Mention cold calls to any relatively old-time journalist and it’s just as likely beads of perspiration will break out spontaneously on their forehead.
Cold calls – the phone calls you make when you’re not entirely sure of the likely outcome, but there’s a fair chance it won’t be good –...
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...
As we ‘progress’ ever further into this strange time of lockdown, increasingly the past is becoming our new future.
Denied competition to get enthusiastic about we dig ever deeper into nostalgia. And the good thing about nostalgia is that – despite its not being as good as it used to...
Given the painfully slow historic process of admitting that women were capable of running long distances, would it surprise you to learn that women led the adoption of annual Australian cross-country championships.
Yes, it would, I’m presuming you replied. It certainly came as a shock to me. Yet, in 1960,...
The longer the Covid-19 pandemic takes to work its way around the world, the further we retreat into the confines of our own homes.
Once the earth was our limit (unless you’ve stumped up half a million for a voyage to Mars via Elon Musk). Now, life is restricted to...
Period of Adjustment, the debut feature film for director George Roy Hill, was based on the Tennessee Williams stage play of the same name about two married couples experiencing relationship problems.
A period of adjustment is what is faced by athletics – all sport, in fact – in adapting to...
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...
