Catriona Bisset ended a 49-year drought as she was named in the world top-10 in Track&Field News magazine’s annual rankings for 2023, one of ten Australian athletes to garner a top-10 ranking.
Since assuming the leadership of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe has repeatedly championed the need for change.
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.
This writer has long adjusted himself to the fact of not being lord of his own household. Even so, being told not to sit in any chair I chose at the empty kitchen table was a confronting reminder of my status. That it was because one of the world’s greatest marathoners had recently occupied it took a little longer to sink in.
It’s early in an Olympic year. An unknown young man breaks through at 800, running 1:45.77. A scarcely better-known young woman breaks the national record in the 100 metres, speeding down the straightaway in 11.10 seconds.
It won’t be easy making the team to represent Australia in the men’s middle-distance events at the World U20 championships in Lima, Peru later this year.
Time is marked out in finite units – seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. But neither time nor events seem to work out that way. Sometimes nothing much seems to be happening. Other times everything seems to be happening at once.
That’s the way it’s been for the week beginning Sunday...
It’s a tough gig in athletics proposing new things. People all over don’t embrace change.
Not all athletes are runners. But the overwhelming majority of them will run a mile away from a change. This is not necessarily a bad thing: to run 100 metres in under 10 or 11...
What a race that was last week (Thursday 22). Cameron Myers leads home a stellar 1500 metres field - including 2022 world champion Jake Wightman – runs the fastest time ever by an Australian man on Australian soil, leads six other Australians and four internationals, under 3:40.c
Actually, that’s a mis-speak. There is no such thing as half a team: the decision is to send NO team at all, just two individuals. Full teams of six for senior men, junior (U20) men and junior women but just two senior women.
To be fair, the senior women’s race...
