For quite a few years now, Athletics Australia’s selection policies have offered the selectors wide discretionary powers in considering the third place in any event.
For almost all that time, many have advocated the selectors make more use of the discretionary clauses. Now, in picking the Gold Coast 2018 team,...
It took just one minute 45.71 seconds for Joseph Deng to throw a hand grenade into considerations of the three men to represent Australia in the 800 metres at the Gold Coast 2018 Commonwealth Games.
Oh, and let’s not forget the aiding and abetting party to this chaos: I refer,...
A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe
No sooner had all us ‘experts’ agreed on one thing – these are not the conditions for a good 5000 – than the Australian championships and Commonwealth Games selection trials delivered the best Australian in-depth 5000 in history.
Never before had three Australians...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Two things surprised me at my first Commonwealth Games as a journalist in Auckland in 1990.
The first, Andrew Lloyd’s victory in an amazing 5000 metres race, still surprises me to this day. I don’t know if ‘Lloydie’ still sometimes wonders if it...
A Column By Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe
The cover of Track & Field News’s December 2017 edition depicts Mutaz Essa Barshim standing on the high jump mat at Zurich’s Weltklasse (and Diamond League final) meeting pointing triumphantly over the bar and out at the reader.
On a cover headed, “Our...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Most years a runners’ panel is part of Falls Creek Running Week. It was again this year, featuring rising middle-distance star Georgia Griffith, Olympic and world championship distance representative Dave McNeill and London 2017 marathoner Brad Milosevic.
Chris Wardlaw was the MC. Inevitably,...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
And the people passing by, stare in wild wonder . . .*
My 2017 night of staring in wild wonder was 8 August: the venue, London Olympic Stadium.
The race is the men’s 800 metres final. Pierre-Ambroise Bosse is in the field. He is...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
What if Australia hosts a Commonwealth Games and we don’t win. Not across all the sports. Not in athletics, either.
Well, it can’t be ‘the blackest day in Australian sport’. That moniker has already been gifted – if that’s the right word –...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
One year ends and another begins, just as it has for the past 40 years, at Falls Creek.
What were once training camps have now become family holidays, but otherwise little has changed since my first visit here in 1978-79. Actually, lots of...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Medals are not easy to get at world championships. Australia had to wait till the ninth day of the world championships to get an athlete to the medal ceremony, but when one medal finally arrived, like London’s famous red buses, another was...
