When Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile on 6 May 1954 his friend and supporter Norris McWhirter stretched the announcement out almost beyond breaking point, proclaiming successively Bannister had run a meeting and track record and “subject to ratification,” an English native, British national, all-comers, European, British Empire...
One of the members of a chat group your writer frequents re-posts a helpful table each week detailing the latest performances of Australian athletes.
Along with the individual performances, the table lists how the result impacts the athlete’s position on the World Athletics rankings. As you may remember, the world...
John Landy once wrote a report for Australian Athletics which someone within the governing body – I can’t believe it was John’s idea – released under the title: ‘Change or Die’.
As I can’t resist the urge to point out every time I have cited that report over the years,...
On hearing of the death of Lady Macbeth and faced with his own impending overthrow, Shakespeare’s Macbeth tries to make sense of it all. Life, he concludes, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
Could have been talking about the World Relays.
In the...
Way back in 1972, when Frank Shorter was just a crazy young kid with a dream of winning the Olympic marathon and China was just beginning to emerge onto the international stage after decades of isolation, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai was asked about the impact of the French Revolution.
“Too...
If you know a bit about Australian marathon history, you will recall that Lisa Ondieki is our only Olympic marathon medallist. Her silver medal in Seoul in 1988 behind the great Rosa Mota is the only medal attained by an Australian at the Olympics. Robert de Castella and Steve...
It takes a (comparatively) long time for a discus thrown from one side of a field to fly through the air and come down some 75 metres distance from whence it was launched. It takes no time at all to spark a discussion.
A year ago, Mykolas Alekna went to...
A column by Len Johnson
Many years of following football teams – Queens Park Rangers, Melbourne Victory, Australia – has taught me one thing: always check the offside flag.
Whether you’re leaping out of your seat with both arms thrown aloft, or slumping down with both arms wrapped around your head trying...
A column by Len Johnson
Towards the end of the Melbourne’s Maurie Plant Classic meeting last weekend a longtime media colleague asked where I would rank the meeting against previous Melbourne classics.
“It’s up there,” I replied. A simple answer to a complex question. You can rank athletics meetings on many different...
A column by Len Johnson
It’s easy to set a world record. Asked once how he felt about doing it, Ron Clarke responded that once you’ve set one it’s just a matter of running a personal best.
Clarke should know. He set anywhere from 18 to 21 world records in his...
