The start of the senior men’s race at the 2018 National at Parliament Hill
(Picture: English Cross Country Association)One of the great amateur events in English sport comes to London this weekend as the National Cross Country Championships return to their spiritual home at Parliament Hill.
Usually a canvas of almost unbroken green, Hampstead Heath will on Saturday be littered with flags, banners, tents and vests in the colours of every athletics club from Cumbria to Cornwall.
More than 8,000 club runners have made entries across ten races, ranging from the Under-13 girls’ 3km course, though to the senior men’s 12km slog, all of whom have had to wait an extra 12 months for the most popular event in the cross country calendar after last year’s renewal was called off due to the pandemic.
The race typically rotates around the country but this will be the 17th time Parliament Hill has hosted the Championships since their inauguration in 1876, more than any other course, and the north London venue has become synonymous with the event.
It is best known - and feared - for its iconic start, where spectators can gather at the top of the hill to watch thousands of athletes (2,328 finished the senior men’s race here in 2018) fan out across the course from packed starting pens and stampede up it before bottlenecking frantically into the first corner. By the last, the field have become so strung out that an endless snake of runners covers virtually the entire lapped course, the hair on heads becoming progressively greyer as they pass, as veterans in their seventies plough on through the mud.
Legendary figures such as Dave Bedford, Paula Radcliffe, Brendan Foster, Mo Farah and Steve Ovett have all won either senior or junior national titles here, part of the appeal being that with no qualifying standards or limits on space, thousands of recreational runners have at some point toed the same starting line as those household names.
There is also the camaraderie, not so easy to come by on the track, that comes with the team championships, which ensure every place matters even in the depths of enormous fields. At the 2020 edition in Nottingham, for instance, Tonbridge AC’s Cameron Payas finished 102nd in the senior men’s race, but left with a National gold medal around his neck as their all-important ninth and final scorer in the team standings.
Tonbridge remain the defending men’s champions, while Aldershot, Farnham & District still hold the women’s crown after last year’s cancellation, the first in the Championships’ history, bar those around the two World Wars, and one which had a significant impact.
“It produces income for the Association that helps us get through the year,” Ian Byett, honorary secretary of the English Cross Country Association tells Standard Sport. “It didn’t cost us anything, it being not held, but we missed the income that comes in from athletes entries which is normally quite a few thousand pounds.
“I tried some blue sky thinking of even having the Championships in the summer but it really wasn’t possible due to everything else going on. We had to, in the end, just say it wouldn’t take place.”
In its traditional slot on the last Saturday in February, this year’s race was thankfully spared the complications of the Omicron wave which forced some events to be called off before Christmas, though it has only just escaped Storms Eunice and Franklin, which wreaked havoc with regional fixtures last weekend.
“I’m told by the site manager at Parliament Hill that they recorded a gust of 75mph up there!” Byett adds. “40 trees came down, but luckily none of them too near to the course and the forecast for the weekend - crossed fingers - is good.”
