GRETE WAITZ - LYNN JENNINGS - JOHN NGUGI - CARLOS LOPES - GASTON ROELANTS

GRETE WAITZ (Norway)
The Norwegian was the dominant figure of women’s distance running during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Waitz is best known for her marathon exploits but she also won five World Cross Country titles, four of them consecutively between 1978 and 1981.
Cross country running was her first love and her success motivated her to put some effort into athletics. "In 1968 I came third in the Oslo championship cross country race. I was very proud and it was then that I decided to train more consistently."
Racing sparingly until her first World Championships, Waitz was unbeaten in cross country races for 12 years until her defeat in the 1982 race by the Romanians Maricica Puica and Fita Lovin.
Her fifth title came in 1983 and equalled the record set by Doris Brown in the pre-IAAF era (1967 to 1971). To prove the theory that sometimes the best is saved for last, she claimed that victory was actually the easiest.
Observers in Gateshead did not disagree as she put twelve seconds between herself and the rest of the field after pulling clear with a kilometre to go.
After adding a bronze medal to her collection in 1984, the people of Norway erected a statue to honour her running exploits outside Oslo’s famous Bislett Stadium.

LYNN JENNINGS (USA)
The American runner from Massachusetts has rightly gained the reputation as one of the toughest, most versatile runners ever.
On the track Jennings has notched up Olympic and World Indoor medals but cross country is her true domain.
Between 1986 and 1993 she competed in every single World Cross Country Championships. Her first appearance brought her a silver medal, behind England’s Zola Budd, followed by two agonising fourth places and a sixth.
But at Aix-les-Bains in 1990 she gained her first victory after leading from the gun. Her teenage prediction that she would be the best runner in the world by the time she was 30 had been fulfilled.
At the time she put it memorably: "I wanted to win this race with every fibre of my body. The only way to survive in international cross country races is to go out hard. Today my hard was harder than anyone else’s."
It continued to be the case for the next two years which included a memorable victory in her home city of Boston in 1992.
In 1994, Jennings opted to concentrate her energies on the track but the 36 year old runner may come back for one last hurrah in Turin. In December she won a record ninth US title and she may yet return to the global stage which she dominated during the early 1990s.

JOHN NGUGI (Kenya)
Although western commentators often foist the title ‘unknown Kenyan’ on any winning runner from that country they had not noticed before, one man really deserved to be called that: John Ngugi in 1986 when he loped to victory in the Swiss town of Neuchatel. His only previous claim to fame had been winning the East and Central African 1500m title in 1985.
Ngugi’s results before major championships were highly erratic and every year there were predictions of his impending defeat. Yet until he was dethroned by Morocco’s Khalid Skah in 1990, Ngugi always managed to dig deep and find something on the day.
The Kenyan team management had often agonized over whether to even include Ngugi in the team, notably in 1987 after he finished 76th in their national championship and yet he out-sprinted his compatriot Paul Kipkoech to win the world crown that year.
In 1989 he romped to a record fourth consecutive title in freezing and muddy Norwegian conditions, winning by 38 seconds.
After a two year gap, when the title passed to Skah, Ngugi was back in action in Boston to win his fifth title, something no other man had done.
Ngugi never had the chance to bow out from the World Cross Country championships in an appropriate fashion. He refused to take an out-of-competition drug test just before the 1993 event and was banned until May 1995.
Following his early reinstatement by the IAAF under the "exceptional circumstances" rule Ngugi returned to competition and made an attempt to get fit for last year’s race in Cape Town. But the two years away from the sport proved too much. Now 34 it is unlikely Ngugi will climb the medal podium again.

CARLOS LOPES (Portugal)
Carlos Lopes gave hope to all those who had expected to hang up their spikes when they turned 30.
The Portuguese star’s World Cross Country Championship career spanned nearly two decades from when he finished 25th out of 35 runners in the 1966 junior race.
He won his first title in 1976 at the age of 29 and many people assumed that this would be his summit, although later that year he won an Olympic 10,000m silver medal.
In 1977 Lopes won a silver medal behind Belgium’s Leon Schots, but by the turn of the decade the years seemed to have caught up with him. At Longchamps in 1980 he trailed in 26th.
However, he proved that age is no barrier, by getting back on the podium in 1983 before winning the title again at the age 37 in 1984.
Lopes will be remembered as the oldest man ever to win the Olympic marathon gold medal, which he did later that year in Los Angeles. But his form carried through into 1985 when, in front of a jubilant home crowd in Lisbon, he became the oldest man to win the World Cross Country title.
Lopes’ achievement is still in the record books and it is difficult to see anyone challenging it in the near future. He is also, however, the last non-African to win the senior men’s title a statistic that could have a slightly shorter life span.

GASTON ROELANTS (Belgium)
Some may wonder why Roelants is included in the pantheon of World Cross Country Championship legends as his record during the IAAF era was rather modest.
The Belgian finished eighth in 1973, 14th in 1974, 10th in 1975 and 13th in 1976. However, he is included not because of what he did during these four years but what he achieved before it.
There have two distinct eras of the World Cross: the first was when Europe dominated and the second when the Championships became truly global. Roelants is the one legend to have known both.
Roelants’ first race was in 1959 when, as a 22 year-old, he finished a modest 27th. The following year, a little older and wiser, he collected a silver medal and preceded to win four titles in 1962, 1967, 1969 and finally in 1972, just before the IAAF took over administration of the event.
His fourth title equalled the record number of victories of England’s Jack Holden and France’s Alain Mimoun until John Ngugi went one better in 1992. In total Roelants competed in 17 International and World Cross Country Championships, finishing in the top ten nine times.
As a track steeplechaser Roelants was a 1962 European and 1964 Olympic gold medallist and also set two world records before turning his attention, with great effect, to the marathon.