By Len Johnson

It was hard not to feel the warmth at Bondi Beach last Sunday.

It was a warm day for the 40^th 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.

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.

Lara Tamsett had a bit more to spare in winning the women’s race. Her 46:54 was the 10^th-fastest women’s performance in race history. St Lawrence’s was a victory and Tamsett’s a performance to burnish the warm glow surrounding the morning.