If you’ve been paying the slightest attention to this column over the years, you have probably worked out that I’m a big fan of the annual Track & Field News rankings.
There’s lots of rankings lists going round now – imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, and all that...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Sometimes our sport seems to flirt with danger, recklessly loading the gun, pointing it floorwards, then professing surprise that it has shot itself in the sport.
It seemed that day three of the world championships might be such a time. Just three real...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Only one event has had its Gold Coast 2018 trial and already selectors and athletes are in a quandary.
Actually, make that two quandaries if we count the news that Australia may be restricted to a quota of 73 athletes in the able-bodied...
A Column By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Athletics is a broad church – unlike the Liberal Party, which only thinks it is.
As Exhibit A, consider the Lausanne Diamond League meeting. Not only did we have athletes of all shapes and sizes competing in all disciplines from Olympic shot put...
By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Herb Elliott didn’t lose too often.
Never, in his junior and senior career over his specialty, 1500 metres and the mile. There might have been a mile in his schoolboy days at Perth’s Aquinas College he lost to a schoolmate three years his senior. But...
Written by Len Johnson
Not many people could entitle an autobiography My Life in Athletics as appropriately as did Mel Watman in 2018. Even fewer could do so without the slightest hint of pretentiousness and in the complete absence of outstanding athletic achievement.
Yet Mel Watman, sometime club steeplechaser and mid-pack...
The big picture numbers were more stable too. Australia got three medals in Tokyo – Nicola Olyslagers silver in the high jump, Moloney and Barber bronzes in the decathlon and javelin. It was three again in Eugene only this time Patterson and Barber contributed gold with Kennedy getting a bronze.
Given the painfully slow historic process of admitting that women were capable of running long distances, would it surprise you to learn that women led the adoption of annual Australian cross-country championships.
Yes, it would, I’m presuming you replied. It certainly came as a shock to me. Yet, in 1960,...
A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe
Next year’s world championships in Doha will feature another Breaking 2 event.
Not two hours this time, but two days. To ameliorate the brutally hot conditions of a Persian Gulf summer, the two marathons will start at midnight.
OK, that’s actually not two separate...
Rio 2016, have you met Melbourne 1956?
A Column By Len Johnson
“Your projects have been changed several times. Your sites, even including the main stadium, have been changed several times . . . you are contemplating changing the rowing to a site I have never heard of.
“There seems to...
