Mombasa WXC logo 2007 (© c)
MonteCarloIn two months time Athletics history will be made. The 35th IAAF World Cross Country Championships will be celebrated in Mombasa, Kenya, on Saturday 24 March 2007.
The Championships significantly will be the first occasion on which Kenya will host an IAAF World Athletics Series event, historic in itself, but for a country which since the late 1960s has been at the forefront of long distance running particularly cross country, the event really does signal the discipline’s spiritual ‘home coming’.
It is particularly appropriate that the nation whose men provided an unbroken line of 18 (long course) senior team victories from 1986 to 2003 inclusive, and which has produced five-time men’s title winners John Ngugi and Paul Tergat, and Edith Masai, the three-time victor over the women’s short course, should host these of all IAAF Championships.
Importantly, in 2007, the IAAF World Cross Country Championships revert back to a one day format (which was in operation until 1998) with a total of four races - one senior race each for both men and women, plus the usual junior competitions, and what better place to start the process than in east Africa, the present heartland of distance running.
Mombasa lying on the coast of the Indian Ocean is Kenya’s second largest city, and is located 475km from the capital Nairobi. The venue for the races is the Mombasa Golf Course.
Timetable (as approved by IAAF Council in Beijing, August 2006).
35th IAAF World Cross Country Championships, 24 March 2007
(Times GMT + 3hrs)
15:30 Junior Women 6Km
16:05 Junior Men 8Km
16:40 Senior Women 8Km
17:20 Senior Men 12Km
IAAF
