There have been exciting advances on the Australian indoor all-time list in recent weeks. A number of athletes – including Stewart McSweyn, Morgan McDonald, Ollie Hoare and Jessica Hull – have produced performances putting them among the top Australians ever.
McDonald ran 7:42.76 for 3000 metres at New York’s famous...
A Column By Len Johnson
In announcing her retirement this week, Alana Boyd got the timing just right.
Timing is everything in Boyd’s event, the pole vault. It is no good having the height before the crossbar, no good having it after. For a clearance, you must have the height at...
Some blokes take the conventional path to number one in Track & Field News’s prestigious annual rankings.
For over 70 years now the US magazine self-styled, and rightly known as, The Bible of the Sport has assessed athletes against three criteria – honours won; win-loss record; and, sequence of marks...
By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
The IAAF has shelved its plan to base qualification for the Doha 2019 world championships on its new rankings system.
Instead, the rankings, which IAAF president Sebastian Coe acknowledged to be “a complex system”, will be trialled through 2019 so that athletes and federations can...
Not even the internet had heard of teenage Australian sprinter Jake Doran before he ran 10.15 for 100 metres in Finland last Sunday (1 July).
Even once Doran had run that time – an Australian U20 record, second-fastest in the world this year by an U20 eligible athlete my internet...
Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
One of the beneficiaries of the decision to compete in Moscow was Rob de Castella, who made his first of four Olympic teams in the marathon.
‘Deek’ finished tenth in the marathon in Moscow, his first experience of the surging sort of running required to win...
A Column By Len Johnson
When Linden Hall ran 4:01.78 for 1500 metres at the Prefontaine Classic last weekend, she leapt to third place on the Oceania all-time list.
Hall’s fabulous performance was also good enough for third all-time Australian and third all-time Victorian.
Fair enough, you might reckon. The opposite of...
A column by Len Johnson
My good friend Brian Lenton has asked me to do a column on his latest book: Thredbo, 50 Years Running, 1968-2017.
By way of disclaimer, this is as much of a disclaimer as you are going to get. As Brian once told me in another context:...
A column by Len Johnson
This columnist has always been a big fan of the Rampaging Roy Slaven and H.G. Nelson observation that “too much sport is barely enough”.
But, I wonder, what about when five of the world’s biggest marathons – Berlin, London, Chicago, Boston and New York – are...
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...
