The World Cross Country always used to be the hardest race to win and those who did were considered the best distance runners in the sport. The event had a rich history, passionate support and glory behind it.

But the World Cross Country Championships will once again be absent from the calendar this year. One of the oldest and most traditional parts of athletics has fallen so far off the radar, having not taken place since 2019, you wonder if someone should send out a search party to try to find it.

It was supposed to take place last year in Bathurst in Australia, got re-arranged for 2022 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and has now been pushed back another 12 months until March 2023.

The fact the event has even been awarded to Australia is a sign of how far it has fallen down the agenda. The country has produced some great distance runners - Benita Johnson even won the women’s race in 2004 - but it has never been considered a big sport there and has no tradition of staging major cross-country races.

The truth is that no-one really seems to be interested these days in hosting the World Cross Country Championships, which is why it has gone to places recently like Bydgoszcz in Poland (twice in three years, in fact) and Guiyang, described in the travel guides as one of China’s "least sunny major cities."

The first World Cross Country Championships I covered was in 1990 in the stunning spa town of Aix-les-Bains, situated on the shore of the largest natural lake of glacial origin in France, the Lac du Bourget, where, under warm blue skies, Morocco’s Khalid Skah and the United States Lynn Jennings raced to victories at the Hippodrome de Marlioz.

It was a different story two years later at Franklin Park in Boston where organisers tore up concrete and put down grass and covered pavement crossings with Astroturf, repurposed from when Boston College built a new American football field and the event took place in the snow. 

John McGrath, former publisher of New England Runner, initiated Boston’s bid after directing the 1984 National Cross Country Championships at Franklin Park and was encouraged by the city’s Mayor Ray Flynn, himself a keen runner. "We pulled out all the bells and whistles," McGrath said. "We had things like a finish line bridge, which was unusual for cross-country at the time. The whole running community came out. The crowd was huge."

The winner of the junior women’s race was a young British teenager Paula Radcliffe, beating an unknown Chinese runner called Wang Junxia, who the following year won the 10,000 metres at the World Championships in Stuttgart and later that season set a world record for the distance which lasted for 23 years.

I remember after the race Radcliffe, having run herself to the point of exhaustion, suffered an asthma attack and I had to run to her mother Pat to get an inhaler to pass to the new wheezing world champion.

A decade later in Dublin in 2002 Radcliffe won the senior race at the start of what turned out to be the greatest season any female runner has ever had, winning Commonwealth Games and European Championships titles by large margins and setting a world record for the marathon.

It is hard to know exactly when the rot began to set in, but interest has definitely declined as the event has come to be increasingly dominated by runners from Kenya and Ethiopia. Of the last 30 editions of the men’s senior race, only four winners have not been from East Africa. One of those was Skah, mentioned above, who also won it in 1991, and the other was Mohammed Mourhit, a Moroccan representing Belgium who tested positive for banned performance-enhancing drugs the year after the second of his triumphs in 2001.

The decision by the International Association of Athletics Federations - now World Athletics - to add a "short-course" race for the World Cross Country Championship starting in 1998 was designed to give non-East African runners the opportunity to succeed but only led to Ethiopian and Kenyan athletes winning twice as many medals. The format was changed back after 2006.

The proliferation of big-city marathons in the spring, many offering attractive financial packages, also meant that the World Cross Country Championships slipped further down athletes’ priority list until it disappeared altogether.

As interest in hosting the event has dwindled, in 2011 the frequency of a Championships staged every year in some format since 1903 was switched to a biannual basis.

The election in 2015 by World Athletics as President of Sebastian Coe, who as a youngster grew up in Britain, a country steeped in the traditions of cross-country, gave it a boost. He launched a campaign for the discipline to return to the Olympic programme at Paris, where it had last featured 100 years earlier in 1924 when conditions were so bad only 15 of the 38 starters finished and nearly every runner needed medical treatment in scenes so harrowing it has never re-appeared since.

Getting cross country back into the Olympics was an important theme when the World Championships were last held in 2019 in the Danish port city of Aarhus. Organisers tried hard to be innovative, including having athletes race up the grassy slope of the Moesgaard Museum. There were special challenge zones filled with mud or sand and a "water splash" section that draws inspiration from the “hare and hounds” cross-country runs that originated from Shrewsbury School in England.

David Katz, a World Athletics official from the United States, talked of the course being "an equaliser", giving athletes from outside East Africa the chance to be competitive and Coe described the event as a "watershed moment" for the sport

In the end, Uganda’s Joshua Cheptegei won the men’s race and Kenya’s Hellen Obiri the women’s as the now traditional order of things was maintained. Still, the event was widely praised and there were hopes that it could lead to renaissance.

But then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and the International Olympic Committee turned down World Athletics’ request to add cross-country to Paris 2024. Any momentum that started to build in Aarhus has long been lost.

After the Paris 2024 snub, Coe has talked of trying to get cross country on the programme for the Winter Olympics but there appears little chance of that plan succeeding.

Perhaps cross country, described by two-time world champion Jennings as being "so primitive, it’s woman versus nature", has had its time and is destined to always be out in the cold now. Or perhaps there is someone out there who can rescue it, restore it to its traditional date in the calendar and make it the weekend again that I used to look forward to so much.