By JOSEPH NGURE

Next year’s International Association of Athletics Federations World Cross-country Championship is going to be a unique event in the organisation’s sporting calendar.

 It is going to be in Bydgoszcz in Poland on March 23, 2013, when IAAF world cross-country would be marking its 40th anniversary.

 A look back to 1973, the year which the new IAAF format replaced the International Cross Country Championships that had been run over the previous 70 years, offers a hugely different picture of an event that has been dominated in recent years by Kenyan and Ethiopian runners.

Interestingly, Ben Jipcho, was the first Kenyan to win a bronze  medal in the International cross-country championships.

 Only 21 countries took part in the event held in Waregem, Belgium on 17 March, 1973, with only two African nations in attendance–Tunisia and Morocco.

No African runner earned a medal in either the men’s senior or junior races, with the fastest  being Tunisia’s Abdelkader Zadem, who finished 20th in the senior race.

The first men’s title went to Finland’s 23-year-old Pekka Paivarinta, who had finished eighth in the previous year’s Olympic 3000m Steeplechase at Munich.

Paivarinta would go on to record a world record for 25,000m of 1hr 14min 16.8sec in 1975 before and thereafter finishing 13th during Montreal Olympics in the 5000m finals in 1976.

The 33-year-old Spaniard bagged two more silvers in 1974 and 1975 behind Eric de Beck of Belgium and Ian Stewart of Scotland respectively.

 The first men’s World Cross Country bronze went to New Zealand’s Rod Dixon, who went on to demonstrate his prowess  in various races culminating in one of the most dramatic Marathon victories ever seen, on the New York course in 1983, when he overtook Britain’s Geoff Smith at 26 miles and went on to win by eight seconds. Thereafter, he became a celebrated long distance runner.

 Scotland’s Jim Brown won the men’s junior title ahead of silver medallist Jose Haro Cisneros of Spain.  The junior team gold went to Spain, with Italy and England bagging siver and bronze respectively.

 The women’s race went to Italy’s 1972 Olympic 1500m bronze medallist Paola Pigni while Silver went to England’s Joyce Smith, who later bagged many medals.

 It would be interesting to see how Kenyans, going to the Poland city of Bydgoszcz for the second time in less than three years, would perform against their rivals Ethiopia.