Serbian capital to stage global championships after Medulin and Pula in Croatia were forced to pull out

Ten years after staging the European Cross Country Championships, the Serbian capital of Belgrade will now stage its first World Cross Country Championships next year.

A decade ago the citys Park of Friendship hosted the Euro event, but it will now welcome the world after the original hosts of Medulin and Pula in Croatia was forced to pull out.

Croatian plans have been abandoned after World Athletics earlier this month described their preparations as not sufficiently advanced.

Belgrade has jumped to the rescue, though, which means a major athletics event will be held on the banks of the River Danube just a few months after Budapest hosted the global governing bodys flagship track and field championships.

Whereas the Croatian event was due to place on the weekend of February 10-11, the event in Belgrade will be on March 30, which has thrown new year cross-country fixtures into mild turmoil. The British trials, for example, were due to be held on January 20 at Parliament Hill but this now looks likely to be too far away from the championships itself.

When Belgrade held the European Cross Country Championships in 2013 it was the first big athletics event the city had hosted since the European Indoor Games of 1968. I reported at the time: The Serbian capital put on a decent show with a record entry of 570 athletes across six races on a spectator-friendly course featuring firm ground, surprisingly mild temperatures (mid-December) and a random log that was barely a foot high designed to break the rhythm of runners on each of the 1500m laps.

The number of spectators was modest, but I added: There was a reasonable buzz in the Park of Friendship venue, partly due to the large contingent of British spectators, some of whom braved the widely publicised airport signal problems to travel to eastern Europe.

Britain won twice as many medals at those 2013 championships than their nearest challenger, France, with the star performer being under-20 womens winner Emelia Gorecka. Less than half a minute behind her, though, team-mate Georgia Taylor-Brown finished a fine fourth despite losing a shoe mid-race. It was the kind of grittiness that would earn Taylor-Brown Olympic medals in triathlon eight years later.

Elsewhere a young Sifan Hassan won the under-23 womens title less than a month after being cleared to represent the Netherlands, while Alemayehu Bezabeh controversially led Spain to senior mens team victory amid accusations on social media from Britains bronze medallist Andy Vernon that they cheated by putting their six runners in two separate starting pens. Adding insult to injury, Bezabeh had only just returned from a drugs ban too.

Belgrade was also notable for a big congress over the weekend of the championships aimed at reviving the ailing fortunes of cross-country running. Frustratingly not much came of it, though, apart from a large document which was published several months later full of photographs and a short-list of solutions which could have been written in five minutes flat by anyone who has ever worn 15mm spikes.

Maybe lessons were learned, though, because Aarhus in 2019 famously revitalised the sport with what World Athletics president Seb Coe called a watershed moment.

I wrote in AW at the time: Aarhus lived up to the hype to deliver a devilish course and memorable races in sizzling sunshine.

The course featured a number of obstacles, most notably there was a steep climb and descent on the grassy roof of an eco-friendly museum. Mass races for club runners also helped to draw in the crowds.

Despite wrestling with pandemic-related delays, Bathurst in Australia took up the baton admirably this year. Now, Belgrade has its chance to shine while Croatia presumably licks its wounds and maybe prepares to mount a bid for a future bid following the 2026 event in Tallahassee, Florida.

World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said: Belgrade is establishing itself as a reliable host of world class competitions. Following a memorable 2022 World Indoor Championships we are confident that the organisation of our 2024 World Cross Country Championships is in a safe pair of hands.

It is not unprecedented for the venue to change either. In 2001 the World Cross Country Championships was due to be held in Dublin but following an out-break of foot-and-mouth disease it was forced to move to firstly Brussels and eventually Ostend at short notice.

On that weekend Paula Radcliffe gave the host continent plenty to cheer by winning the senior womens long-course race on a gruesomely muddy course and at the end of this coming winter there will be similar hopes that Jakob Ingebrigtsen will schedule the event into his plans and give the east Africans a run for their money.