Merrell’s Open Letter to the IOC

From their Instagram post on their European account:

In our new campaign, entitled Trail to Paris, we’re launching a bid to make trail running a future Olympic sport.

We’ve hooked up with five UK run crews to trail run over 455km from London to Paris over the next four days ahead of this summer’s Games.

The press release also mentioned that cross country running used to be an Olympic sport:

“This summer’s Olympics marks one hundred years since running off-road was an official discipline,” said Tom Jenkins, a passionate trail runner from London. “Cross-country running, now commonly known as trail running, was the last of its kind at the Paris 1924 Games.”

Merrell’s an American footwear brand and is the title sponsor of the Skyrunner World Series, but this marketing effort seems to be coming from the UK. Of course, with Paris hosting this summer, all eyes will be on France and with UTMB happening mere days after the Closing Ceremony UTMB will be in the spot light. Exactly 100 years ago the first Winter Olympics were happening in, yes, you guessed it, Chamonix, France.

So, we have an effort promoting trail running for this year’s Olympics in Paris and there’s an effort promoting it for 2032 in Brisbane, Australia. The city hosting the Olympics in between Paris and Brisbane is… Los Angeles, California. There are hills just outside that city. I ran them, this past October. Who’s gonna organize the promotional efforts stateside?

The full ‘open letter’ can be found in a blog post here.