by Justin Lagat
Justin Lagat stepped out of his comfort zone, writing about great Kenyan athletes, and took on a global question, who is the best athlete of all time in World Champs? Which was the best World Champs?
The question of who the greatest athlete of all time is will feature on the social media space in the coming days leading up to the World Athletics Championships in Budapest, thanks to World Athletics launching a platform for fans to give out their opinions on the topic.
What an interesting idea!
For the first time, we shall have Carl Lewis competing for side by side with Usain Bolt and Maurice Greene in the men’s 100m race. We shall have Haile Gebrselassie versus Kenenisa Bekele, Mo Farah, and Joshua Cheptegei in the 10,000m event. How about Allyson Felix and Sanya Richards in the women’s 400m? Or Vivian Cheruiyot and Tirunesh Dibaba in the 5000m event?
Fans will also vote for their favorite moments from the past editions of the global event.
This will be done to mark 40 years since the inaugural edition of the World Athletics Championships in 1983. World Athletics will celebrate the past four decades of action across all of its platforms in 2023 by giving a chance to fans to choose from a long list that will contain moments from all 18 editions of the championships, from 1983 through to 2022, and vote on their ten favorite women’s moments and ten favorite men’s moments. The top forty moments will be revealed later in the year, before the Budapest World Championships.
It will be an opportunity for athletics fans to travel back in history and reflect on the great performances and achievements and on the legendary athletes that have graced the past 18 editions of the global event.
“The launch of the World Championships in 1983 was a seminal moment in the modernization of our sport as it created new opportunities for our athletes to build their names and become professional, for our sport to become truly global and to move towards gender equality. Over 40 years, we have grown as a sport in myriad ways, and this is a perfect opportunity for us to reflect on and celebrate that history while remaining focused on the progress we still need to make to secure our future,” said Sebastian Coe, the World Athletics president, in a press release on Tuesday (21).
World Athletics is encouraging all followers of the sport to get involved in the celebrations. In the coming weeks, World Athletics will launch an opportunity for fans to decide on the 40 Greatest Moments of the World Championships via a public vote.
To read the World Athletics release:
https://www.worldathletics.org/news/press-releases/celebrating-40-years-world-championships
