Dreaded Lurgi ends Rio hopes | A Column By Len Johnson
Forty years after going to my first Olympic Games I have had to reluctantly accept that I have no chance of making the team for Rio 2016.
I arrived in Sydney on Thursday, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and thinking I...
A Column By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Being a selector is often a thankless task – literally, in the sense that not many of those selected ever think to say ‘thank you’, and, figuratively, in the sense that it is bloody hard work.
So perhaps it is fitting that the...
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...
How do you set an Australian record when 15 athletes – yourself, and the previous record-holder, included – have a superior legal performance.
Simple, as it turns out. You just put a timer at the 100-yard point of a 100 metres race.
That’s what happened in the New South Wales state...
Ah, Oslo! Remember those Scandinavia nights. Warm but rarely hot. Calm conditions. Great tradition of middle and long-distance track running.
It’s been quite the year for records. World records, area records, national records going down like ninepins.
It’s possible that without much ‘normal’ athletics happening, record-breaking creates even bigger headlines. Setting up a night of records, as happened when Joshua Cheptegei and Letesenbet Gidey broke the men’s 10,000 and women’s...
Actually, it should have taught me a whole heap of things, starting with: “Why am I still doing this,” but I’m going to dissociate from that question straight away.
Disocciation is actually a significant mental condition (see footnote), and I wouldn’t want to make light of it. I’m talking about...
Barely a minute after the start of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games women’s 400 metres, Cathy Freeman was sitting in a crumpled heap on the track.
This was scarcely the pose you would expect of a gold medallist, but it was all Freeman had left after defying one of the...
Prior to the World Cross Country Championship in Bathurst, RT will unveil a comprehensive, 10-part series, composed by Len Johnson, that delves into the historical narrative of Australia’s participation in World XC.
Part 7 of 10 – Written by Len Johnson
On this occasion, we’re talking about the 1990s, or that...
A couple of years back this writer commented on a couple of precocious performers by name of Armand – then, as now, more commonly known as ‘Mondo’ – Duplantis and Jakob Ingebrigsten.
Around the same time another supremely gifted youngster, Selemon Barega, came out of nowhere to become the fourth-fastest...
