James ‘Jim’ Bailey: 21 July, 1929-31 March, 2020
Jim Bailey, who died in America on 31 March, was a runner of undoubted talent. Yet, despite making an Olympic and a Commonwealth Games team and winning two national titles over 880 yards, Bailey is, and will continue to be, remembered for...
Sugar-coating the pill. Bait and switch. Little white lies.
Life is full of euphemisms for the art of getting us to buy – most often, it is ‘buy’ – a less tasty commodity by implying we are actually being offered something far more palatable.
History is a dry subject; statistics even...
That was pretty quick, wasn’t it? One minute the Olympic Games are full steam ahead, the next they’re punted off into 2021, maybe 2020, sometime in the future anyway.
Quick – and painless, we’re assured. Just as the doctor assures Pink, in Pink Floyd’s The Wall, as he is about...
World cross-country 1981-85: amid extraordinary scenes in Madrid, Robert de Castella takes Australia into the individual top-10.
A year out from Bathurst 2021, Len Johnson continues his look at Australia in the world cross-country championships.
The men’s race at the 1981 world cross-country championships in Madrid finished amid extraordinary scenes as...
Last weekend (Sunday, 8 March), 86,174 spectators at the Melbourne Cricket Ground watched Australia win the final of the women’s cricket T20 World Cup. It was reported as the highest attendance ever for a women’s sporting event in Australia.
Good on them. Got to be happy about that. If you’re...
At Graham Crouch’s memorial some weeks ago, thoughts naturally turned to some of ‘Gruffy’s’ greatest runs.
The memorial was conducted at Hagenauer Reserve, home to Box Hill Athletic Club. As a committed Box Hill member, Crouch ran some of his best races at the track, including a 3:56.7 mile there...
Continuing my meandering paper chase through our world cross-country history, we come to the 1977 and 1979 championships in Dusseldorf and Limerick, respectively. The former saw Australia continue to move up with the debut of three 20-year-olds who would be the nucleus of future teams.
But – whatever happened to the women?
Followers of cross-country are used to seeing young runners make significant debuts. Did someone say Kenenisa Bekele? Or Zola Budd who, like Bekele, was a senior world champion before her 20 th birthday. Bekele, indeed, not only won the short-lived short race in 2001, but did the double a year later, all still three months before turning 20.
Well that didn’t take long, did it?
Tucked away somewhere in all the reportage on Armand Duplantis’s current assault on the men’s pole vault world record was the question of whether he would continue to raise the record one centimetre at a time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QFUh2P9_Bg&t=6s
Now there’s a few things you could say...
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...
Brett Robinson, Jessica Hull and Stewart McSweyn made it a good week for Australian distance running this week, but it’s the sometimes under-rated Robinson who should be singled out.
It was hard not to notice Hull and McSweyn, who did their magic at the Melbourne Track Classic. The meeting may...
