Where have all the races gone?

From the Great Edinburgh Cross Country to the indoor grand prix in Birmingham, Britain has lost an alarming number of major events in recent years.

It is now eight years since the Great Edinburgh Cross Country International last took place and its absence in the winter fixture list in Britain is still sorely felt. Attempts to keep it going in Stirling in 2019 were admirable but ultimately doomed. The pandemic in 2020 then saw off any chance of a revival.

The meeting at the picturesque Holyrood Park was regularly televised live on BBC early in the new year with athletes such as Eliud Kipchoge, Kenenisa Bekele, Laura Muir and Mo Farah among the competitors, although the king of Holyrood was undoubtedly multiple winner Garrett Heath of the United States.

Go back a few years earlier – when the Great North Cross Country International was held in the north-east of England – and Paula Radcliffe was a regular, facing rivals such as Gete Wami and Zola Pieterse. In the 1990s it was even sometimes held between Christmas and the new year, once again televised on BBC.

Current races like the Ribble Valley 10km and Friday Night Under the Lights 5km at Battersea did their best in recent days to provide some good racing over the Christmas period but they lack the big names and TV interest that the Great Edinburgh event had.

Of course the landscape of the sport is always changing. In 2026 we now have a World Cross Country Champs on January 10 instead of its traditional late March date and road runners are flooding over to Valencia this weekend in search for a fast 10km.

Still, it’s fairly clear the number of major domestic athletics events in the UK has dwindled alarmingly in recent years.

It’s not just cross country either. The annual indoor grand prix meeting in Birmingham used to be described, with good reason, as the ‘Weltklasse of the indoor season’ due to its world-class fields. In 2025 its mid-February date in the calendar was effectively taken by the Keely Klassic, a promising event which sadly isn’t happening this year.

Not long ago there was also a late January indoor match in Glasgow that BBC televised. An international match will still happen this month on that end-of-January slot but it is an ‘EAP’ meeting with few big-name athletes and little media interest.

If you go back to the sport’s heyday, the 1985 season saw BBC cover four indoor meetings at the start of the year before ITV took over coverage of the sport in Britain. ITV subsequently showed 20 British events during the rest of that year. It would have been more, too, if not for an apartheid demonstration in Edinburgh and a technicians’ strike.

READ MORE: 2026 athletics fixtures calendar

Looking at the outdoor circuit, Britain has also sadly lost its CityGames events since the pandemic. These popular meetings took place in Manchester, Newcastle-Gateshead and Stockton.

There was even a street athletics meet on Horse Guards Parade in London in 2014, although encouragingly there is now talk of resurrecting a pole vault competition in central London this summer, possibly taking place on Oxford Street on the same weekend as the London Diamond League.

Let’s hope it comes off because British athletics could definitely do with more, not fewer, televised events in coming years.

Snow and ice trigger new year cancellations

Only a few days into 2026 and once again we are wondering whether the sport in the UK is gripped by a ‘cancel culture’.

The first parkrun weekend of the year saw more than 100 events called off due to the icy weather. Thankfully more cross-country races have so far gone ahead, though, in keeping with Loughborough coach George Gandy’s famous comment that “cancel should not be part of a cross-country runner’s vocabulary”.

You can expect more cancellations in coming days, however, if the cold snap continues.

I usually start the new year by doing the Brown Willy Run on Bodmin Moor which takes runners to the top of the highest point in Cornwall and back to the finish at the historic (and apparently haunted) Jamaica Inn.

Twelve months ago this seven-mile run (like parkrun, it refuses to call itself a race) was cancelled due to bad weather. This year it thankfully went ahead but I sense more and more ‘health and safety’ concerns every year.

In 2026 the event saw under-16s banned. This follows a decision to ban dogs running with their owners. Maybe it’s my imagination but there are also lots more mountain rescue volunteers than I remember from 10-20 years ago.

What would Alf Tupper make of it all?

Off-beat athletics head-to-heads

How long will it be before we see more off-beat athletics competitions that might, dare we say, draw inspiration from the Nick Kyrgios vs Aryna Sabalenka tennis ‘battle of the sexes’, or the Anthony Joshua vs Jake Paul boxing mismatch last month?

We have already seen Karsten Warholm face Mondo Duplantis over 100m in Zurich – and it was well received to be fair.

What other head-to-heads might we see? And will anyone have the imagination and energy to bring them to the sport in 2026?

As the above examples from tennis and boxing remind us, though, there is a fine line between entertainment and farce.