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,...
You don’t have to dive deep into Australian world cross-country history to find yourself immersed in a stream of Steve Moneghetti statistics. From his first appearance in 1985 to his last in 2004, Moneghetti was the dominant force in our men’s teams.
Had the story of Australian participation been written...
A strange thing happened when Track & Field News published its annual rankings for 1990. The number one in the men’s 1500 metres had never ranked in the top-10 before. Even more strongly, neither had number two; nor, for that matter, had number three.
Performance governs the rankings: Noureddine Morceli,...
Can it really be just a few months (spoiler: yes, it can) since many of us were aghast at World Athletics’ decision to trim formats to fit Diamond League meetings into a 90-minute television window.
In those pre-coronavirus days, the decision to defenestrate some beloved events – the 5000 metres,...
