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...
Twenty years ago, I ran the Host City Marathon, the selection ‘trial’ race over the Sydney Olympic course.
It was a decision which sits near the top of my ‘why on earth did I do that?’ list. In fact, it was added before the marathon even finished, just past the...
Round about the time the coronavirus pandemic went truly global, and was seen to be ‘a thing’ which might adversely impact the Tokyo Olympic Games, a Japanese government minister lamented that the Games were afflicted with a 40-year-curse.
“It’s a problem that’s happened every 40 years – it’s the cursed...
Last week was a good week for remembering that sayings become clichés because there is more than an element of truth to them.
First as we – we Victorians, especially – endure a winter without cross-country, suddenly, in the last week of July, cross-country was coming at us from all...
Seems like only yesterday we were marking one year to go to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
Now, in an Olympic version of Groundhog Day, here we are celebrating it all over again. It is one year to go to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. Still.
In 12 months, 52 weeks,...
O tempora, o mores - oh what times, oh what customs - declaimed the Roman orator Cicero to his fellow senators in 63 BC, in a speech attacking a political rival. Or, to put it (very) loosely, things couldn’t get much stranger than this.
Oh yes they can. To cite...
Remember when Australia ruled the world at men’s steeple? No: well, I don’t either. In fact, I would never have known of this brief domination had it not been for the coronavirus pandemic.
Until very recently, I had thought that the history of the men’s steeple was pretty much the...
O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is the 2000 Coen Brothers comedy about the adventures – misadventures, mostly – of three escapees from a chain gang on a quest to regain the proceeds of a robbery committed by one of them.
It is a satire loosely based on Homer’s epic Greek...
One day at the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games, I watched on as the American 5000 metres representative, Duncan MacDonald, did a training session.
My billet was a few metro stations beyond the Olympic stadium. A relatively short run took me down to the stadium and Village precinct. I ran there...
Athletics can be one of the most democratic of sports, accessible to both the fastest, highest and strongest and the slowest, lowest and puniest.
Such is true of most sports, of course. Tennis is played both at the sublime Federer-Nadal-Williams level and as hit-and-giggle social doubles. Golf is Tiger Woods,...
