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BUCS (British Universities & Colleges Sport) events are the highlight, the feature, the creme de la creme of higher education sport! There are 3 BUCS events for us: BUCS cross country (start of February), BUCS indoors (13-15th of February), and BUCS outdoors (end of April/start of May.)

BUCS cross country

BUCS cross country is the weekend with the club which everyone raves about! Hosted in a different city each year, up to 50 CUAC athletes of all abilities enter. With women's and men's Long and Short courses, the racing is spicy and the support is electric. After the race, there's a notorious club night for all the competitors, and it's here that legends are born...

In 2025, we hosted BUCS cross country at Cardiff! We had a record number of athletes racing, and it was a great success for the club in both hosting and racing aspects, with our women's short course team finishing 8th, our men's short course and women's long course teams both finishing 13th, and our men's long course team finishing 16th. Highlights included Iris Courtney finishing 18th in the women's short race, and Georgia Palmer finishing 25th in the women's long race.

2023 was a particularly strong year, with the women's team finishing 13th and the men's team 4th, the highest position in the club's history.

BUCS Indoors

It is always a fantastic atmosphere in the cauldron of noise at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield. Every year, a team of CUACletes make the long journey up to take part in the 3-day indoor track and field championships. For 2026, the provisional date for BUCS indoors is the 13th-15th of February, but this is subject to change due to the clash with the UK Athletics Indoor Championships 2026. The location of BUCS indoors is also not confirmed for 2026 due to this clash.

2025 was a great year with stand-out performances from Grace Morgan, who broke her own club record and placed 4th in the Women's 60m hurdles, Nahbi Odeh who placed 5th in the Men's Triple Jump final, our women's 4x200m team who finished 5th with a new club record, and Tom White who came away with gold in the mascot race.

2022 was a very strong year for the club, taking a 25 person team and coming away with 3 medals! Rory Howorth brought us a bronze in the mascot race, Che Richards a silver in the long jump and James Heneghan became the BUCS indoor 1500m champion.

BUCS Outdoors

BUCS outdoors is another 3-day track and field championship, where CUACletes travel to compete in the very competetive pinnacle of university athletics.

2025 BUCS outdoors was hosted at Manchester, and the university competition season was ended with a very respectable 12th place in overall team scores. Great performances included Lauren Hill coming 8th in the Women's Triple Jump final, and our uni record-breaking women's 4x100m team, who came home with silver medals.

2022 outdoors was again very strong, with BUCS athletics being hosted at Chelmsford. The club came away with a long jump gold medal won by Che Richards and an ambulant long jump medal by Nils Rehm.

Qualifying performances

For BUCS track and field each university can in general only take two athletes per event, and the team is selected by the committee based on recent performances. Some events also have an additional minimum standard set by BUCS. The table below shows the PBs of the athletes that were selected for the BUCS teams in 2022.

(*) Minimum performance standards set out by BUCS