Top 20 most popular articles on the AW website in 2023

Controversial stories dominate in our annual list of most heavily clicked pieces at athleticsweekly.com

East African marathon runners are prominent on our list of the most popular website articles in the past 12 months but not always for the right reasons. Titus Ekiru’s 10-year doping ban was the story you clicked into the most on our site in 2023 with our coverage of Tigist Assefa’s phenomenal women’s world record in Berlin being hot on Ekiru’s heels.

Readers and followers of AW certainly enjoy reading about controversy. Doping stories seem to particularly appeal to you. The news of untimely deaths, in-depth event previews and features on how top athletes train are also popular on our site.

Interestingly, our previews haven’t proved quite so popular in the past year. Still, there were a number of previews that fell narrowly outside the top 20 list below. Similarly, major events coverage does not figure strongly, but we think this is because our reports are drowned out a little by mass coverage from the wider media when it comes to events like the World Athletics Championships and London Marathon. On the latter, for example, our coverage from the Mini London Marathon usually gets more hits than our reports from the ‘main races’ on Sunday.

The majority of our website visitors are from the UK but we receive lots of traffic from the United States. A little way behind, Australia is the ‘bronze medallist’ when it comes to visitors to our site followed by Ireland, South Africa, Canada, Kenya, India, Germany and Sweden.

Russia is banned from athletics and of course English is not the country’s first language but they still place 63rd in the list of nationalities that visited the AW website in 2023. Elsewhere, we have seen athletics fans from as far afield as Vanuatu, Cape Verde and the Faroe Islands logging into athleticsweeky.com this year.

Here is our list of most popular stories in 2023. To read any of the articles in full, just click into the headline.

1 Kenyan marathon runner Titus Ekiru receives 10-year ban

After running 2:02:57 to win the Milan Marathon a couple of years ago, Ekiru was found guilty on two charges of tampering as well as testing positive for banned substances on two occasions. With news of Kenyan drug busts coming seemingly every week in 2023, this particularly long ban caught your attention and ended up being our most viewed article of the year.

2 Tigist Assefa smashes women’s world marathon record in Berlin with 2:11:53

The Ethiopian shocked the running world as she took more than two minutes off Brigid Kosgei’s mark as Eliud Kipchoge won the men’s race in 2:02:42 and Charlotte Purdue went No.2 on UK all-time rankings.

3 Jail for runner who once beat Mo Farah

Ricky Stevenson beat Mo Farah among others to win the short-course race at the Great Edinburgh Cross Country International in 2010 so you were clearly surprised to read that the now retired runner has been given a two-and-a-half-year sentence for stealing money from holiday business.

4 Vote for your AW athletes of 2023

Our annual readers’ choice poll is always popular and this time the article that included the voting form was our fourth most clicked post of the year.

5 The lights are on but no one’s at home

This opinion piece highlighted the fact there were no major competitive opportunities on home soil for British athletes who had excelled at the World Championships in Budapest. This was in stark contrast to previous years when end-of-season events were a big feature of the British athletics scene.

6 The world 800m record that has stood the test of time

We took a deep dive into Jarmila Kratochvilova’s world 800m record of 1:53.28. The mark has stood for 40 years but is mired in controversy. Like a number of articles in this list, it also appeared in our monthly print magazine, which meant our paid subscribers were able to read it several weeks before it went online.

7 Keely Hodgkinson’s killer session

Athletes and fans enjoy reading about how the stars train. Given this, our article about the British 800m champion’s “killer session” went down well in 2023.

8 Young athletes’ match at Dartford abandoned after fight

Not everybody enjoyed reading this article. The club officials involved in the fixture – a UK Youth Development League match in Dartford – were not surprisingly keen to keep it quiet. However many of you were interested to hear about a brawl which began with two team-mates from Herne Hill Harriers and quickly spiralled out of control.

9 Why Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce still has a point to prove

Being a UK-based magazine, articles on British athletes are usually our most popular. But when we focus on athletes from countries like Kenya, Ethiopia and in this case Jamaica they can also receive a lot of attention.

10 Natasha Cockram conquers the heat and a cold in World Champs marathon

Of all our reports from Budapest, this proved most popular. Maybe it was because most of our other coverage, such as Josh Kerr’s and Katarina Johnson-Thompson’s victories, was drowned out by the wider media, whereas this piece on Britain’s sole female marathoner at the championships was more exclusive.

11 British distance runner and coach John Nuttall dies aged 56

The shocking news that Liz McColgan’s husband had died at a relatively young age led you to click into the story in your thousands to find out more.

12 Josh Kerr attacks British 1500m record in Zurich

Often the anticipation and hype during the build-up to a competition proves more exciting than the main event itself. This is a good example as Kerr’s plan to run a national record at the Weltklasse meeting a few days after claiming the world 1500m title ahead of Jakob Ingebrigtsen captured your interest although the record attempt ultimately fell a little flat.

13 Dina dodges the curve balls to take 100m title

One of our reports from the UK Championships in Manchester got a lot of clicks as Dina Asher-Smith stormed to gold during a busy two days of action.

14 Seb Coe: “You may see Russian athletes in Paris. They just won’t be in athletics”

The World Athletics president’s hardline approach on Russian and Belarusian athletes continued when we reported his reaction to the IOC’s decision to allow some of them to compete at the 2024 Paris Olympics.

15 Amo-Dadzie defeats Omanyala at 100m

Eugene Amo-Dadzie has been one of the British breakthrough athletes of the year and our coverage of his victory over the Commonwealth 100m champion in Austria caught your eye. This was also one of our regular in-depth results round-up articles that includes details of a large number of events.

16 Ciara Mageean runs fastest-ever parkrun by a woman

Stories about parkrun often do well on the AW website, probably because so many people can simply relate to the events and distance involved because they have probably participated in it themselves at some stage. So when Mageean ran 15:13 on December 23 to beat Izzi Batt-Doyle one-year-old ‘record’, it enjoyed a large number of clicks.

17 Boston Marathon cut-off time stricter than ever

News in September that the Boston Marathon had moved its qualification guidelines made it into our top 20 list of popular articles.

18 Why cross-country running should always go ahead whatever the weather

This story divided opinion with one follower on social media calling it “dangerous nonsense” but the overwhelming reaction was one of agreement as the argument was put forward for cross-country running events to go ahead “whatever the weather”.

19 UK Athletics selection decisions for Budapest are wrong

Despite the British team performing brilliantly at the World Championships, the team selection itself was criticised as a number of potential squad members were left at home. This in-depth piece saw AW’s Steve Smythe – a veteran of 13 World Athletics Championships – dissecting the decisions in detail.

20 Adelle Tracey smashes long-standing Jamaican 1500m record

The middle-distance runner has switched from Britain to Jamaica but our largely British audience still enjoy following her progress and here you clicked into this article in your thousands as it snuck into our top 20 list.

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Top 20 most popular articles on the AW website in 2023 appeared first on AW.