Every person who has ever climbed a ladder has experienced the feeling. Once you start to come down, your first step is blind, your foot searching for something solid. You’ve taken every precaution; you know you will find a sound footing, but it’s still a relief when you do.
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...
Written by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Usually, we go to a world championships knowing what to expect. We may not get all, much or any of what we expected, but we go with a clear vision.
Doha 2019 is not like that. It doesn’t fit the norm. We don’t even...
Thirty-six years after Dave Smith and Tim Erickson should have been Olympic teammates, their sons Dane Bird-Smith and Chris Erickson will be.
Bird-Smith and Chris Erickson have long since joined their fathers in representing their country in international competition, but Rio 2016 will mark their first appearance as Olympic teammates.
Bird-Smith,...
For quite a few years now, Athletics Australia’s selection policies have offered the selectors wide discretionary powers in considering the third place in any event.
For almost all that time, many have advocated the selectors make more use of the discretionary clauses. Now, in picking the Gold Coast 2018 team,...
Let’s keep this on the record, shall we.
Having considered recently how much credibility should be given to some of the world records set this year (Please Buy This Record, RT 18 October), let’s look this time at the quantity of records set by Australian duo Jessica Hull and Stewart McSweyn.
Hull took down Benita Willis’s national record for 5000 metres when she ran 14:43.80 in Monaco and then Linden Hall’s national mark for 1500 with a 4:00.42 in Berlin. Finally, she ran 8:36.03 for 3000 in Doha to slice a couple of seconds off Willis’s former 3000 record. Earlier in the year, Hull ran 4:04.14 in Boston to take the indoor 1500 record from Melissa Duncan.
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
What is it about the Letzigrund stadium and the Weltklasse meeting. For the second year in a row, Zurich’s beloved boutique venue produced a memorable distance race in which the winner triumphed almost purely on their will to win.
A year ago, it...
Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
The road distance event at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games will be a half-marathon, at least compared to its immediate predecessor at Rio 2016.
No, the traditional, 42.195-kilometre distance will not be slashed by 50 percent (fiddling with the distance might be grounds for revolution in...
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
Last weekend, 5-7 May, was one of those times when, to dip our lids to Roy Slaven and H.G.Nelson, “too much sport was barely enough.”
To recap, we had off-field shenanigans with the John Coates v Danni Roche election for the Australian Olympic...
