So, with support from World Athletics and the Victorian government, the Melbourne Track Classic has been picked up, dusted off and will be presented at Lakeside Stadium on 23 February as the Maurie Plant Meet (MPM), a World Athletics Continental Gold meeting.
Forty years ago, at the first world championships in Helsinki, there was little doubt which athlete was “the face of the championships.”
Thirty-six years after Dave Smith and Tim Erickson should have been Olympic teammates, their sons Dane Bird-Smith and Chris Erickson will be.
Bird-Smith and Chris Erickson have long since joined their fathers in representing their country in international competition, but Rio 2016 will mark their first appearance as Olympic teammates.
Bird-Smith,...
The King Strikes Back: A Column By Len Johnson
Recently, I caught up with a film I had missed first, second, third and all subsequent times round – ‘The Madness of King George.’
‘George’ is King George III of England who apparently went ‘mad’ during his reign, though his symptoms of...
A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe
Could it be that the year’s best performance in the marathon came in the equivalent of a ‘beer mile’?
Well, it could just be. That’s if you’re prepared to accord Nike’s Breaking 2 project at least as much credibility as an event in...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
I’m not really a road trip sort of bloke. Unlike Willy Nelson, I can wait to get on the road again.
The then almost-obligatory campervan trek around Europe 40 years ago excepted, I’ve rarely travelled, by road, more than one day at a...
When did Australia first compete in the world cross-country championships.
If you answered: “Rabat, 1975,” you’d be right. Sort of. Largely. But you’d also be wrong. Sort of. Technically, but not over-technically.
Five years before our intrepid men and women trekked to Morocco, two Australians had already competed in a ‘world’...
One of the endearingly frustrating things about athletics is its tendency for misplaced anxieties.
One person’s imminent disaster is another’s ho-hum moment, I know, but we all too easily get into a tizz about things that aren’t as bad as we think whilst overlooking crises about to envelop us.
Witness, say,...
The Stawell Gift may have had 138 previous runnings, but like most other major sporting events, it couldn’t put one foot in front of the other during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic.
The 120-meter handicap sprint, run on a manicured grass track at Stawell’s Central Park, has launched a million stories...
how then to assess athletics in 2021. There were good things and bad things to be sure and good and bad monarchs still run the sport. But was 2021 a good year, a bad year, or a first taste of some new normal.
