Walk this way – Mexico’s federation celebrates its centenary

The Mexican athletics federation celebrated its centenary on 1 January, seeing in 2025 with the New Year resolution to get back among the medals at the World Athletics Championships Tokyo 25.

The country has 14 World Championships medals to its name, three of them gold, but has not been among the medals at a global championship since 2017, missing out at the past two Olympic Games and past three World Championships.

Nevertheless, Mexico can look back at a century and more of a rich athletics history, especially in race walking, that should serve to inspire its current crop of internationals.

Ample evidence suggests that organised running existed during Aztec times, an era that is usually considered to have lasted about 200 years from the 14th to 16th century, and one of the ancient Mexican gods took his name from the local word for running.

However, the origin of modern athletics in Mexico had its genesis with the influx into Mexico in the last quarter of the 19th century of foreign, especially American and British, workers and businessmen who set up their own sporting and social clubs.

Independence Day interest

The expatiate newspaper The Daily Anglo-American announced on 22 June 1892 that the clubs Anáhuac and Athletic would stage ‘a meeting of races as well as high and long jump contests’ in Mexico City to commemorate the forthcoming American Independence Day on 4 July

It was one of the first references in the media to a Mexican athletics meeting, although it is known that local clubs had staged informal meetings for several years before.

The Fourth of July meetings in following years, dubbed ‘The Patriot Games’, and the formation of more clubs provided the focal point for Mexican athletics for the following two decades.

The first marathon staged in Mexico was on 27 November 1910 and was held over 40km.

Juan Diaz, a member of the local fencing school, won in 3:05, to apparently great applause from crowds gathered at the finish line in front of the Salón Merignac, a local dance hall in Mexico City.

Paris proposal

In parallel with many other countries in Latin America, interest in athletics grew rapidly in the 1920s and the Mexican Olympic Committee was formed in 1923 with a view to sending a team to Paris for the Olympic Games the following year.

In the end, 11 athletes – as part of a contingent of 15 men contesting three sports – travelled to Paris, although no one progressed beyond their heat or qualifying round.

However, the day before the Games got under way, a meeting of the National Olympic Committees in the region undertook to stage the first 1926 Central American and Caribbean Games in Mexico City.

In the end, only Mexico, Cuba and Guatemala took part with the hosts taking 15 of the 20 events.

Among the winners was the 19-year-old 200m gold medallist Mario Gomez who took the title in an impressive 22.2. Gomez would go on to provide the highlight of the Mexican squad at the 1928 Olympic Games when he made the semi-finals of the longer sprint.

Over the next four years, performances improved and in 1932 Juan Morales and Maria Uribe, the country’s first woman at the Olympics, finished seventh in the 10,000m and javelin respectively although both events were straight finals.

Pan Am Games the Olympic impetus

Budgets and the rising global standards severely limited the numbers of athletes sent to the Olympics over the next 20 years but enthusiasm for athletics in Mexico didn’t wane.

Javelin thrower Hortensia Lopez became the first Mexican athletics gold medallist at the inaugural Pan American Games in 1951 and earlier that year Mexico City was the almost unanimous choice as the venue for the second edition of the Games in 1955.

The hugely successful affair, which saw almost 100,000 spectators packed into the University Stadium – later to be remodelled as the Olympic Stadium ahead of the 1968 Olympic Games – watched some of the world’s best athletes on a daily basis, and saw Mexico take two silver and two bronze medals.

More importantly, it provided the long-term impetus for Mexico City to bid for the 1968 Olympic Games with the landmark decision to award the Games to a Latin American country for the first time taking place in 1963.

Moving the clock forward to 1968, the home Olympics – a watershed moment for athletics as it was the first Olympics held on a synthetic track and broadcast worldwide in colour among many other historic moments – also provided a pivotal moment in Mexican sporting history.

Pedraza makes Mexico proud

An inspired Jose Pedraza, who had won the 20km race walk at the inaugural Central American and Caribbean Championships on home soil in Xalapa in 1967, took the 20km race walk silver medal for Mexico’s first Olympic athletics medal.

Pedraza’s success – along with the skills of former Polish champion Jerzy Hausleber who had been hired to coach the country’s race walking prospects two years before – was the catalyst for Mexican race walkers to dominate for a generation.

“At the beginning it was not easy,” Hausleber told World Athletics in 2010. “But bit by bit after the Pedraza medal, there were more and more young athletes interested in walking. Walking became popular enough to become almost a national sport.”

Daniel Bautista set a 20km race walk world best of 1:23:40 in Bydgoszcz, Poland just a few months before going on to get gold, Mexico’s first in athletics, in the same event at the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games. He also improved the world best for 20km three more times in 1979 and 1980.

Another Hausleber product, Raúl González, broke the 50km race walk world best twice in 1978 before winning Olympic gold at what used to be the longest event on the athletics programme at his fourth Olympics in 1984. González had also won the 20km silver medal eight days before but finished just seven seconds behind teammate Ernesto Canto, who had also taken gold at the inaugural 1983 World Athletics Championships.

Although no Mexican athlete has since won Olympic gold in any discipline, Daniel Garcia also won the 20km race walk title at the 1997 World Championships and there has been plethora of silver and bronze medals at major championships for the country.

Guevara becomes Mexico’s golden girl

In the new millennium, while the rest of the world has caught up with their race walkers, Mexican athletes have shown their prowess in other disciplines.

Ana Guevara flew the flag for Mexican athletics in the early years of the 21st century with 400m medals at three successive World Championships from 2001-05, including gold in Paris 2003.

She also came close to being Mexico’s first female Olympic athletics champion in 2004 but, in a thrilling race, was just edged out by the Bahamas’ Tonique Williams-Darling and had to settle for silver.

Luis Rivera became Mexico’s first World Championships field event medallist when he took long jump bronze in 2013, and Diego del Real came close to standing on an Olympic podium with a hammer fourth place in 2016.

Looking ahead to Tokyo, who could win a medal for Mexico and put the icing on the cake of their centenary?

Once again, the spotlight falls on a race walker.

There are high hopes that Alegna Gonzalez can finally step onto the podium after a series of near misses. Gonzelez, the 2018 world U20 10,000m gold medallist, has finished fifth in the 20km event at the past two Olympics – as well as fifth with her teammate Ever Palma in the marathon mixed race walk relay – and fifth over 20km at the 2023 World Championships.

Perhaps Tokyo will be the time when Gonzalez follows in the footsteps of her many illustrious race walking predecessors who wore Mexico’s famous olive green, white and red colours on the global stage.

Phil Minshull for World Athletics Heritage