Canada will not send a team to the 2017 IAAF World U18 Championships

Canada will not field a team at the 2017 IAAF U18 World Championships.

The nation’s governing body, Athletics Canada, announced Tuesday that a Canadian team will not be present at the July championships in Nairobi, Kenya. The event used to be known as the IAAF World Youth Championships in Athletics.

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The United States, the United Kingdom and Australia will too skip the championships. Select nations opting not to send teams to the global championships was one reason that Athletics Canada cited in Tuesday’s decision. In athletics, there are the IAAF U18 Championships, the IAAF U20 Championships and the IAAF World Championships, the latter being the senior-level event.

“Safety and other factors” were also taken into consideration by Athletics Canada’s National Team Committee. In 2016, the IAAF, the governing body for international athletics, announced that the 2017 edition of the U18 championships would be the last. Area competitions will instead be the focus in an effort to increase the likelihood of youth athletes continuing to develop through to the senior ranks.

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“We decided it’s not the best pathway for those athletes at that stage of their career,” Sebastian Coe, the IAAF president, said on the decision to end the global event after 2017. “Research has proved that some 90 per cent of the medallists at these Under-18 championships never make it to the senior team.”

Sherbrooke, Que. hosted the IAAF World U18 Championships in 2003, four years after the event’s inception, the only occasion in which Canada has hosted the global event. Canada won three medals, two silver and one bronze, at the 2015 IAAF World U18 Championships in Cali, Colombia.

Canada will instead focus on sending a team to the 2017 Commonwealth Youth Games. That event will be held July 19-23 in the Bahamas.