Continental Cup Australian Previews

Many thanks to Chris Wainwright.


So I might kick things along by saying I have no idea who would win a fantasy 800 between the past three world record holders – Sebastian Coe, Wilson Kipketer and David Rudisha.
That said, I have a strong view on who would not win, and that’s Sebastian Coe. I’d back him against pretty well anyone in history at 1500 but the case against Coe at 800 can be summarised _ a little unfairly, I’ll admit _ in three words: Hans-Peter Ferner.
Hans-Peter Ferner was the largely undistinguished German middle-distance runner who upset Coe in the 800 at the 1982 European championships in Athens. The comparison is not entirely fair to Coe, as he had missed a lot of the 1982 season ill.
“I’ve taken a lot out of a shallow well,” he said in attempting to explain the inexplicable.
The loss to Ferner, however, did serve to underline the fact that for all his greatness at 800, Coe struggled to win a major title at the event. In the 1978 European championships, he was third, passed by Steve Ovett in the final metres before both were swamped by East Germany’s Olaf Beyer. At the Moscow Olympic Games, the two great British rivals famously ‘swapped’ specialties, Ovett winning the 800, Coe redeeming his career with his win in the 1500.
After two years of illness and injury, Coe was again at peak strength for the 1984 Olympics. He successfully defended his 1500 crown, but only after finishing second in the 800 to Brazil’s Joaquim Cruz.
Indeed, not until the 1986 Europeans _ by which time he had been the world record holder for seven years _ did Coe finally land an 800 gold medal. He beat Tom McKean and Steve Cram in a British clean-sweep. Then, in an outcome eerily reminiscent of Moscow 1980, he lost the 1500 to Cram.
Cram had earlier won the Commonwealth 800-1500 double, taking the 800 in 1:43.22 from McKean. Coe, who was ill, did not take his place in the final.
So, over eight years from 1978 to 1986, Coe lost two fast championship 800s (1978, when he went out in 49.3, and 1984, when Cruz won in 1:43.00), two tactical races (1980 and 1982) and didn’t get to the line for a race Cram won in 1:43.22.
Coe was obviously a great 800 runner, but the evidence suggests he was vulnerable in head-to-head races against the very few men who could be regarded as his peers.
Kipketer won four world championships but likewise failed to win an Olympic gold medal. He missed his best chance in 1996 when he was ineligible, a few months short of becoming a naturalised citizen for his adopted Denmark. It’s hard to see how Kipketer would not have won then.
Rudisha, of course, has no medal at all at senior global championship level, his one attempt ending in the semi-finals in Berlin last year. That bitter experience sparked the sequence of fast times which included the world record 1:41.09 in the same Berlin stadium a week ago.

Rudisha’s current status raises another point of debate in 800 running: all things being equal, will a good big man always beat a good little man?
Peter Fortune, Cathy Freeman’s coach, observed of Rudisha that “he’s not only big; he runs magnificently and he’s quick.” Of course, as well as one of Rudisha’s 1:43 performances in Melbourne, Australians also saw evidence of his speed when he ran a 45.50 400 in Sydney earlier this year.
On whether good big men always beat good little men, Fortune was not so sure, but he says: “When they’re tired, big men remain strong.”
Most 800-metre races are run slowing down. I saw some ‘stats’ this week that indicated 18 of the 21 improvements of the world record/world best (a couple were not ratified) featured a slower second lap. Most of this slowdown comes in the last 200. In both Kipketer’s previous record of 1:41.11 and Rudisha’s 1:41.09, the slowest 200 was the last 200.
Intuitively, physical strength must play a role here. Intuitively again, big men are stronger than smaller men and stocky men stronger than lean rivals.
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This issue got a really good working over back in the days when Alberto Juantorena ruled the roost. Juantorena (nick-name El Caballo, the horse) won the 400/800 double at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and remains the only man to do so. He set world records both in winning at the Games (1:43.50) and the following year (1:43.44).
In Montreal, Juantorena destroyed his smaller US opponent Rick Wohlhuter, who had set two world records in the run-up to the Games, in the final straight.
Mike Boit of Kenya missed that race as the African nations boycotted Montreal in protest at New Zealand’s rugby ties with South Africa. Tall, but lean, Boit took Juantorena on in a classic race at the World Cup in Dusseldorf in 1977. The pair engaged in a side-by-side battle up the last straight before Boit fell into his opponent’s giant stride pattern and lost narrowly, 1:44.04 to 1:44.14.
Coe’s championship losses to Beyer-Ovett and Cruz also fall into the big man/small man category.
Anyway if you want to make your own judgement, you can see the 1976 Olympic final here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBTG-QwbNsE&feature=related) and the 1977 World Cup race here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9C2CDZvOOY).
Finally, as Rudisha contemplates his championships aims for the next two years, it’s sobering to think that the last man to win an Olympic gold while also holding the world record was Dave Wottle back in 1972 in Munich.
Let the debates continue!
![]() In perhaps the greatest debate settling race I can remember, Hicham El Guerrouj outkicks Kenenisa Bekele for gold medal #2 in Athens, earning major Hardware and Scoreboard points in the debate for "greatest distance runner of their era". |
![]() Even at 35, Lagat is still the best in the world when he's on. |
![]() Lagat is 6-0 lifetime against Solinsky, and 1-0 this year. But Solinsky is getting closer and closer. |
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new ‘New Balance’ compression range which appeared in the ‘Women’s and Men’s Health’ magazine. I did the modeling for the women’s range which was a lot of fun. It was very exciting to finally see their advertisements. The New Balance compression range should be available in shops this month, so make sure you check them out - they fit and wear fantastically.
By Len Johnson
It was hard not to feel the warmth at Bondi Beach last Sunday.
It was a warm day for the 40th running of the City2Surf. The sort of day they say is regularly turned on for the world’s biggest road race, and on the rare occasions when it is not, the sort of day they say is usually turned on for it.
It was the sort of atmosphere in which Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott would love to have basked. Even Mark Latham may have mellowed out a little had he been there.

Mostly, it was the weather _ clear, sunny, almost no wind. But there was also the warm glow generated by being among 80,000 like-minded souls.
Pretty well every person at Bondi Beach on Sunday, 8 August was there for the City2Surf. Eighty thousand had run, jogged or walked from the start at Hyde Park, others had come there to meet loved ones or friends. At noon, when I finally left Bondi, there was almost as big a crowd walking up the hill to Bondi Junction and the trains as there had been running up the Rose Bay to Vaucluse Hill in the race a few hours earlier.

As a sports journalist for over 20 years, I was often caught up in crowds gathered for a single purpose. I experience it at AFL grand finals, at the opening day of Olympic and Commonwealth Games, or at world championships. The atmosphere was tweaked a little higher still on day one of Brisbane 1982, Sydney 2000 and Melbourne 2006.
There is one difference between such occasions and the City2Surf _ and it is a significant one. At major sporting events, the crowd has come to watch others perform, the event itself is a celebration of the highest performance level of a sport _ Olympics, AFL, NRL, whatever.

At the City2Surf, however, the celebration is of everyman and everywoman. The 80,000 participants range from the fleetest of foot _ who negotiate the 14 kilometres from city to beach before many of the back-of-the-pack folk have even set foot on the road _ to the slowest of the slow.
It is not 80,000 gathered to watch a handful of elites perform, but to share roughly the same experience. It’s as if the entire crowd at the AFL grand final were on the field having a communal kick-to-kick.
Apart from breaking the course records, this year’s race had pretty much everything you could ask for. On paper, there seemed little between defending champion Michael Shelley, 2008 winner Martin Dent, Commonwealth Games marathon selection Jeff Hunt and Delhi 5000 representative Ben St Lawrence.
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This expectation was borne out on the roads. The four race through the early part of the course together. Shelley was the aggressor up the big hill, but it was still all together at the top and well around the corner through Dover Heights. Only then did Dent start to drop back a little; only in the last few hundred metres did Hunt drop a few seconds behind.
And only in the last 100 metres was the issue settled between Shelley and St Lawrence. Even then, it swung first St Lawrence’s way and then Shelley’s, before St Lawrence edged decisively ahead to win by a second in 41:05.
In 2000 Matt Beckenham was representing Australia at the Sydney Olympics in the 400m hurdles. A decade on he will be playing an important role as coach to the likes of Melissa Breen, Lauren Boden and Brendan Cole as they step out onto the track at the New Delhi Commonwealth Games.
The month of May saw another period of great results for the squad. Lauren made a huge step forward in becoming a potential world top 8 athlete with victory and a huge PB (55.25) at the Osaka Grand Prix. Also at that meet Brendan ran a season best of 49.85 which has secured him a berth in the Continental Cup and Melissa got a wonderful opportunity to race Veronica Campbell Brown in the 100m.
One reason is that the latter term does not even encompass one of two of the more popular forms of competition _ road and cross-country. A more basic one is that athletics is a more holistic sort of word, implying a whole that is more than just the sum of its parts, while, to my taste anyway, track and field suggests two fundamentally different sports under the one umbrella.

It’s all a matter of semantics, but results at the recent continental championships, particularly the African and European championships, indicated that perhaps there is a disturbing element of truth to the two sports/one umbrella concept. Specifically, if you want to see field athletics, go to Europe; if you want to see track, go to Africa, the Caribbean, the US _ but go somewhere else.
In looking at the results from Nairobi (African champs) and Barcelona (European), this distinction virtually leapt off the page. As some have already observed (notably Pat Butcher in his www.globerunner.org blog), the field event results in Spain were right at the top of world-class, but the track results were spotty; in Kenya, the opposite was true.
There was a gender divide _ the women’s track results in Barcelona were generally superior to those in Nairobi _ but there are other social and cultural factors operating here. Women’s middle and long-distance performances were also better at the Europeans, but female African runners have joined their male counterparts in dominating those events at world level.

Pat Butcher also commented on the implications of these outcomes for the sport in Europe. Track events, he argued, are far more marketable than field events, so it cannot be a good thing that Europeans are virtually invisible on the world stage in track events.
Be that as it may, a quick comparison of the men’s events at the African and European championships shows the medal performances _ not only gold, but all medals _ in Nairobi were generally much superior to those at Barcelona.
Amazingly, one event in which they were not was the 3000 metres steeplechase. Good as the French pair who went 1-2 in Barcelona _ Mahiedine Mekhissi and Bob Tahri _ are, fast as they ran (8:07.87 and 8:09.28 and despite the fact that they have both been very competitive in recent global championships, I don’t think anyone would argue they are a threat to the Kenyan hegemony in the event.

Still, one other thing which was apparent in Barcelona was the strong performances by British athletes. No doubt this level of performance is rising as a home Olympic Games draws ever closer. Hopefully, there will be a wash-over effect into other European countries. After all, an Olympics in London in 2012 is also far more a “home” Games for French, German and Scandinavian athletes than was Beijing in 2008.
With the post-championship phase of the Diamond League and European season about to start up as I write, the other major thing to ponder is what the results in Nairobi and Barcelona imply for the remainder of the season. Freed of the mental and physical burden of preparation for the year’s major objective, what performances might some of the champions now produce (not to mention others spurred on by failing to achieve desired results).
In Nairobi, David Rudisha ran 1:42.84, leaving 2007 world champion Alfred Kirwa Yego some two seconds behind (Abubaker Kaki did not run). Now he is free to resume the chase after Wilson Kipketer’s world record.

Silas Kiplagat and Aamine Lalou excited us with the year’s first sub-3:30 1500 metres performance in Monaco recently, but in Nairobi Olympic champion Asbel Kiprop handled them both. What will they produce when the chase for fast times resumes, I wonder.
Sadly, one thing we won’t get to find out is how fast Wilson Kiprop might run at sea level. For the second time he produced an amazing 10,000 metres performance at altitude (Nairobi is around 1700 metres above sea level). In the Kenyan trials it was 27:26.93. In the championships, he was just as impressive, winning in 27:32.91. But there is no Brussels 10k this year, due to the fact that it is the Diamond League final and the distance is 5000.
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The women’s distances seemed more affected by the altitude than the men’s, but Olympic champion Nancy Lagat, who has lost just once this year, again defeated Ethiopia’s Gelete Burka in the 1500 and world champion Vivian Cheruiyot produced a 2:46 final kilometre to win the 5000 metres from Meseret Defar in 16:18.72.
From the Europeans, Blanka Vlasic finally got a European title with a 2.03 win in the high jump, Natalya Antyukh ran under 53 seconds to win the 400 metres hurdles, Andreas Thorkildsen continued to rule the men’s javelin, Phillips Idowu showed his best form when it counted to win the triple jump with a personal best 17.81, Christian Reif produced a world-leading and championship record 8.47 to win the long jump and Renaud Lavillenie was untroubled to win the vault at 5.85.
With the big pressure off them, some of these athletes will be out to produce something out-of-the-ordinary in the remainder of the season.
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Demi Wood
Around 70,000 entries have been received. Reports of the death of the running boom appear to have been exaggerated.
The race from the centre of Sydney to the most famous surf beach in Australia _ Bondi _ was first staged in 1971. Then it started at the Town Hall; now it starts from Hyde Park. Then, and for the first five editions, it wound its way up through Kings Cross; now it goes through the tunnel.
Then it was won by visiting American runner Kenny Moore from Australia’s John Farrington. Beth Stanford was the first woman to finish out of just under 80 female entrants. That figure represented approximately four percent of the 2000-or-so total entries. Now, female participation rates hover around 50 percent, and women constituted a majority in the 2006 race.
Then the race was run on the first Sunday in September; now it is the second Sunday in August, though organisers graciously brought the race forward in 2000 to allow the Sydney Olympics a little clear air for publicity!
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Back then, on seeing a runner, some ‘dags’ could not resist winding down the car window and enquiring: “Who do you think you are _ Ron Clarke?” Now, we’d know enough to retort: “No, but I’m channelling him!”
Now, of course, the City to Surf has a City2Surf tag, leading me to wonder whether this column should not be headed: “The City2Surf @ 40”, but in so many ways the race is the same as when it started. For a few, it’s about getting from the city to Bondi as quickly as possible. For a few more, it’s about running from the city to Bondi in the company of thousands of like-minded souls.
For the rest of the participants, and for all the spectators, the City to Surf is a festival of running. For one day each year, the community from the centre of town, through some of Sydney’s most exclusive suburbs and some of its most inclusive, is pretty much united by one event.
Everyone who has run a City to Surf has a favourite moment. Mine still remains the first, the moment I took a quick glance over my shoulder as I headed up William St into the tunnel to see the whole street filled with runners.
My next favourite moment concerns a race I didn’t even run _ the 1985 edition, when I was (kind of) responsible for getting the winner to Australia. I’d done a little bit of work for the City to Surf and other Fairfax running events, and was asked to suss out the possibility of Olympic marathon champ Carlos Lopes coming out.

I headed off to the 1985 world cross-country championships in Lisbon armed with several folders of promotional material and a few t-shirts (runners, even good ones, came relatively cheap then). I never did speak to Carlos, my nerve and my Portuguese both being pretty much non-existent.
But I did invite English marathoner Hugh Jones over for a cup of tea and a chat while we were training on the Algarve, told him about the race, gave him the t-shirt and the organiser contacts. Fivemonths later, Jones became the first overseas winner since Kenny Moore and my career as a race promoter came to an end with a 100 percent strike rate.
I finished my first City to Surf, the 1978 race, still holding an orange t-shirt. Back then, the elite and semi-elite runners used to line up on the traffic-light island across the intersection from the official start. The practice was condoned by race organisers, but they also disqualified any runner detected not starting from the official line.
So you wore an old t-shirt to cover your race number. I intended to discard mine along the way but, in the excitement, I carried it in my hand all the way to the finish.
That was also the year of the ‘false start’, when all the runners were given an arbitrary two-minute penalty. There certainly was a premature start and the official timing no doubt started late, but I reckon we were ‘dudded’. Six years later, I ran my second City to Surf and recorded pretty much the same time despite not being in anything like the same form.
Over the years, the City to Surf has been run, and won, by some of Australia’s best. John Farrington won three in a row after that first race, Angie Cook went from first schoolgirl in the inaugural race to a two-time winner in 1974 and 1975. Robert de Castella, Chris Wardlaw, Bill Scott and Steve Austin _ Olympians all _ were among the early winners.
‘Deek’ set a race record 40 minutes eight seconds in 1981, which Steve Moneghetti chased for four years before beating it by five seconds in 1991. Allison Roe of New Zealand, Lisa Ondieki and, finally, Susie Power, set outstanding female race records. Ondieki ran so fast that her coach, Dick Telford, wearing a light-weight head-cam for television, had to take a short-cut from New South Head to Old South Head Rd to keep up with her.
‘Mona’ did even better as a wired-up runner in 2004, leading pretty well all the way before losing out in a sprint to Tanzania’s three-time winner Patrick Nyangelo and his teammate Dickson Marwa. Apparently he’d just asked them: “Can’t you run any faster?”
Actually, I made that bit up. But there are 70,000 stories in the City to Surf, and that could have been one of them. The 40th running this year, the 40th birthday next year, still going strong.
The City to Surf is Australia’s most famous road race and, often, its best. Long may it run.