Steve Cram: ‘I think we’ll pick up five or six medals if it goes really well’
‘It isn’t going to be easy,’ Steve Cram told the RW podcast, when asked about Team GB’s medal hopes for the upcoming World Athletics Championships in Budapest this weekend. ‘I think we’ll pick up, I hope, five to six [medals] if it goes really well. It looks a bit of a challenge.’
This year, only a small squad of athletes will represent Team GB at the Champs, after UK Athletics announced last month that every athlete in the team must have reached the required qualifying standard, despite World Athletics accepting athletes according to their world ranking place. It meant that a number of British athletes were told they couldn’t take up their invite from the world governing authority to compete in Budapest, including those who have performed well in previous World Championships – such as 100m hurdler Josh Zeller, who came fifth last year and is ranked 33rd in the world.
But Cram says the lack of athletes hitting qualification marks highlights gaps in talent. 'I think there are some areas where we should be doing better,' Cram said in the podcast interview, 'I know there’s been a lot of talk around the team that has been selected and the size of the team, it’s basically that size because people haven’t made the qualifying marks… we’ve struggled to find, in the men’s event: long jumpers, triple jumpers, javelin throwers. It’s not that we are missing a bunch of people, we don’t have anybody. We don’t even have one or two people who are hitting the mark there, so that’s probably a bit of a concern.’
But established athletes, especially those producing promising results in the Diamond League this year – such as 800m star Keely Hodgkinson, who took 0.11 seconds off her previous best and lowered the British record in June – bolster the team’s medal hopes. ‘There are people like Keely [Hodgkinson], Zharnel Hughes, Dina [Asher-Smith who] is starting to run well again,’ he said. ‘We always have a chance in the 4 x 100s. The lads in the 1500m are there or thereabouts – that’s a race where anybody could pick up a medal perhaps. And there is always one or two surprises and things that, maybe you don’t see them coming, [and there's] KJT in the heptathlon as well. So, we have some of our established stars who are right in the mix – Laura Muir [for example] – you could probably make a case for eight to nine chances and hope to convert with a bit of luck.’
Nevertheless, Team GB’s chances of winning gold are not perhaps as promising as they once were, says Cram, despite Britain’s strong contingent of middle-distance athletes. There was, of course, Jake Wightman’s emphatic 1500m gold at the World Champs last year – although sadly he won't be able to defend his 1500m title this weekend due to injury – as well as Muir’s brilliant bronze in the same event.
‘My area, middle distance, has been great for a while and continues to be so on the men’s and women’s side. [But] we’re missing… the Mo Farah thing… Mo goes and in the 5000m and 10,000m we suddenly look bereft. Eilish [McColgan] is obviously injured and she’s done brilliantly in the last year or two. [But] there are gaps. Someone’s probably going to come through and fill that gap but, at the moment, it’s winning the gold medals that looks tough. As I said, we’ll pick up some medals but who are the people that are going to go and win gold medals this year and next year?’
Encouraging performances, however, from the next generation of track and field athletes at the recent 2023 European Athletics U20 Championships in Israel, where GB finished fourth in the medal table, reveal an exciting new era of talent coming through. 'You only have to look at our performance at the recent European under-20s… there are athletes bubbling under the surface of those who are currently around right now, who may think they’ve got an outside chance of getting to the Olympics next year, or perhaps the Worlds in two years’ time.'
For this year's contingent, however, a number of unfortunate factors – including an out-of-sync competition schedule triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic – has made race preparation and planning particularly tricky in recent years. While the World Champs would normally be every two years, last year we had the World Champs, Commonwealth Games and European Championships all rolled into six weeks. Then of course, this year’s World Champs will be proceeded by the Paris 2024 Olympics next year.
This is where strategic race planning is essential to ensuring athletes are in optimal shape, for a major competition like the World Champs – and crucially, at the optimal time. ‘You have to plan your season,’ Cram told us. ‘And it’s a challenge these days for people because a lot of them aren’t really making much of a living and opportunities [come up] to go and pick up races… where they think, oh I’ve got a chance to run there and it wasn’t in the plan initially...'
'If it’s the Worlds, or the Europeans or the Junior Championships, it has to be your goal for the season. I think, if you speak to all of the coaches, their job is to get their athlete physically as well prepared at the right time [as they can be]. I always get frustrated for athletes whose season’s best was done in the first three meetings of the year… it’s nice that everyone wants to do a season’s best or a personal best but, to do it when it matters, it’s a skill.’
And for those athletes who do flourish on the world stage this weekend, it may well help their bid to qualify for a dream spot on GB's Olympic team in Paris next year. 'There will be athletes who come to these Championships and will perform at a level that they suddenly think: I’ve got a chance next year, I’m in the mix now, and I’ve done something. Maybe they’ve finished fourth, maybe they’ve come third, maybe they’ve come sixth... I think that’s always interesting watching out for those people, particularly in these World Champs a year before the Olympics.’
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