I never had a record-breaking career, but early in my record-buying career I acquired a disc recorded by British comedian, Peter Sellers.
One track tells the tale of a pre-teen pop music phenomenon whose 15 minutes of fame had clearly come and was going fast. Our popster, despairing he hasn’t had a chart-topper for all of three weeks, ends the track I’m So Ashamed with a sobbing plea: “Please Buy This Record.”
It’s not a bad metaphor for sport in 2020. The devastating impact of Covid19 was felt early and has endured throughout. By the end of March the Tokyo Olympic Games had been postponed. We are assured that the Games will go ahead same time next year, yet we were assured they would go ahead this year until they didn’t.
Standing on the outside, looking in
The ACT Cross-Country Club grew organically from a handful of runners gathering for cross-country races in 1957 to an entity which nurtured and managed distance running in Australia’s capital city. Nurtured because club members planted the seeds, managed because, in an early example of...
Cargo bolt comes up the river: A Column By Len Johnson
Cargo cult mentality refers to a belief by some Melanesian islanders that all their world issues would be resolved by the landing of an airplane carrying supplies and goods.
This belief grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries and...
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
The years 2020 and 2021 have successively been “a year like no other” (even if 2021 seemed depressingly like 2020).
I don’t know about a year like no other, but when it comes to Australia and the Track & Field News annual rankings, 2021 was certainly a year...
Started with Bathurst, finished with Melbourne. World cross-country champions crowned; world track and field champions acclaimed at Lakeside Stadium.
Australia lost one of its athletics’ greats with the death of Rick Mitchell on 30 May. A nation our size doesn’t produce many Olympic gold medallists, even fewer on the male side of the gender balance. And still fewer in individual track events. With a silver medal in the 400 metres in Moscow in 1980, Mitchell is our most recent male Olympic medallist in an individual track event. Before ‘Mitch’, it’s right back to 1968 and Ralph Doubell with his gold medal in the 800 metres in Mexico City.
We’ve gone off daylight saving time. We’ve signed off on the national championships and the Brisbane Track Classic. The Stawell Gift is imminent as I write this. The northern hemisphere track season is just getting going.
That all adds up to just one thing. It’s time for cross-country. Time to...
Universality. In the long and endless deliberations about the new qualification system for Olympic Games and world championships, who knew about the universality clause.
Prior to the World Cross Country Championship in Bathurst, RT will unveil a comprehensive, 10-part series, composed by Len Johnson, that delves into the historical narrative of Australia’s participation in World XC.
Part 7 of 10 – Written by Len Johnson
On this occasion, we’re talking about the 1990s, or that...
