Michael Wright, organiser of the Monument Mile Classic, on attracting the big names to central Scotland, the challenges of staging an event and why athletics needs a collective change in mindset
What makes Cooper Teare, the 2022 US 1500m champion and training partner of Olympic gold medallist Cole Hocker, appear at a four-lane university track in the centre of Scotland on a chilly evening in late August? Opportunity, mostly. But also being well looked after, being able to race somewhere new and being able to engage with a new kind of crowd.
“This just seemed like a super fun event,” Teare told AW after the latest edition of the Monument Mile Classic, a packed programme of races over the classic distance at the University of Stirling that has undoubted echoes of Highgate’s Night of the 10ks and is growing in both stature and reputation.
“My younger self would have killed to have been able to come to something like this and come face to face with the athletes I looked up to. At all corners of track and field there’s importance and inspiration to be taken and to be around an event like this and a community like this that seems to know their track and field has been awesome.”
The event’s tagline is “bring the flames”, given the jets of fire that shoot out of the finish gantry at the start and finish of the races. For meeting director Michael Wright, confirmation that it is really catching light arrived when he saw Teare attracting a crowd of autograph hunters after the American had broken the meeting record in an ‘A’ race that saw 11 men running under four minutes.
One of them was Andrew McGill of Cambuslang, the 20-year-old Scottish 1500m champion who sliced almost seven seconds off his mile PB best to clock 3:55.89 in ninth.
Laura Muir presents the prizes
“Me and my dad like to look at people’s progressions so we’d looked at Jake Wightman’s and at the age of 20 he was running around 3:41 [for 1500m] and then got chucked into a Diamond League in Glasgow and out of nowhere ran 3:35,” he says.
“I don’t have that Diamond League to run in, but Michael has created this grassroots event that has given athletes the chance that Jake got all those years ago. I was just happy to get that opportunity to show what I can do in that kind of field.”
» This is an abridged version of a longer feature that appeared in the October issue of AW magazine. Subscribe to the magazine here, check out our new podcast here or sign up to our digital archive of back issues from 1945 to the present day here
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