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...
Inevitable as it was, the decision by World Athletics to postpone the world indoor championships by 12 months from March, 2020 to March, 2021, has created a logistical problem for the world cross-country championships in Bathurst in 2021.
The outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan, and its potential spread, was an...
The first time I encountered Maurie Plant was at the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games. I heard Maurie before I saw him (a not uncommon occurrence over the next 43 years).
I was on the concourse just inside the ticket entrance, Maurie was high above on the entry ramp to the...
Almost 68 years ago, an athlete was plucked from obscurity to represent Australia in the marathon at the Helsinki 1952 Olympic Games.
Amazing. More amazing still was the fact that the athlete in question, Claude Smeal, was serving with the Australian armed forces in the Korean war. A national-class marathoner,...
Traveling in a fried-out Kombi
On a hippie trail, head full of zombie
- Down Under, Men at Work, 1981
What do you do when you're trekking around and in need of transport?
Well, if it’s the 1970s and you are Australians in Europe, you get yourself a Kombi van. Many young Aussies...
