Mid-autumn. Warm, sunny day expected tomorrow with temperature in the low 20s (Celsius, that is). Tick, and tick again: must be the opening cross-country race of an Australian winter season.
You can get sunburn on the first day of a Down Under winter season. You can do so again at the national championships which, traditionally, close out the season. In between, you may or may not experience what is commonly proclaimed in the northern hemisphere as “real cross-country conditions.”
But it’s not just the imminent Victorian cross-country relays – they’ll have been held before most of you get the chance to read this – that brought cross-country to my attention this week. There was also the report that the International Olympic Committee has decided cross-country will NOT be contested at the 2030 Winter Olympic Games to be hosted in the French alpine region of Haute Savoie.
No cross-over sports – IOC-speak for events not contested solely in winter – will be added to the 2030 edition of the Games. This was a decision of the IOC Executive Board. Technically, the decision must be ratified at the Extraordinary full IOC Session in Lausanne next month. But that seems a foregone conclusion, especially as new IOC president Kirsten Coventry revealed it herself at a media conference.
Technically, too, the decision does not close the door on a future decision to included cross-country on the winter Olympic program. Coventry confirmed that a different phase of exploration could permit entry for the 2034 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City. Take that with a grain of the city’s eponymous substance, I’d suggest.
“It will just be snow and ice,” said Coventry in announcing that summer sports and crossover sports (i.e. predominantly winter, like cross-country and cyclo-cross) were no go for the French Alps. Things may change, I guess, but “snow and ice” has been the mantra in rejecting all previous attempts to get cross-country on the winter Olympic roster.
Remember January 2026? Well, even the most forgetful of us can probably recall what happened just a few months ago. That was when the latest edition of the world cross-country championships was conducted in Tallahassee, just a few years past the announcement by World Athletics that cross-country would have its own season, climaxing with a February world championships. Only one of the three editions since – Bathurst in 2023 – has been held in February.
Certainly, it’s been difficult to fix a date when the global pandemic threw international sporting calendars into chaos in the first half of the 2020s. It has already been decided, a couple of years after the world cross-country adopted an even-year schedule, mind you, that the event would go back to an odd-year schedule. The next edition will be 2029. We went back to odd years at the cost of skipping 2027 it would seem. We began the 2020s with a four-year gap between Aarhus and Bathurst; now there will be a three-year gap between Tallahassee and 2029.
In trying to understand that situation, this columnist suggested World Athletics was optimistic world cross-country would be added to the winter Olympic program for 2030, despite a rump of winter sports federations which remained implacably opposed.
World cross-country in the Winter Games might be plan A, we suggested then. But if that doesn’t get up, what the heck is plan B we wondered. Whatever it is, it might be time to pull it out of the bottom drawer of the desk.
Anyhow, in a roundabout sort of way, there was another world cross-country reminder when the entry lists for this weekend’s (16 May) Diamond League meeting in Shanghai. No less than five Australians – Sarah Billings, Abbey Caldwell, Linden Hall, Claudia Hollingsworth and Jess Hull – are down for the women’s 1500 (it was six, but Georgia Griffith is now not competing).
Back in January, Australia won the mixed relay in Tallahassee. This followed a bronze medal in Bathurst two years earlier. Those two medals were based around our strength and depth in men’s and women’s 1500. Olli Hoare, Hall, Jack Anstey and Hull made up the gold medal team in Florida. Hoare, Caldwell, Stewart McSweyn and Hull were the bronze medal team at Mount Panorama.
China presents us with regional advantages – a (relatively) short trip, no significant time change, Australian autumn to northern hemisphere spring – but it cannot be too often we have seen five Australians in a Diamond League 1500 field (Ethiopia also has five in the 16-strong field). That’s real recognition at a very high level of competition.
Can’t wait for the livestream.