Sometimes it seemed there was a better field watching the men’s world championships 1500 metres final than there was running it.
Jakob Ingebrigtsen couldn’t run himself into fitness – not 1500 fitness, anyway; he may still win his third straight 5000 gold – in time. Out he went in the...
One of the stranger things about the world championships is waiting for them to start. There is a hell of a build up and then, two weeks or so out from opening day, we go into a state of suspended animation.
A column by Len Johnson
Few runners kept up with Emil Zatopek during his brilliant career. Even fewer got past the Czechoslovakian champion. And of those who did, hardly any stayed ahead of ‘Zato’ all the way to the line.
If it was hard enough catching up with Zatopek through his...
Universality. In the long and endless deliberations about the new qualification system for Olympic Games and world championships, who knew about the universality clause.
A legacy event that didn’t deliver a legacy. On life support after five years. A course you couldn’t run fast on.
Sydney staged Australia’s first marathon back in 1909. The city hosted an Olympic marathon in the year 2000. The course was reckoned to be “a beauty,” crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge – for which the descriptor ‘iconic’ is, for a rare occasion, appropriate - from the start in North Sydney, circling the lush Centennial Parklands before making its way westwards to Homebush and the finish inside Stadium Australia.
Someone recently had the temerity to suggest that this column lives too often in the past.
We could respond that there’s a lot more history in the past than there is in the present. And who knows the future anyway? But fair comment we replied and since then have tried to avoid the past as much as possible.
It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas. Black Friday sales – the shopping confection which serves as the sprint race to the Christmas F1 Grand Prix – out of the way, things winding down.
Of course, there’s always a bit of athletics to December. But this week, suddenly...
A column by Len Johnson - 23/07/21
The Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games haven’t even started and Australia is dominating.
Some hours before the Opening Ceremony, as this is written, Australia is already up and about. In women’s football, goals to Tameka Yallop and the talismanic Sam Kerr took the Matildas to...
Zurich’s fabled Weltklasse meeting has often been dubbed “the Olympics in one day.”
It’s a fair call. Usually staged within a week of the conclusion of the year’s major championships – Olympic, world or European – Zurich re-packages the just concluded championship as three hours’ non-stop action. The champions can...
A Column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe
There wasn’t much reason to remember the 1970s – apart from the fact that we could. It was the decade we regained our memories. It followed the ‘60s and, as everyone knows, if you can remember the ‘60s, you probably weren’t there.
Athletically,...
