RT's lead columnist, Len Johnson is reporting from the Gold Coast during the games for Runner's Tribe and the IAAF.
So hard to walk away - A column by Len Johnson
It’s getting harder and harder to walk away these days – either on a temporary basis or into permanent retirement.
Sally...
What a week.
First cricket, and a ball-tampering scandal which has now resulted in the Australian captain, vice-captain and a hapless junior player facing suspensions and the coach resigning. Second, amidst all the cricket turmoil, came the raising by a senior government minister of the prospect – quickly shut down,...
What is the best performance by an Australian team in a world distance running championship?
Close, but no cigar, if you said the bronze medals won by Australian women’s teams in the short race at the 2006 world cross-country championships and at the 2008 world cross-country championship (by which stage,...
Ours is a sport of precision.
Following wind 2.00 metres per second – everything hunky-dory: 2.01 m/s – a different story. Run a 1:59:59 marathon on a course measuring 42.195km and you’re a barrier-breaking hero. If the course comes in at 42.194km, it just didn’t happen.
Mostly precision is a good...
If one word defined the running career of Roger Gilbert Bannister, it would have to be the number ‘three’.
Words came before it in Norris McWhirter’s ‘spontaneous’, rehearsed-in-the-bathtub-the-night-before, announcement of the result of the mile in the Oxford v AAA meeting on 6 May, 1954. Words followed, too, but they...
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...
