World Cross Country

[Chris]

I guess it depends on the type of job and hours worked. Also, forgot to mention that I had a wife and family, that restricts the mileage somewhat.

If your well enough to run your well enough to work, therefore I don't think we'd qualify for welfare benefits lol.

I don't know if that is the point though. I don't think Bedford or Nerurkar are talking about the likes of you or me - I don't mean this disrespectfully - I just mean that I think they are talking about the athletes who probably could choose to be great or not.

In regard to your second point you don't need to be ill to spend a year on Job Seekers allowance and you don't need to try all that hard to seek a job. Besides that there must be a million young people on "gap" years.

[Richard Head]

In regard to your second point you don't need to be ill to spend a year on Job Seekers allowance and you don't need to try all that hard to seek a job.

If you claim Job Seekers Allowance you only actually get paid anything for the first six months, after that they just pay your National Insurance contribution. When i was claiming it 18 months ago the Allowance was £57 a week so anyone spending a year on Job Seekers would receive approx £1500. You cant fund much of a lifestyle on that unless you have some savings behind you.

[Witton Park]

If you claim Job Seekers Allowance you only actually get paid anything for the first six months, after that they just pay your National Insurance contribution. When i was claiming it 18 months ago the Allowance was £57 a week so anyone spending a year on Job Seekers would receive approx £1500. You cant fund much of a lifestyle on that unless you have some savings behind you.

There is also Income based Job Seekers Allowance (or was). Quite a few years ago, I was out of work briefly, and so was my wife.
There were 2 options of JSA.
1. Contributions based - as long as we had the stamps up to date we could get the base payment which I think was about £50.
2. Income Based - where you could really crank it up by demonstrating how much of sob story you were, but if you had a few quid put by for a rainy day, forget it.

I had 3 kids, a mortgage etc but unfortunately I had savings of about £9,000 at the time, which meant I was inelgible for Option 2.

Without the savings, I could have been clocking up a few hundred quid.

I asked the official that if I went out, put my £9000 on a horse, it lost, and came back, could I then claim if the horse lost.
No was the answer, a technicality!!

It doesn't pay to be prudent ( I hate that word now) or honest.

[FREDDIE]

It would be intresting to see what people like RR say about this, i am sure he was out running over Woodhead at 5.00 am then going to work full time, coming home to a family and then going out training in the evening ?
UKA seem to want everything but offer very little in terms of funding compared to a lot of other sports

[Witton Park]

UKA seem to want everything but offer very little in terms of funding compared to a lot of other sports

Fully agree Freddie.

I often try to put in perspective the performance level of my kids at events. You get an U13 first season coming in 37th of 42 in a XC race and they feel a bit disappointed.

I explain that if they were performing at that level in football, they would be in the top 5 or 6 in their area, probably signed up by one of the local professional clubs, and admired by all the mates at school.

I would like to see an extensive prize money list instead of this lottery funding bestowed on the chosen ones and I would structure it something like this (figures are just for illustration and I am using XC as an example, but this could be applied through other disciplines.

County Champs XC 1st £100 with further award for 2nd, 3rd and first 3 teams.

Regional XC Champs eg. Northern 1st £500 with further award for top 6 and 1st 3 teams.

National XC Champs 1st £1000 with further awards for Top 10 individuals and 1st 3 teams.

The events to be covered could be open for debate, the scale of awards through the age groups, etc, but my principle would be to take the pot of money available to fund athletes and make it's distribution results orientated and that way all athletes at all levels would have a fair crack of the whip.

[Half Seven Buzzer]

Pudgy - thans for the info.

Some good stuff on this thread. I watched the BBC Sunday coverage form Edinbugh last night. As has already been mentioned, there was no coverage whatever of any GB mens team runners finishing the race. No post-race (or pre-race) interviews with GB runners. Brief highlights of the junior races and no mention whatever of where ANY of the junior GB runners finished, despite some pretty impressive performances, especially in the junior ladies. This is extremely disappointing from the BBC - they should be actively promoting this to other young(ish) runners - not showing 4 or 5 replays of Bekele crossing the line in slow motion, however good he is.

World Championships in our own backard and the BBC practically ignore British competitors. I'm getting more annoyed the more I write.

Alan

[dominion]

UKA / UK Sport won't fund non Olympic sports such as cross country. It's a crap system.

[Bladerunner]

I think part of the 'problem' with our 'strength' in cross country is that in years gone by all our middle distance and long distance track runners ran on the country in the winter as part of their training regime. The likes of Peter Elliot, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram, Tim Hutchins etc were all either winners or very highly placed in the National and/or Inter Counties. Nowadays our middle distance athletes are often off on warm weather training/altitude training and for want of a better word dont seem to want to 'slog' it out on the country.

A cynic might say they'd rather spend a couple of weeks in Australia/ South Africa in the sun rather than running through 9 miles of mud in the National!!!

[dominion]

Coe's jumping in the act now,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/mai...2/socoe102.xml

[Pinno]

It would be intresting to see what people like RR say about this, i am sure he was out running over Woodhead at 5.00 am then going to work full time, coming home to a family and then going out training in the evening ?
UKA seem to want everything but offer very little in terms of funding compared to a lot of other sports

Another one in full agreement with you Freddie. Half seven Buzzer has posted a good comment that the more we write and think about it the more annoyed we feel.

A now we have Seb Coe pitching in as well.