A Column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Crikey. No sooner do we write in defence of Matt Centrowitz’s tactics in the Rio Olympic men’s 1500 metres final than we get an Australian championships replete with races run on what we might now call the Centrowitz-Kipyegon model: slow as a...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Ladies and Gentleman, we present for your entertainment a battle for one of the heavyweight titles of athletics – the world cross-country championships.
In the red corner, the defending champion, a course over 10 kilometers, multiple laps over a flat (and maybe a...
A Column By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
It is entirely fitting that Steve Moneghetti’s induction into the Athletics Australia Hall of Fame should have been announced the week of the world cross-country championships.
Despite his great achievements at the marathon and on the track, it was the world cross-country which...
From Rabat to Kampala
A Colum By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
This Sunday, the Australian teams to contest the world cross-country championships leave for Kampala. It is just on 42 years since Australia first contested the event in Rabat, Morocco, on 16 March, 1975.
Now, 42 might seem a strange anniversary...
A Column By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Being a selector is often a thankless task – literally, in the sense that not many of those selected ever think to say ‘thank you’, and, figuratively, in the sense that it is bloody hard work.
So perhaps it is fitting that the...
Written by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come,” Victor Hugo is reputed to once have said.
Like many such ‘quotes’, this may not be a precise rendition of the French poet and novelist’s words, merely the most common paraphrase. Hugo’s observation...
Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
One of the beneficiaries of the decision to compete in Moscow was Rob de Castella, who made his first of four Olympic teams in the marathon.
‘Deek’ finished tenth in the marathon in Moscow, his first experience of the surging sort of running required to win...
Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Have we got a dog in the fight is the basic question self-interest asks itself whenever a dispute flares.
In other words, have we got an interest beyond the fact that many humans are drawn towards conflict – provided they are a safe non-participant. As many...
Did ye get healed?
A Column By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Nitro Athletics has been and gone. It seems to have had an overwhelmingly positive reception – 1.4-million viewers Australia-wide on the first of three nights on free-to-air television, Melbourne’s boutique lakeside Stadium jammed to its 9000-ish capacity for the...
A Column By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
The Wages of Fear is a 1953 movie about four men who are asked to transport a dangerous cargo of nitroglycerine.
The plot of the Franco-Italian, noir-nero drama is simple: four men, broke and stranded in a South American oil town, are contracted...
