Humankind returned to the moon this week – voyaged around it, at least – and an athlete won the Stawell Gift from scratch. Historically these two events happen with about the same frequency.
Alright, alright. I can already hear some smarty pants yelling at their smartphone or computer screen that someone else won the Stawell Gift from scratch just last year, too. True enough. Sha’Carri Richardson this year did what Bree Rizzo did last year, I’ll grant you.
Melissa Breen also won the women’s gift from the ultimate backmark in 2012. With two men – Jean-Louis Ravelomanantsoa in 1975 and Josh Ross in 2005 – also winning from scratch, the feat has been achieved five times in the 144 runnings of the men’s and 37 of the women’s Gift.
Human moon voyaging began with the first moon orbit by the US Apollo 8 mission in 1968, and there were six landed missions as part of the Apollo program from the first in 1969 to the last in 1972 (the Soviet Union conducted non-crewed missions over a similar timescale).
So, six lunar landings, five wins in the Stawell Gift from scratch. Given the first Gift winner from scratch came three years after the last lunar landing to date, we might venture to say that it proved easier to land a human being on the moon than to win the Stawell Gift from scratch.
I wouldn’t say that, but I’m sure you wouldn’t have to ask more than a couple of Stawell Gift stalwarts before you found someone that would. Nor would you have to ask too many runners who have tried, and failed, to win at Stawell from the backmark, much less the scratch mark!
Athletics purists can argue till the cows come home – or, perhaps more accurately, until they are blue in the face – about the true merits of handicap racing. The ideal of handicap running is to give each runner a start, their ‘mark’, based on their ability.
In theory, that will give everyone a roughly equal chance of winning. In practice, the ideals of the handicap system are honoured, or dishonoured, in similar manner to the ideals of the Olympic movement. Aspirations at which we aim, targets we mostly miss, by embarrassingly large margins all too often.
The modern history of the Gift is peppered with elite international athletes who – in a contradictory paraphrase of Julius Caesar’s “I came, I saw, I conquered” after a swift, decisive military victory – came, were seen and were conquered by an unknown out-marker. If Sha’Carri Richardson was even aware of any of this, it obviously didn’t worry her.
Wearing the backmarker’s red vest, she improved from heat to semi-final from semi-final to final. She ran 13.82 in winning her heat on Saturday afternoon, improved to 13.53 in winning her semi (just 0.007 seconds ahead of second place after easing up before the line) and then to 13.15 in the final, this time with five-hundredths (at least four of them wasted!) to spare over second place.
Despite the 2-3 metre improvements race by race, to watch them all three performances were the same. One of the beauties of the handicap system is that the sight of the backmarker chasing the out-markers down is the same, regardless of the speed. And they’re pretty well guaranteed to catch them only in the final 10-20 metres. By centimetres, as Bruce McAvaney said in commentary.
As noted previously, Richardson became the first winner of scratch since checks notes – Bree Rizzo last year. Even if both these redoubtable women are back for the 2027 Gift, you wouldn’t want to bet on a hat-trick. Could be a sure-fire path to ruin!
It’s been a big week in other ways, too. As the Stawell Gift was being run on Easter Monday, the world was holding its breath not waiting to see if a scratch runner could win but to see whether it was about to be engulfed in a war as a result of Donald Trump’s intemperate rant demanding Iran cease its blockade of a vital waterway of face being obliterated “back to the Stone Age”.
Fortunately, someone blinked and we lurch on to the next crisis point.
It would be trite to suggest any equivalence, but there is a faint echo in the move from Stawell to this weekend’s national championships in Sydney. Stawell’s football oval with its grass track, slightly uphill gradient and lanes marked out by ropes threaded through metal stakes is a different world from the newly resurfaced synthetic track at Sydney Olympic Park Athletics Centre.
But the metaphorical stakes are high, with selection for the Commonwealth Games team guaranteed for winners who achieve, or have already achieved, the standards set by the selectors. Instead of backmarkers chasing down athletes of limited ability, it’s back to head-to-head competition amongst peers. Chalk and cheese, but with greater consequences.
Whatever happens at Sydney Olympic Park, though, the most significant Australian performances of the week may have already come in a field outside a small town in windy Oklahoma USA. Matt Denny produced the third 74-metre throw of his career to win a discus competition at the Ramona Throws Series.
Denny needed almost every centimetre as Germany’s Steven Richter snatched the lead mid-competition with a throw of precisely 74 metres. The Australian threw the current Oceania record 74.78 in Ramona last year when he also had a 74.25 effort.
Both men are competing again on Sunday along with Kristjan Ceh who achieved a personal best 72.26 in an earlier competition in the series.