If you asked an Australian track and field fan to nominate the three best multi-day meetings held in this country, I guess there would be near-unanimous agreement on the top two – the Melbourne 1956 Olympic Games and Sydney 2000.
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
The most unexpected of many coincidences and surprises surrounding the launch of
The Landy Era back in 2009 was the appearance of Billy Mills.
My book had already enjoyed the benefit of several twists of good fate, chiefly in being
ready for launch at the...
A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe
One of the great features of the build-up to the Zatopek 10,000 used to be seeing the main contenders showing their form with a race, maybe even two races, over 5000 metres.
Let’s commemorate two great distance runners by calling it the Pre-Zatopek...
What is the best performance by an Australian team in a world distance running championship?
Close, but no cigar, if you said the bronze medals won by Australian women’s teams in the short race at the 2006 world cross-country championships and at the 2008 world cross-country championship (by which stage,...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
One year ends and another begins, just as it has for the past 40 years, at Falls Creek.
What were once training camps have now become family holidays, but otherwise little has changed since my first visit here in 1978-79. Actually, lots of...
Once upon a time Australians knew stuff-all about the World Cup and cared even less.
And then, we made the finals. A drawn-out group stage, followed by a drawn-out final against South Korea – tied 2-2 on aggregate after matches in Sydney and Seoul, followed by a play-off in Hong...
I checked the impression that 2021 has been a good year for Australian records by reviewing the pace of national record-breaking in recent years. The figures seem to confirm the impression: Eight athletes set a total of 14 Australian records in 2021, a higher figure for both number of record-breakers and number of records than for any of the previous three years.
Running in the opening Diamond League meeting of Olympic year in Xiamen somebody named Gudaf Tsegay won in 3:50.30, suggesting the reigning 10,000 metres world champion and 5000 world record holder may also be capable of giving dual Olympic champion Faith Kipyegon – and anyone else who emerges in the interim - a run for her money in Paris.
When non-residents characterise Canberra as “the bush capital”, they’re usually evoking a range of emotions, most of them hostile. Contempt for the political and bureaucratic classes sits at the extreme end of that range with scorn, disparagement and bemused indifference following in descending order of malevolence.
Occasionally, though, the descriptor...
A Column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Cross-country: something for everybody. Just step outside and run.
Invented by cave-dwellers fleeing mastodons, cross-country simply involves running as fast as you can – faster than a pre-historic predator, in any case – for as long as you can, over whatever terrain confronts...
