A top British decathlete claims the discipline is being “continuously sidelined” after being omitted from the UK Athletics Championships schedule.

“There’s no clarity and no explanation to why we’ve been so pushed aside,” Harry Kendall, 26, told BBC Radio Kent.

UK Athletics (UKA) said integrating the timetables for combined events at its championships in 2021 and 2022 had “proved unsustainable”.

As a result, the decision had been taken to revert to holding the decathlon and heptathlon at the England Athletics Championships instead.

A UKA spokesperson said the body had the long-term aim of developing “a more established combined events ‘festival’ experience in future years” and increasing entry numbers.

In the past, the likes of Daley Thompson, Dean Macey, Denise Lewis, Jessica Ennis-Hill and Katarina Johnson-Thompson have delivered major British success on the international stage in decathlon and heptathlon events, becoming crowd-pulling figures.

Multi-discipline events were also not part of the main programme at the most recent UK Athletics Indoor Championships, in Birmingham in February, and were held the following weekend as part of the Birmingham World Indoor Tour Final.

Instead of being staged in Manchester on the weekend of 8-9 July, the heptathlon and decathlon will now be incorporated into the England Athletics Senior and Para Championships in Chelmsford on 22-23 July.

“Until a couple of weeks ago we had no idea that was going on at all,” added Kendall, who represented England in decathlon at the Commonwealth Games last year.

“We’re getting no information on why our events are being cancelled or shunned or just not spoken about.

“It’s like we’re not a consideration. It does seem like we’re just a complete afterthought. If we had some valid reasoning as to why this is happening, then it’d be slightly more manageable.”

UKA said its Combined Events Championships had, until recently, been held in tandem with the England Championships but that it had piloted staging them at the UK Championships in 2021 and 2022.

However, timetabling issues meant they would not be included in Manchester this year.

“Unfortunately, the challenge of merging the respective competition timetables proved unsustainable with extended days impacting negatively on athletes, officials and spectator experience,” a UKA spokesperson said.

“In addition, the overall UK Championships also incorporates the major championship trials for each year, which adds a further layer of timetable complexity to ensure a fair competition schedule for all athletes.

“Taking into account all these factors with the (UKA) advisory panel it was agreed to revert to the previous format of integration with the England Championships.”

However, Kendall queried that rationale: “The fact is, the England Championships, which we’re now being incorporated with, has a much busier timetable than the [UK] Championships that we’re not a part of, so I don’t believe that can be the reason why.”

British decathletes ‘get no respect’

Kendall, of Tonbridge Athletics Club, believes the heptathlon and decathlon both deserve a higher profile within the UK Athletics programme.

“There’s a bit of a narrative going on that we don’t have the quality at the moment in combined events to warrant enough exposure,” he said.

“I actually think that – especially this year – it’s pretty false.

“In the decathlon we’ve got a fair few people over around 7,500 points. There’s a load of boys out in America doing really good jobs at the moment in the collegiate system and they’re getting great scores.

“In the UK you’ve got myself, Lewis Church and Elliot Thompson putting up big scores.

“But we get no respect for it. On the women’s side the quality is even higher.

“Hopefully we can keep working on making a bit more of a name for ourselves and incorporate ourselves back into sort of the main British Athletics line of thinking.”

Kendall, who lives in Crowborough in East Sussex but trains in Kent, sees Johnson-Thompson, the 2019 world heptathlon champion, as a “flagship performer” for British Athletics for the past decade.

However, he thinks other heptathletes will miss out on the exposure of competing in front of a big crowd in Manchester next month.

“When I was competing in Birmingham in the Commonwealth Games last year, the crowd were behind me so much. I’ve never heard anything like it,” Kendall said.

“There’s seven heptathletes on the British Athletics funding programme, be that on Olympic level, podium level or UK Futures funding.

“At the (UK) Championships potentially you could have over half the people in that field on British Athletics funding and for that not to be included in the main championships (in Manchester) is a little bit wrong for them, because they’re being supported by the governing body.”