The World cross country champion, Zersenay Tadesse, was astounded when he arrived in Edinburgh yesterday.

He is bigger than David Beckham in his Eritrean homeland, but when he saw his own image towering 12 metres above his head, he laughed in disbelief.

"It surprised me," he confessed.

"It's very nice. It is very good."

Last year he halted the cross-country monopoly of Kenenisa Bekele. The Ethiopian, World and Olympic 10,000 metres champion, has 18 cross country gold medals and 11 individual titles. But he is no longer champion, after having dropped out in Mombasa last year. So can Tadesse win again?

"I don't know, but I will try," he said with classic African modesty.

It was his only victory in 11 global head-to-heads with Bekele, who does not arrive until late tonight, but his management team will take him to see Tadesse's picture first thing tomorrow morning.

When Bekele's manager, Jos Hermens, told him about Tadesse's vast image, it stoked his desire for revenge. "This has just motivated him even more to regain his title," said Hermens. His Dutch colleague, Valentijn Trouw, said last night: "We plan to take Kenenisa to show him the poster. Little things like that can make a big impact."

If Bekele needs further motivation, that will arrive in the shape of his wife, Ethiopian film star Dannawit Gebregziabher. "What man wants to lose in front of his wife?" asked Trouw. "And it's the first time she will have seen him run."

Like many title contenders pouring into Edinburgh, Tadesse is from a nation that did not exist when cross country was first contested over the rugged slopes of Arthur's Seat. Young, emerging nations will dominate Sunday's 36th IAAF World Championships at Holyrood.

So strong are Kenya, and their Rift Valley neighbours, that the highest aspiration of Great Britain's trial winner, Tom Humphries, and of Scottish rival Andrew Lemoncello, is "to be first European". That admission means they are beaten before the gun. Paula Radcliffe and Sonia O'Sullivan have won recent world titles, demonstrating that European women can beat the best Africans, but that's several steps too far for European men.

Statistics are daunting and compelling: in the 20 years to 2007, African-born athletes won all but four of a possible 63 individual medals in the main senior men's race. Of the possible 63 team medals, African nations have won 50.

That this is the weakest men's and women's squad Britain has ever fielded is eloquent testimony to the priority cross country now has for UK endurance athletes.

Radcliffe and Mara Yamauchi would have made the GB women's team medal contenders, but they're pre-selected for Beijing and focusing on that. However, the argument that it's Olympic year does not apply to Africans.

The battle between the hottest Beijing medal hopes of Eritrea and Ethiopia: Tadesse v Bekele, is the most eagerly anticipated of the weekend.

This is a match which transcends Scotland v England at football. Hundreds of Eritreans from all over Britain are heading for the capital. Many came to the UK during the bloody 31-year war with Ethiopia, which led to independence in 1993. It is a measure of how sport unites that groups of rival fans danced and chanted in harmony, cheering their heroes when the pair competed there this year and last.

However, it would be foolish to consider this a two-horse race. Kenyans Eliud Kipchoge and Joseph Ebuya know this course. So does Ugandan Commonwealth 10,000m champion Boniface Kiprop.

Long before penning such classics as Kidnapped or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson was lamenting the demise of cross country in the capital. In the Edinburgh University magazine of 1871, he wrote: "No more does the merry medical student run eagerly in the clear wintry morning up the rugged sides of Arthur's Seat."

The "Six-foot Club" (so-called because it was the height which members needed to be to hurdle gates and fences) organised a one-mile steeplechase on the outskirts of Edinburgh in 1828.

That was the year that Burke was fingered by Hare, and was hanged at the Tolbooth. Eritrea, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia, and Tanzania did not exist then, but their athletes will execute European hopes without mercy this weekend.