Top athletics officials will meet to discuss how to arrest Europe's precipitous decline in cross country running after Ethiopian runners dominated the World Championships.

Ethiopia, led by Kenenisa Bekele and Tirunesh Dibaba in the senior events, won all four individual gold medals and two of the team titles on Sunday - Kenya taking the other two.

That was no surprise as Africa - and those two nations in particular - have totally dominated cross country for 25 years.

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

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

Nobody in the sport is complaining about that - east Africa's commitment to cross country is what has kept it buoyant for two decades.

What worries those who run the sport, however, is that much of the rest of the world, and particularly the former stronghold of Europe, appears to have given up trying to compete.

In the senior men's race on Sunday there were only two Europeans in the top 50 - Spaniards Juan Carlos De La Ossa and Ayad Lamdassem.

The women fared slightly better with two Britons, Liz and Hayley Yelling, and France's Saadia Bourgailh Haddioui in the top 30, as well as fifth-finisher Hilda Kibet, who converted to the Netherlands from Kenya a year ago.

In the junior races the highest finishing man was France's Sidi-Hassan Chahdi in 23rd while Charlotte Purdue of Britain was 16th in the women's event.

Even more damning than the individual results was the lack of team representation throughout the championships, with major athletics nations such as France and Germany sending only a handful of athletes and eastern Europe barely present at all.

When the event was first held in 1973, 85 percent of the competitors were European but in Sunday's races that figure had dropped below 30 percent.

Lamine Diack, president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, complained on the eve of the event that many countries had lost sight of the team aspect of cross country.

He described Germany's decision to send only Susanne Hahn as a sole representative as "shameful" while IAAF general secretary Pierre Weiss said the sport was facing a major problem and that the organisation's cross country committee would meet on Monday to see what could be done.

Japan, Australia and the United States flew the flag for the non-African 'rest of the world'.

Spain were the only European country to send a relatively strong set of teams as even host nation Britain fielded youthful squads in the senior races as some leading athletes opted not to compete.

Yet for all the IAAF's will to change the situation, it seems the problem lies not with a lack of will among the federations, but with the athletes and coaches themselves.

IAAF vice-president and former double 1,500 metres Olympic champion Sebastian Coe said that attitudes had changed from his era when cross country was deemed an essential part of a track athlete's training regime.

Speaking on the eve of the race, he said: "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."

Reuters