The end of the world as we know it: By Len Johnson

When Ava Gardner was filming On the Beach in Melbourne, she joked that Melbourne was a good place to make a film about the end of the world.

Neville Shute’s novel depicted the world in the aftermath of a nuclear war, with Australia and Melbourne virtually the last place on the planet to be swept by the wave of deadly radioactive fallout which had already engulfed the rest of the world.

Melbourne in the 1950s was a good place to make a film about the end of the world, and must have seemed even more so to a film star with a taste for the wilder side of Hollywood lifestyle.

The pubs shut at 6pm, a ‘temporary’ measure brought in to assist the war effort (that’s the 1914-18 world war), but not without an unedifying swill when seasoned drinkers would line several glasses of beer up on the bar when last orders were called. The less said about Sundays, the better: no newspapers, no bread, no cinemas - ironically, about the only thing that wasn’t banned on Sunday was saying something about Sunday.

You didn’t have to be Ava Gardner to think Melbourne an ideal place to make a film about the world’s final days.

In a different way, Punta Umbria is a good place to stage a championship which is the end of the world cross-country, or at least the end of it as we know it. From this year, the IAAF’s oldest world championship becomes an annual event.

This Andalusian beach resort has a permanent population of 15-20,000 which swells tenfold, to 200,000, in summer. It’s exactly the sort of host which is ideal for an event like world cross-country. The championship is the biggest thing in a small town blessed with infrastructure beyond its size. The course is manicured grass, with three sets of three logs to negotiate and three artificial mounds on each lap.

Fast, spectator-friendly, but with enough artificially induced interruptions to the runner’s rhythm to prevent the race’s being a straight-out burn-up for track athletes.

Not only is it an ideal course in an ideal location, Punta Umbria 2011 also affords an ideal opportunity to reflect what the change will mean to world cross-country.

For most of its 39-year history, the world cross-country has been constant – a men’s 12km championship, a women’s race from between 4km (initially) and 8km. The two major changes have been the addition of a short-course race from 1998 to 2006 and, now, the decision to go from an annual to a two-year cycle.

The way the championships coped with the short-course event may be a good omen to how it will cope with the change of frequency.

The introduction of the short-course event was an ill-fated attempt to attract the world’s top middle-distance runners. An unintended by-product (assumedly unintended, anyway) was the opportunity it gave for athletes to double their gold medal tallies.

When Sonia O’Sullivan won the double in Marrakech in 1998, the very first occasion on which the short-course race was contested, it was assumed she had pulled off what would prove to be a rare feat. Very quickly, that view was reassessed as more athletes excelled in both races.

Kenenisa Bekele may well be the greatest cross-country runner ever to pull on a pair of spikes. Even if he were not, he has set a record of 11 wins that will be impossible for anyone to better. No fewer than five times – from 2002 to 2006 – did he win the ‘rare’ double. Well done it may have been, but a steak is not the only thing that cannot be rare and well done at the same time.

Sticking to the long race only, Bekele is still the greatest winner in world cross-country history. He won for a sixth time in Edinburgh in 2008, putting him one ahead of John Ngugi and Paul Tergat, who each won five times. Carlos Lopes has won four times.

Tergat aside, I was lucky enough to see each of these great champions run the race. I saw Lopes win in Lisbon in 1985, Ngugi win in Auckland in 1988 and Stavanger in 1989, and Bekele win in Fukuoka in 2006.

Each race was different. Lopes was ruthless in the way in which he dealt with his opposition – both on and off the course. Before the race, he heaped the hometown pressure on his teammate, the brilliant but mentally fragile Fernando Mamede. In it, he ran away from his rivals over the last of five laps.

The 1985 cross-country was still the style of race which normally prevailed. Over 250 started, of whom 200 were loosely in one huge pack after a lap. This number was roughly halved lap by lap, until Lopes surged off the front of a pack of 20 to victory.

Auckland in 1988 was run in fast conditions around Ellerslie racecourse on a brilliant sunny day. There was little between Ngugi and his teammate, Paul Kipkoech, the 1987 world 10,000 metres champion, for most of the race. Kenya placed eight in the first nine in a display of rare dominance.

Stavanger was different, a mud-heap on which only three men broke 40 minutes for 12km. Runners tackled a long rise each lap on the muddiest and most uneven part of the course. I remember Ngugi negotiating the climb like a drunk bumping his way along a hotel corridor, weaving from side to side of the course as he sought the best going. He won that day by almost 30 seconds, the biggest winning margin in history.

Of them all, Bekele probably gave out the strongest aura of invincibility. Certainly, he did that day in Fukuoka, controlling the race from the front before surging away to victory.

Of the women, I missed Grete Waitz’s five victories (one of them in Spain, in Madrid in 1981) and Lynn Jennings hat-trick of wins from 1990 to 1992. But I saw Ingrid Kristiansen win at her ninth attempt in 1988 and Tirunesh Dibaba out-duel Lornah Kiplagat in a dramatic 2006 long race (Kiplagat had her revenge a year later in Mombasa).

Annette Sergent of France was as dominant over mud as Ngugi, winning in Stavanger in 1989 two years after her first title in Warsaw.

And I’ve seen Linet Masai lose two years in a row despite controlling and dominating the race from gun to the last few strides both times. She deserves a win (perhaps has one by now), but so have a lot of other great runners.

Gold medals will not be as easy to accumulate, nor bitter performances so quickly atoned for as we move to a two-year cycle.

The racing, we hope, will be just as memorable.