A Column By Len Johnson
When David McNeill ran 27:45.01 in the Payton Jordan meeting in Stanford this May, his performance had a certain Dickensian element.
To cite the opening line from A Tale of Two Cities , it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The...
Busier than santa's elves | A Column By Len Johnson
Ron Clarke won three successive Zatopek 10,000s at the start of the 1960s, setting his first world records in 1963.
Clarke likewise won the last two Zatopeks as the decade concluded. Which prompts the question – what happened in the years...
The long and winding road the leads to . . . nowhere
A Column By Len Johnson
Monday, 23 November, was Labour and Thanksgiving Day in Japan. The annual public holiday for commemorating labour and production and giving thanks was also the day on which the Chiba International Ekiden Relay would...
Ask a runner to run a heat and they’ll run a (graded) mile.
That’s the conclusion to be drawn, anyway, from two Victorian meetings in the past two weeks.
First, the Victorian Milers Club staged its opening meeting of the season on 10 November. Almost 250 ran, no fewer than 151...
A Column by Len Johnson
Last time Sebastian Coe was in this much trouble over something that happened in Russia was when he lost the Moscow 1980 Olympic 800 metres final to Steve Ovett.
Coe was the world record holder, two seconds faster than anyone else in the field. Yet he...
A Column By Len Johnson
The one flaw in Ron Clarke’s career was the lack of a championship gold medal. Long before his passing earlier this year, however, it was pretty well universally acknowledged that the manner in which he re-imagined and re-shaped track distance running more than made up...
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...
Sunday morning, Melbourne, 18 October, 2015 and the Australian women’s Olympic marathon picture seemed to crystallise as Jess Trengove ran 2:27:45 in the Melbourne marathon and Lisa Weightman won the half-marathon in an even 71 minutes.
Like a kid’s jigsaw, the picture did not stay in place long. Less than...
Jim Dunaway, who passed away earlier this year, was one of the giants of track and field journalism.
Or perhaps he was a dinosaur, as in ‘we won’t see the likes of him again’, a creature from a past age, rather than in the literal sense.
Mostly, he was just Jim....
