Puppi and Murigi Lead Current Athlete World Rankings
In close battles on both the mens and womens sides, Francesco Puppi and Lucy Wamburi Murigi are currently atop the leaderboards in the Mountain Running World Rankings.
Puppi, who finished 7th at the World Mountain Running Championships in Canillo, Andorra, leads fellow countryman Bernard Dematteis in the rankings by a mere 20 points. Dematteis finished second at the fifth and final 2018 World Cup race at Smarna Gora in Slovenia. Currently in third place in the ranking is Geoffrey Gikuni Ndungu of Kenya who won the overall WMRA World Cup over Puppi with his third place finish at Smarna Gora.
On the women's side, the rankings are event tighter with Austria's Andrea Mayr just 10 points behind Murigi. In their last head-to-head race at Smarna Gora, Murigi overtook the strong Austrian ascender on the downhill to finish eleven seconds ahead and take the win. Mayr won the overall Mountain Cup standings with Murigi just behind her.
The Athlete Rankings are a new initiative this year that were first introduced at the World Mountain Running Congress in Andorra in September. Compiled from the results of 57 international mountain races, they have produced a preliminary World ranking for all athletes involved in mountain running competitions.
"The goal behind these rankings is to provide true comparisons between athletes across the major mountain running competitions from around the world," noted WMRA President, Jonathan Wyatt. "As the ranking system evolves, this will provide an easily reconisable system for fans of the sport to compare athletes."
The rankings include results from the Classic and Long Distance World Championships, WMRA Cup races, the Salomon Golden Trail Series and other top mountain running competitions:
- 1 x World cup points classification
- 2 x World mountain running championship race events
- 5 x World cup races
- 5 x Continental / area championships
- 6 x Golden trail series races
- 10 x National championships
- 28 x Sanctioned races chosen among the IAAF Label mountain races, the most long-lived and well organized from an organizational and competitive point of view.
- 49 x Races that have already been accounted for, recently there has been added two events including the IAAF/WMRA Mountain Running World Championship and the Golden Trail Series (ISF Championships) stage at Ring Of Steall in Scotland.
The current top ten rankings are as follows:
