WMRA President - Tomo Šarf
Our newly elected president tells us a little about his own history in Mountain Running, and the sport's future.
I was born “once upon a time” (or “more than 60 years ago”) in a country called Yugoslavia, close to Ljubljana, the capital of today’s Slovenia. The Sava river with its famous kayak course was on one side of the village, and Šmarna gora on the other side (gora = mountain).
As a kid I was a solid road-biker, but due to the desire for education (which was in that time hard to join) left professional sport and have remained a good “multi-tasking” amateur sportsman up to today.
As a complement sport to road-biking, in that time we were running up and down Šmarna gora and of course competing for the best time. When I was 19 (in 1979), I decided to organize an official race to see how fast it was really possible to climb this hill, with only 360m elevation gain. Since then the Šmarna gora race has been organized 42 times in 42 years, hosting 19 World Cup finals; small hill, small race, but strong competition.
This was my first contact with Mountain Running, although in that time nobody knew anything about such a sport. But this kind of practice was familiar to many sportsmen like bikers, alpinists, kayakers, rowers, etc. All sportsmen were running up and down the mountains as a basic physical preparation for competitions.
Doing this, in 1992 the Šmarna gora Race was the first national Championship in the new country called Slovenia. In the same year also SLO MR association was founded and I was the president for the next 25 years. While chairing the Slovenian team at the World Championships during the 90s, Danny Hughes, the WMRA president, invited me to join and so I was elected to the Council in 1997. Since than I became year by year more deeply involved into mountain running as runner, event organizer and MR official on a national and international level.
In all those years working for WMRA I was taking care for all kinds of jobs – generally more focused on the organizational/technical part and less on promotion/media side. Generally, in the past, WMRA was more focused in this way. Our basic budget was secured by our patron, IAAF, and also generally sport was not as money orientated as it is today. Also international Mountain Running races were mostly low to middle budget events and most organizers were happy if they ended the event without a loss in finances.
In the last 4 years, many things have changed. The newly elected Council will continue the way it is going now, following World Athletics' general policy. We all hope that the Covid euphoria is mostly over and that the coming years will be less stressful.
On the competition side, two WMRA top events have developed into the joint Mountain and Trail Running Championships and we can hardly wait for the first events on World and also European level. On the other side, the World Cup has also changed its character – it became wider and financially self sufficient.
In the coming four years we would like to introduce some new events, like Masters Long Distance Champs and I hope it is time to make some tests with relay races, that could bring new excitement into our sport. The World Ranking project has also started and of course, as a long term project, it will only show its potentials in the near future.