This is the first of two features turning the clock back to remember the other SPAR European Cross Country Championships that have been held in Belgium.
After the inaugural two editions in the northeastern England town of Alnwick, the SPAR European Cross Country Championships moved on to Belgium and the city of Charleroi around 70 kilometres south of Brussels in 1996.
As might be expected after days of rain, the going was heavy from the outset in the grounds of the 18th century Château de Monceau-sur-Sambre where the championships were staged but the swamp-like proved no barrier to Great Britain’s eventual men’s winner Jon Brown, who seemed to glide over the quagmire that had been churned up from three previous races.
The 25-year-old Briton looked supremely comfortable from the outset in the cold and muddy conditions, leading a large pack through much of the initial stages of the 9.65km race, often looking around to assure himself where all his main rivals were including Portugal’s two-time defending champion Paulo Guerra.
Early in the third kilometre, Brown felt confident enough to surge and immediately splintered the 12-man leading pack which had been together from shortly after the gun.
In just a few hundred metres he opened a 20-metre gap over his nearest rivals and from that point, Brown just kept extending his lead.
By the line, his finishing time of 32:37 giving a good indication of how tough the course in the context of the distance at an event which has gone down in folklore as arguably the muddiest SPAR European Cross Country Championships ever, he came home 35 seconds clear of the silver medallist Guerra.
"It was easy," Brown reflected afterwards. "But you couldn't run through the mud, you had to stagger through it. I wasn't sure how to play it, whether to sit in there and bide my time.
“But I seemed to be moving away without putting too much effort in at all although I expected to do well after a good month's training in November consolidated my fitness from the summer,” he added.
Biggest winning margin in championship history
His winning margin remains to this day the largest in a senior race at the SPAR European Cross Championships by either gender – for the record, Denmark’s Anne Emilie Møller won the 2019 women’s U23 title by 39 seconds – something that neither Guerra, who was to go on and also win in 1999 and 2000, Ukraine’s nine-time winner Serhiy Lebid who finished down in 58th place in 1996, Norway’s imperious two-time defending champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen or any women’s champion have been able to improve on.
Brown’s emphatic victory – and the first triumph by a British man in a major cross country championship since Ian Stewart won at the 1975 World Cross Country Championships – came as little surprise though to pundits who had followed his progress since finishing sixth in Alnwick 12 months earlier.
He was the leading European at the 1996 World Cross Country Championships, when finishing 12th, and he had handily defeated Kenya’s reigning world cross country champion Paul Tergat at a race in Spain just the previous week.
The victory was to be the highpoint of Brown’s running career although he broke the British 10,000m record with a run of 27:18.14 in Brussels in 1998 and picked up a bronze medal behind Guerra at the 1999 European cross country championships, as well as finishing fourth in the 2000 and 2004 Olympic Games marathons.
Behind Brown and Guerra, the latter having a solitary race for second place after determining that to chase Brown would be futile, France’s Mustapha Essaid took the bronze after a duel with Denmark’s Carsten Jorgensen, who was to take gold 12 months later.
Led by Guerra, Portugal’s scoring quartet all finished in the top 11 and were clear winners of the men’s team honours with 27 points.
The women’s contest saw Romania’s Iulia Negura pull away from Sweden’s Sara Wedlund with just over a kilometre to go in the 4.55km race and she crossed the line in 16:58, six seconds in front of the 21-year-old Swede.
However, Negura failed a post-event doping test and also tested positive for a steroid in an out-of-competition test a week earlier and was stripped of her title a few months later, Wedlund to be upgraded to the gold medal.
France took the women’s team title, coincidently also with 27 points, although there were only three to score in that era. A Belgian team led by Anja Smolders in tenth also pipped Sweden for the bronze medal, their first and only medal in the senior women's team race in championship history.
Charleroi also saw the introduction of U20 races although they were not to get official status until the following year in Oeiras, Portugal.
The men’s race over 5km was won by the Netherlands’ Gert-Jan Liefers, who was to get the gold medal 12 months later and go on to set a Dutch 1500m record of 3:32.89 in 2001 which was only beaten by Niels Laros this summer, while the women’s 3km ‘title’ was taken by Spain’s Alessandra Aguilar, the first of her 12 outings over 20 years at the SPAR European Cross Country Championships.
Phil Minshull for European Athletics
