Monte-Carlo – On paper it would seem an unusual head-to-head clash on which to promote a championship. Coming into the 36th IAAF World Cross Country Championships, Edinburgh, Scotland (30 March), Eritrean Zersenay Tadese has won just one of the eleven global championship battles he has had with Ethiopian Kenenisa Bekele during his career.

However, to think that would be to forget the momentous events which occurred last year in the senior men’s race at the World Cross Country Championships in Mombasa, Kenya, when not only did Tadese, the World Road Running champion, win the gold but his chief opponent, Bekele, the reigning five-times long course race titleholder, could not even finish.

Bekele, as three-time World 10,000m champion and 2004 Olympic 10,000m gold medallist, is arguably one of the greatest ever track runners but at cross country with ten individual senior race gold medals (he also won titles 2002-2006 at the now discontinued short race distance) and one junior crown he is definitively the greatest ever cross country runner.