The road to a thriving sport

I took the photo of this road nearly five years ago when visiting Newcastle. On a Sunday morning each autumn it is impossible to see the road for it is covered by tens of thousands of runners lining up for the Great North Run.

The Great North Run was the brainchild of Brendan Foster. In the 70s he was one of my heroes. Often he would win big races and, although he sometimes didn't, you never felt he would let you down. It was a different era of course, but I loved the way he had the guts to take a race by the scruff of the neck even if, by trying to win, his gamble would cost him dearly.

I've watched so many 800 and 1500 metre races in recent years when I wish some of the the Brits would gamble a bit more.

When Big Bren took to the commentary box I was less of a fan. For several years he seemed to talk about nobody other than Steve Cram and his range of commentary was less than any other in the history of sports commentary. It is like having a commentator in football who only speaks when the goalkeeper has the ball and passes over the microphone as soon as the goalie passes the ball.

And then there is the conflict of interest. He is never going to criticise the Great Run series in which he has such an interest. Would a horse racing commentator be allowed to commentate on an event he organised?

But every now and again Brendan Foster hits a chord that is in tune with my thinking. Last week he was quoted in the Sunday Times after he contacted the paper, he said it was the first time he had ever done so, to protest at the way athletics is being judged purely by the number of medals we win at the Olympics.

Comparisons were made with the GDR. For those too young to remember the GDR, it wasn't Brendan's venture into Ireland (Great Dublin Run) it was the ironically named German Democratic Republic - there is possibly more democracy in Zimbabwe than there was in East Germany.

In the GDR, if you were good at a particular sport you had to do it whether you liked it or not. Not only did you get the top coaches but the top pharmacists were on hand too!

Given the choice, I would probably rather watch the best 10 marathon runners in the world run the London Marathon on a short circuit so that I could see them time and time again at the expense of the masses. But even if 10 runners beat 2.05 the run would create less interest than if 40,000 completed the course. And sport would be the loser if those 40,000 people sat in the pub watching the action getting fat intead of competing.

I'll still get the odd dig in where I see standards are falling. For example, the winning performance in the 20 miles on Sunday would only have achieved 9th place in 1996.

But Mr Foster is right. The sport is thriving in so many ways away from the Olympics. As was noted in the obituaries for Christopher Chattaway recently, it was only the eccentrics that went running in the old days. And they were only young people too.

Going back to the days when Brendan Foster was putting Tyneside on the map a fellow Geordie was criticising the changing face of Newcastle. Alan Hull, the most prolific of the songwriters in Lindisfarne wrote many songs about alleged corruption and how houses were being knocked down to build motorways.

Alan Hull, who is long deceased, would not have imagined the motorways being covered in runners. Lindisfarne had an album called Nicely out of Tune. But for once, Brendan Foster is in tune with me. The sport is thriving; we would like more high achievers but let's recognise what Brendan Foster and others like him have achieved with the mass participation events.

Alan Hull's Fog on the Tyne has gone and if he were around now he might be writing "We can run together" instead of "We can swing together.".