Bydgoszcz ready to add to its rich athletics legacy – IAAF World Cross Country Championships

As the world’s finest cross country runners prepare for the beginning of the upcoming season, so too is the northwestern Polish city of Bydgoszcz as it prepares to host the 38th IAAF World Cross Country Championships on 28 March 2010.

Playing host to the world’s finest middle and long distance runners will be just the latest in a long recent string of successful championships for this city of 400,000, located 270 kilometres west of Warsaw. Indeed, to fans of athletics, Bydgoszcz has already become synonymous with high level competitions at both the continental and global levels.

Only last year, Bydgoszcz hosted the 12th IAAF World Junior Championships, a successful and memorable competition which witnessed one World junior record, six Area junior records, 10 championships records, and 74 national junior records.

But its relationship with the IAAF dates back more than a decade now as the host of the first edition of the first IAAF World Youth Championships held in 1999. Those inaugural championships brought the spotlight for the first time on athletes who are now some of the sport’s biggest names, including two-time Olympic champions Yelena Isinbayeva and Veronica Campbell. It was also a springboard for, among others, former World champions Jana Pittman and Ladji Doucouré. That year, the late IAAF President Primo Nebiolo was named an honourary citizen of Bydgoszcz.

On the continental level, its CV goes back even further as the host of the European Junior Championships in 1979. Teenagers who won or showed well thirty years ago included unknown British middle distance runner Steve Cram and West German high jumper Dietmar Mogenburg who would later become, respectively, World and Olympic champions as well as World record holders. Decathlon winner Siegfried Wentz of the former West Germany later went on to capture World silver and Olympic bronze. The women’s Javelin Throw champion that year, Fatima Whitbread of Great Britain, claimed the World title eight years later. The winner in the Pentathlon, West German Sabine Everts, just three years later won the European Long Jump title before taking 1984 Olympic bronze in the Heptathlon in Los Angeles.