Fury after Market Drayton 10k left off top race list in the UK

For the past four years Market Drayton 10k has been ranked the UK's best 10K race by Runner's World magazine, beating events in London and Leeds to the top spot.

But this year the magazine has left the event in Market Drayton out of the league table, despite being rated the highest by runners.

Kerry McCarthy, commissioning editor of Runners World, said this year it had changed the way the best races were rated.

One of the organisers Tim Beckett said they were "very upset" the magazine had changed the system.

He said: "We are really annoyed and feel cheated by Runners World this year as they have not done their usual ratings on the votes earned this year.

"We are actually top again and had the best ratings but there is nothing to show that from their magazine article.

"As a voluntary, hard working, small committee who spend many hours putting this on we are furious.

"I have put our race on to compare and we had the highest number of people vote for us over all those races listed and we got 99 per cent yet we didn't even get a mention as one of their races to do.

"The runners obviously thought so as they voted for us but unfortunately the magazine made their own decision to omit us.

"Nevertheless we are voted top 10K now for five years running on the ratings."

A total of 2,560 runners took part in the main 10k and more than 320 ran the event's smaller fun run this year, and organisers said it was nearly 400 more than they had ever had before. When the race began in 2004 they had 125 entrants, and then 250 a couple of years after.

Ms McCarthy said: "Market Drayton was very unlucky to miss out this year.

"In previous years the rundown of best races has been put together using purely statistical data from the runnersworld.co.uk event feedback section, but this year there were various other additional factors for us to take into consideration.

"We had the same amount of editorial space to devote to what is an abundantly blossoming UK race scene and on this occasion we just felt that, having investigated the whole marketplace, other 10K races just had the edge for this year.

"That's not to say that Market Drayton has become a bad race overnight – far from it; it continues to tick all the main organisational boxes that many runners look for and if we'd been able to include a top 20 of 10K races then Market Drayton would have been in there."