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.
Titus Ekiru (Getty)
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.
CLICK HERE to Read the Full Original Article at AW…