EDINBURGH (Reuters) - Senior athletics officials will hold a crisis meeting after this weekend's world cross country championships to address the decline of cross country running throughout Europe.

When the event was first held in 1973, 85 percent of the competitors were European but in Sunday's races that figure will be down to 29 percent.

Major athletics nations such as Germany and France, as well as most of Eastern Europe, are barely represented in Scotland while even host nation Britain has been forced to field a virtual youth squad as senior athletes opt to skip the event.

Lamine Diack, president of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) said countries had lost sight of the team aspect of cross country, the only major IAAF discipline where team medals are awarded.

Many competing nations have sent squads with fewer than the nine athletes necessary to take part in the team competition.

Diack identified Germany, for whom Susanne Hahn is a sole representative, for particular criticism. "They could not have made more effort? For a country of 90 million not to field a team -- shameful," he told a news conference on Saturday ahead of Sunday's world championships.

IAAF general secretary Pierre Weiss said the organisation's cross country committee would meet to see what could be done to revive cross country in Europe.

"Yes, we are facing a problem and we meet on Monday to discuss the future," he said.

Sebastian Coe, IAAF vice-president, said the blame lay not with national federations but with individual athletes and coaches who did not appreciate the benefits of cross country.

"If you a looking at the problem of cross country in Europe then look at the European standard of distance running," he said. "We lost the argument 20 years ago -- the coaches don't see it."

TRAINING REGIME

Coe, twice Olympic 1,500 metres champion in the 1980s, said that in his era winter cross country running was an essential element of the training regime for European athletes.

"If you go through the annals of distance running you will see that most of the great names incorporated cross country but you rarely find anyone at a European level now who sees a correlation from cross country to track," he said.

It is a different story in Africa, whose athletes have become astonishingly dominant.

The senior men's team race has been won by Ethiopia or Kenya every year since 1981 in both the short and long races and the same two nations have shared the junior men's race since 1982.

On the women's side only Portugal, in 1994, have interrupted the African dominance in the last 17 years.

Diack said the Africans took cross country far more seriously than European countries and said the track performances of their leading athletes supported Coe's beliefs.

Ethiopia's Kenenisa Bekele, favourite to win the senior men's title for a record sixth time, is also a three-times world champion over 10,000 metres on the track, while Ethiopian women's favourite and twice winner Tirunesh Dibaba took the world 10,000 metres track title in Osaka last year.

"Athletes have to recognise that a serious part of development is cross country and running in a cross world championship can be enormously helpful for a track season," said Coe.

(Editing by Clare Fallon)