Runners from the West Midlands university made up a quarter of the British team at the European Cross-Country Champs and won nine medals including three individual podium places
Yet again British cross-country runners were crowned kings and queens of Europe as they took to the turf of Turkey over the weekend. Nadia Battocletti and Jakob Ingebrigtsen won the battle for the blue riband senior races, but Britain won the overall war with six golds and 12 medals in total.
Not that you’d know this from reading the national newspapers on Monday. For some years now they have operated as if cross-country running doesn’t exist as a sport. In comparison, imagine how much coverage footballers would enjoy if they won a European title?
Let’s hope at least the Birmingham Post and Birmingham Mail give the British successes at the Euro Cross a bit of space in their columns. After all, a quarter of the team at the event in Antalya were drawn from the University of Birmingham with its thriving endurance programme led by former steeplechase international Luke Gunn.
Students from Birmingham earned nine medals in total with Will Barnicoat, Jess Bailey and David Stone winning individual gold, silver and bronze respectively. As the university rightly boasted on social media: “If UoB were a country, we would have finished second in the medal table, only behind GB & NI, with our nine medals.”
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Indeed, it brings back memories of when Aldershot, Farnham & District were in their pomp with Mick Woods as lead coach. Those were the days of Emelia Gorecka, Steph Twell, Charlie Purdue, Lily Partridge and others. At the 2011 Euro Cross in Slovenia, we reported: “If Aldershot, Farnham & District had been entered as a separate nation at the past seven editions of the European Cross-Country Championships, they would top the overall combined medals table when it comes to medals won in individual races.”
The following year, at a bitterly cold Hungarian event which was once again dominated by Brits, I reported: “This was a further victory for the People’s Republic of Mick Woods. If the Aldershot coach was a national country, his athletes would have topped the medals table in recent years and Jess Coulson (Piasecki) was only one of his successes in Budapest – others including under-20 silver medallist Emelia Gorecka.”
Jess Coulson (Mark Shearman)
Loughborough University has always been “the place to go” for budding athletes. It is still a fine choice, too. There are of course other good options for up-and-coming athletes, though. Innes FitzGerald, for example, is clearly thriving in her first term at Exeter University.
Don’t forget the American college option either, with the under-23 women’s champion in Antalya, Phoebe Anderson, plus under-20 men’s runner-up George Couttie, both doing well on the NCAA circuit.
READ MORE: Euro Cross 2024 coverage
For British endurance runners who prefer to live and train at home, though, the University of Birmingham is clearly the No.1 performing university right now, as results from Antalya demonstrated.
To read our coverage from any of the European Cross Country Championships dating back to its beginning in 1994, go to our digital archive of back issues here.
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