Len Johnson is currently in Rio, Brazil covering the games as he see's them.
Please remember, these people are our guests | A Column By Len Johnson
Went for our first run today in the Olympic city. A beach run it was, from Ipanema to Copacabana and back.
A number of Olympic...
When non-residents characterise Canberra as “the bush capital”, they’re usually evoking a range of emotions, most of them hostile. Contempt for the political and bureaucratic classes sits at the extreme end of that range with scorn, disparagement and bemused indifference following in descending order of malevolence.
Occasionally, though, the descriptor...
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Fair stands the wind - or does it? | A column by Len Johnson
On Monday, 18 January 1932, sprinter Jim Carlton rocketed around the curved grass track on the Sydney Cricket Ground to win the Australian championships 220 yards...
Sunday night spent reliving those wonderful moments in Sydney as Catherine Freeman took the gold medal in the 400 metres. Wake up Friday morning to learn that Stewart McSweyn has taken down the national record in the 3000 at Rome’s Golden Gala Diamond League.
Not a bad week, you’d have to say. Even better when you factor in a national record 4:00.42 for Jessica Hull in Berlin, yet another fast 1500 by McSweyn in Zagreb, winning there in 3:32.17 just a few days before Rome. Or Nicola McDermott getting over 1.95 metres to take third place in the Rome high jump.
David McNeill’s athletics career could have been over almost before it began. On Tuesday night in Perth, he may have run his way into a third Olympic team.
It was in 2005 that McNeill, along with Liam Adams and Toby Rayner, was a controversial non-selection for the junior team to...
Runner's Tribe - A column by Len Johnson
Lisa Ondieki took a long time to get a decent bite at the Big Apple. When she did, she almost swallowed the thing whole.
A friend of mine received a social media message this week that 23 October was the anniversary of Rod...
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.
Len Johnson Reporting from the World Champs, London – Runner’s Tribe
Eight years ago the world seemed to be at Dani Stevens (then Dani Samuels) feet. On a rainy night in Berlin, she handled the difficult conditions far better than her more experienced rivals to become, at 21, the youngest winner...
A column by Len Johnson - Runner's Tribe
Two things surprised me at my first Commonwealth Games as a journalist in Auckland in 1990.
The first, Andrew Lloyd’s victory in an amazing 5000 metres race, still surprises me to this day. I don’t know if ‘Lloydie’ still sometimes wonders if it...
In writing last time about the Melbourne-Echuca marathon relay and the toughness of the distance runners of that era I wondered about the training they used to do.
I made the observation: “These men may not have done the high training mileages of today, but they certainly were tough when...