A column by Len Johnson
Towards the end of the Melbourne’s Maurie Plant Classic meeting last weekend a longtime media colleague asked where I would rank the meeting against previous Melbourne classics.
“It’s up there,” I replied. A simple answer to a complex question. You can rank athletics meetings on many different...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Two things surprised me at my first Commonwealth Games as a journalist in Auckland in 1990.
The first, Andrew Lloyd’s victory in an amazing 5000 metres race, still surprises me to this day. I don’t know if ‘Lloydie’ still sometimes wonders if it...
Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Whenever my gaze is drawn to what, in the circumstances, might be called the ‘wrong’ side of our microwave, I find John Stanley, Chris Wardlaw and Dave Fitzsimons looking back at me.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the images of these three distinguished Australian distance runners of the 1970-80s...
First, let’s have the good news. And, yes, even in these bad times there is still some good news.
Five Australian athletes – world champion javelinist Kelsey-Lee Barber, walkers Dane Bird-Smith and Jemima Montag, and runners Jessica Hull and Stewart McSweyn – have been nominated to the team for next...
It was once said of the architect Christopher Wren, “if you seek his monument, look around.” Wren’s monuments were the buildings he designed.
Similarly, you could say of Bill Baillie, who died on Christmas Day, aged 84, “if you want to know what sort of runner he was, ask around.”
Baillie...
Ghost Who Runs - Fast! | A Column by Len Johnson
Hunched of shoulder, stooped of frame, Ibrahim Jeilan’s running style resembles nothing more than a question mark.
If that is so, then the question Jeilan poses is this: can the last man to defeat Mo Farah for a global 5000...
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 look at the latest breaking 2 project.
When it comes to second chances, you can pick your won cliché. Some old sayings take the glass-half-full perspective; others look on the gloomier, glass-half-empty side.
“A soufflé doesn’t rise twice,” former Australian prime minister Paul Keating observed scathingly of a political opponent...
Just as you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; Nina Kennedy didn’t need a magazine to tell her she was the number one female pole vaulter in the world last year.
A Column By Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe
Rankings ‘bang’ pre-empts Nitro
I’m as gung-ho for Nitro as the next bro’, but we should not become so bedazzled by the Big Bang Theory of Australian athletics as to ignore minor, but just as spectacular, explosions along the way.
Reference the annual merit...
