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On August 16th, we published an interesting article by Claudio Licciardello on the subject of “whether a European Walking Championship under the same conditions as the one in Birmingham still makes sense.”
A few days later, it appeared on OA Sport – Il tempio dello Sport, a multipurpose sports website, a deep analysis on European Walking Championship (and other items) written by one of their editors, Giulio Chinappi.
For those unfamiliar with him, Giulio Chinappi (born July 22, 1989) graduated from the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, majoring in Development Sciences and International Cooperation, and subsequently in Population and Development Sciences from the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He then earned a TEFL teaching diploma from the University of Toronto. He has worked extensively with various NGOs in Europe and around the world, focusing primarily on minors. He has been collaborating with the OA Sport website since February 2013.
Although the topics are very similar to those previously discussed, it also addresses the defining characteristics of a discipline like race walking in particular, as well as some rule changes that the author finds questionable, to say the least.
We have also translated this article and present it to our readers with the specific promise that we will not publish any further news on this topic of the Birmingham walk.
Happy reading.
Birmingham and the “mixture of fried fish” of walking: how athletics is destroying itself.
After erasing the historic distances and identity of race walking, European athletics reached its nadir in Birmingham: four simultaneous races, double-crossing, congested feed zones, and an incomprehensible spectacle. Even on the track, differing regulations and ranking privileges complete the picture.
There are disciplines that need to be revitalized and disciplines that are progressively demolished by the very people who claim to want to revive them. Race walking belongs to the latter category. After years of questionable decisions, distance changes, erasure of traditions, attempts to pursue a supposed modernity, and constant regulatory experiments, the European Championships in Birmingham have reached the almost inevitable outcome: a huge “mixture of fried fish” in which four races are held simultaneously, men and women overlap, “marathon walkers” and specialists of the shorter distance cross paths, double-crossings multiply, and even following the fight for medals becomes an exercise for the initiated.
It was hard to imagine a more effective way to further debase a discipline already severely impacted by the decisions of recent years. Race walking had its own identity; it didn’t need to borrow it from anyone. The 20km and especially the legendary 50km were more than just numbers: they represented decades of history, champions, time benchmarks, national schools, and comparisons between generations. The 50km, in particular, was the toughest test not only in athletics, but probably in the entire Olympic program, an extreme race that required specific preparation, physical and mental endurance, tactical ability, and a completely different level of effort management than shorter distances.
However, without a rational explanation, World Athletics decided to cancel it. First came the 35km, presented as a modern solution better suited to the new needs (of whom?). A distance with no real tradition, introduced in place of one that had an enormous one. The 35km, in turn, barely had time to exist before the same officials who had imposed it decided to cancel it as well. Since 2026, international walking has adopted the 21.0975 km and 42.195 km distances: half marathon and marathon walking.
The nomenclature itself speaks volumes about the cultural confusion that reigns at the top of athletics. The marathon, in fact, is not a generic unit of measurement equivalent to 42 kilometers and 195 meters. It is a race with its own tradition, its own mythology, a history rooted first in ancient Greece and then in the origins of the modern Olympic Games, which has transformed that seemingly irrational distance, introduced in London 1908, into one of the universal symbols of sport. The same goes for the half marathon, which over time has become an independent specialty of road running. Walking, on the other hand, had other distances and a different history.
Calling a 42.195 km race a “marathon walk” conflates two distinct identities in a childish attempt to make walking more recognizable by leveraging the prestige of another discipline. With the stated aim of promoting one discipline, therefore, the decision is gradually erasing its historical references, adopting names and distances belonging to another. The result is not greater comprehensibility, but rather greater confusion. For decades, it was enough to say “marathon” and everyone knew which race was being referred to. It was enough to say “20 km” or “50 km” and the reference was equally immediate. Today, we must distinguish between a marathon run and a marathon walk, between a half marathon and a half marathon walk. A reform that claimed to make the discipline more accessible to the public has achieved the extraordinary feat of requiring a linguistic clarification that was previously unnecessary.
Birmingham has brought this logic of debasing walking to its conclusion. The four men’s and women’s race walking events, spanning two distances, were concentrated at the same time and on the same narrow circuit, just 1 km long. The television results were devastating: athletes competing in different races were constantly mingling; men and women competing in the long and short distances ran the same sections, but belonged to four different classifications; the lapping became incessant; an overtaking could be a decisive attack for a medal or simply the passing of an athlete competing in another race and at a different stage of their race.
The viewer, therefore, cannot rely on what they see: they must constantly consult the graphics, stopwatch, number of laps, bib color, and distance. If possible, they should keep an eye on the live timing online to understand more. In other words, they must first decipher the competition and only then can they try to follow it. It was said that this format would have increased the visibility of the race walk: in reality, four simultaneous races do not generate four times as much attention, but rather a fragmentation of attention in which none of the four competitions receives the space it deserves.
Even from a technical standpoint, consequences emerge that should not exist in such a prestigious event. The athletes themselves, from the moment the absurd program was announced, warned of the risk of congestion at refreshment points: when competitors from four different races arrive in the same stretch, they must move sideways, locate their refreshment points, slow down, and rejoin the flow. Trajectories cross, groups overlap, men and women from different races can find themselves in the same space precisely when the action becomes less linear. An athlete can therefore be disturbed not by a direct opponent, but by someone competing in another competition. It is difficult to imagine a more evident demonstration of how sporting logic has been sacrificed in the name of compressing the program.
Added to all this is the impossibility of a double victory. In the past, a specialist capable of excelling at both distances could attempt to win two medals, or even two golds, a feat achieved, at traditional distances, only by the legendary Polish athlete Robert Korzeniowski at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Today, with the races held simultaneously, that possibility is eliminated not by a technical limitation, but simply by a scheduling choice, making a potentially memorable sporting achievement practically impossible. Here too, while proclaiming the desire to create new points of interest, potential stories to tell are eliminated.
Race-walking has thus become the laboratory in which international athletics has experimented with one of its worst tendencies: continually modifying what already worked, in the belief that any change equates to modernization. Was the 50km too long? Away with the 50km. Is the newly created 35km unconvincing? Away with the 35km too. Does the 20km have a consolidated history? Let’s transform it into a half marathon. Do races need greater visibility? Let’s do them all together. Every perceived problem is addressed by creating a worse problem.
Birmingham, however, demonstrates that the issue isn’t limited to walking. Even in track events, spectators are forced to contend with a proliferation of different qualifying systems that seem to have been conceived without a common philosophy: in the 1500 meters and 3000 meters steeplechase, qualification is based on placing, with no time repechage; in the 800 meters, however, placings and best times are combined; in sprint races up to 400 meters, however, a controversial “bye” is granted to the top twelve in the qualifying standings. Furthermore, in these latter races, the twelve privileged athletes who advance directly to the semifinals are not necessarily the twelve athletes who recorded the best times of the season. An athlete can therefore find themselves outside the top twelve despite being in better condition, or despite having recently achieved better times than someone who benefits from the “bye”.
The sprain becomes particularly serious in the 400 meters, the so-called “loop of death.” While saving a round in the 100 meters means avoiding a race by just a few seconds, missing a 400-meter race means avoiding a high-intensity effort that can have significant consequences in the hours that follow and the following day. There may be a minimal difference between the twelfth and thirteenth-placed athletes, but one reaches the semifinals without having run the previous round, while the other must face it with an extra 400 meters in their legs. Athletics used to be one of the simplest sports to understand. Whoever runs fastest wins. Whoever jumps highest or furthest wins. Whoever throws the furthest wins. In heats, the top runners advance, and sometimes the fastest times are fished out. This immediacy was precisely one of its greatest strengths. Today, there seems to be an almost systematic desire to complicate it. Birmingham represents the pinnacle of this decline because it concentrates in the same championship all the flaws accumulated in recent years: the erasure of traditions, artificial nomenclature, overlapping races, ranking privileges, different qualifying systems, and increasing difficulty for spectators to understand what’s happening. But, we reiterate, no discipline has been mistreated as much as race walking.
The Birmingham “mixture of fried fish” is therefore not an isolated organizational incident. It is the end result of a concept according to which the history of sport is an obstacle, and disciplines must continually be reinvented, and the public can be won over by multiplying artifices rather than offering clear, recognizable competitions that respect their tradition. Those governing athletics today continue to talk about innovation, visibility, and modernization, but the results show otherwise: these new formulas not only fail to attract new audiences, but end up disgusting even those who have always followed every European, World, and Olympic competition, even those held late at night.
Giulio Chinappi
OA Sport editor.
Cover Photo: Associate Press/ LaPresse Only Italy and Spain