major title in cross-country, although he has won just about everything else.
Adding XC to the Olympics would also introduce an intriguing question about how athletes might choose to double (or triple... or quadruple!) in the distance races. In 1924, Nurmi won five distance gold medals (take that, Michael Phelps!) including two XC golds, one in the individual race and one in the team XC race.
Wouldn't it be great to have team XC in London?
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