In October, 2018, Jack Rayner hit a sweet spot.
Running in the inaugural Commonwealth half-marathon championships (has there been another ne: I’m not sure), Rayner went boldly with the pace set by a pack of Ugandan and Kenyan runners all bringing much more impressive personal bests to the starting line than his modest 63:19.
It’s not often that runners turn their attention to the shot put, but the career of Valerie Adams demands our attention.
During 2021 post-Tokyo, the phone rang when we were in Darwin, at dinner with friends with whom we had just completed a five-day hike on the West Arnhem Land escarpment. John Landy was eager to talk about Peter Bol and the Olympic 800 metres final.
At this time, John was...
At the World Indoor Tour meeting in Birmingham, Catriona Bisset chased home Keely Hodgkinson in the 800 metres, running 1:59.46. That sliced a massive 2.39 seconds off the previous Australian record which was set by Tamsyn Manou in the heats at the world indoor championships in Valencia. Manou went on to win the gold medal in the final.
Is it just me, or is the pace of indoor record breaking picking up.
Jakob Ingebrigtsen took almost half-a-second off the men’s world indoor record in Lievin, France on Thursday night, reducing it to 3:30.60, a time which is still extremely handy outdoors. But we’re not talking world records here,...
The past couple of years of Australian women’s 800 has been all about Catriona Bisset. Bisset broke through the two-minute barrier in 2019, before breaking Charlene Rendina’s long-standing national record – set in 1976 - in London that same year.
A column by Len Johnson
Back in the day, Ireland’s Eamonn Coghlan was known as Chairman of the Boards, a nickname which acknowledged his mastery of indoor track racing.
Good enough outdoors to have won the gold medal over 5000 metres at the first world championships in Helsinki in 1983 and...
High heat and oppressive humidity have hung around Melbourne through January like the last, unwanted guest at a New Year’s Eve party.
With most of Australia gripped in a heatwave, how’re you going to cool down. How else than by talking cross-country.
We’re coming up to the ‘one year to go’ date for the twice-postponed World Cross-Country Championships, now set down for 18 February, 2023. I would have said “settled on” but when Olympic Games and world championships have been postponed during these crazy times, all schedules are aspirational.
When this column drew the curtain on 2021 with a look at the annual Track & Field News rankings, I commented it had been a notably strong year for Australian athletes. I hadn’t realised how strong until former Athletics Australia president Terry Dwyer drew my attention to the magazine’s analysis of the rankings.