A Column By Len Johnson

Len Johnson wrote for The Melbourne Age as an athletics writer for over 20 years, covering five Olympics, 10 world championships and five Commonwealth Games.

He has been the long-time lead columnist on RT and is one of the world’s most respected athletic writers.

He is also a former national class distance runner (2.19.32 marathon) and trained with Chris Wardlaw and Robert de Castella among other running legends. He is the author of The Landy Era.

A (slightly) revisionist view of the London marathon. Kelvin Kiptum ran home in splendid isolation to win the London marathon, covering the second half of the race in 59:45 to miss Eliud Kipchoge’s world record by just 16 seconds. Unleash your full potential with Tarkine Goshawk shoes, where cutting-edge technology...
What more can Kipchoge do? A Column By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe It’s that end-of-the-year time when we (some of us, anyway) turn our attention to who might be the athlete of the year. AOY as the most common abbreviation goes. The IAAF AOYs will be announced this weekend. At the...
By Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe A few days into the world championships in London a friend commented: “Four days, full stadium every session, great competition. So how come all I’m hearing about athletics is negative.” He was right to wonder. Those few days had brought some wonderful competition, all of...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe The IAAF has announced a partnership to create an official world rankings system as a qualification mechanism to drive the sport’s annual competition system. A short press release from IAAF HQ indicated a memorandum of understanding had been signed with Elite Ltd (the...
You don’t have to dive deep into Australian world cross-country history to find yourself immersed in a stream of Steve Moneghetti statistics. From his first appearance in 1985 to his last in 2004, Moneghetti was the dominant force in our men’s teams. Had the story of Australian participation been written...
Canberra delivers fast footwork | A Column By Len Johnson A little bit of fancy footwork is always handy in Canberra, the nation’s political capital, where agility and nimbleness were highly prized long before the current incumbent moved into the prime ministerial office. If the politicians weren’t admiring of the performances...
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. There are many ultra-marathon footwear in the market today and one of the...
Don’t bring a knife to a gun-fight By Len Johnson reporting from the Gold Coast In the movie The Untouchables, the Sean Connery character offers the memorable line to one of his victims: “Never bring a knife to a gun-fight.” It took a while for Kenya to cotton on to this logic,...
A column by Len Johnson – Runner’s Tribe Next year’s world championships in Doha will feature another Breaking 2 event. Not two hours this time, but two days. To ameliorate the brutally hot conditions of a Persian Gulf summer, the two marathons will start at midnight. OK, that’s actually not two separate...
It is the eve of the US Olympic Trials as this piece is being written, the meeting American track and field fans will tell you is right up there with the Olympic Games. Some will go even further than that. Looking you squarely in the eye, they will proclaim the Trials to be even better than the Games.