“What’s wrong with this picture?,” asks Van Morrison in the song of the same title. “There’s something I’m not seeing here.”
Repeating the question, Morrison observes that what’s wrong (is) “something that’s not exactly clear.”
As the vision streamed in from Gateshead last Monday morning, it was all too clear what...
Said Aouita’s time in the early to mid-2000s as Australia’s national distance coach was controversial, to say the least. He charmed some, alarmed others – the Venn diagram of these two groups significantly overlapping – but life while he was in the position was always interesting.
I can’t remember whether Ingrid Kristiansen called me, or I called her.
But there was a phone call in March, 1988, the week before the women’s world 15km road race championship in Adelaide. Kristiansen was training at Falls Creek in preparation for a tilt at two world titles within six...
Lasse Viren, the fabulous Finn who won consecutive Olympic track 5000/10,000 doubles – once suggested that elastic tapes must be used to measure the last three or four miles of the marathon.
One night back in the late-1970s, the announcer at Melbourne’s Olympic Park finally gave vent to his exasperation at the cat-and-mouse battle between two of Australia’s leading distance athletes on the track below for the Victorian men’s 5000 metres title.
“Doesn’t anyone want to win this race,” he cried.
I couldn’t...
A column by Len Johnson reporting from the Gold Coast
Championship marathons seem to attract more than their fair share of brutal weather.
Put on any championship, pick any day for the marathons and it’s a better than even-money bet that the day will dawn warm and sunny. Indeed, that it...
Let’s keep this on the record, shall we.
Having considered recently how much credibility should be given to some of the world records set this year (Please Buy This Record, RT 18 October), let’s look this time at the quantity of records set by Australian duo Jessica Hull and Stewart McSweyn.
Hull took down Benita Willis’s national record for 5000 metres when she ran 14:43.80 in Monaco and then Linden Hall’s national mark for 1500 with a 4:00.42 in Berlin. Finally, she ran 8:36.03 for 3000 in Doha to slice a couple of seconds off Willis’s former 3000 record. Earlier in the year, Hull ran 4:04.14 in Boston to take the indoor 1500 record from Melissa Duncan.
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
When Nike announced recently that its ‘window’ for the attempt to run the first sub-two hour marathon was 5-7 May, an intriguing possibility was raised.
The date dead-centre in the window, 6 May, is the sixty-third anniversary of the breaking of another famous...
Noah Lyles didn’t win his heat of the Olympic 100 metres. He didn’t win his semi-final either. He never led the 100 metres final until the moment his chest touched the line. But he is the Paris 2024 men’s 100 metres Olympic champion. And with victory we can acclaim him the world’s fastest man (until the next global championship).
Is it just me or is Cam Myers channelling Herb Elliott
