So many honours have been heaped upon Steve Hooker for his exploits in 2009 that a significant one almost slipped by unnoticed.

Track & Field News ranked the Olympic and world champion pole vaulter fifth male athlete of the year, the first Australian to gain such a ranking since Jana Rawlinson was ranked tenth in 2003, the year she won her first world championships gold medal in the 400 metres hurdles, and the first male Australian since Robert de Castella was ranked sixth in his world championships marathon year of 1983.

Usain Bolt was voted 2009 male Athlete of the Year, followed by Kenenisa Bekele, Tyson Gay, LaShawn Merritt and then Hooker.

Each year, in addition to its event rankings, the American magazine assembles a panel of international experts to vote on the male and female athletes of the year across all events. The panellists vote on a 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 basis and the athlete of the year is decided on the aggregate.

Not surprisingly, a top-10 AOY finish is an honour that has eluded all but a handful of Australians. As a small nation, Australia doesn’t provide a huge number of Olympic and world champions which, three years out of four, is pretty much a minimum requirement for AOY candidates.

Nor does the lifespan of the award help. The men’s Athlete of the Year was inaugurated in 1959, the women’s in 1977, so the stars of Australia’s golden years in the 1950s and 1960s _ Marjorie Jackson, John Landy, Shirley Strickland, Betty Cuthbert, Herb Elliott _ never had the chance to win it.

Ironically, the only Australian to have been voted Athlete of the Year failed to win an Olympic gold medal. That would be Ron Clarke, whose amazing record-breaking year of 1965 saw him acclaimed male athete of the year. Clarke pretty well lived in the top 10 throughout his international career _ he was fifth in both 1966 and 1967, and equal ninth in 1968.

The only other Australian male top-10, Kerry O’Brien, also failed to win an Olympic gold medal. Like Clarke, however, that failure (in 1968, at least) was attributed largely to the high altitude of Mexico City. O’Brien was ranked third in the AOY poll in 1970, the year in which he set a world record in the 3000 metres steeplechase in Berlin; he was ranked number one in the steeple and sixth in the 5000 metres.

Deek’s appearance in the overall top 10 came the year he won the world championships marathon. He also won that year’s Rotterdam marathon, defeating Carlos Lopes in a head-to-head duel over the last five kilometres, and pushing Alberto Salazar back to fifth. You also have to wonder whether de Castella may have ranked in the top 10 in 1981 had he got the immediate credit for breaking Derek Clayton’s world marathon record in Fukuoka. Instead, Salazar “beat” him to the mark on a New York course which turned out to be just under 150 metres short.

In the shorter history of the women’s AOY only three Australians have made top 10. First, and most prolific, is Cathy Freeman, who was voted fourth overall in 1997, the year of her first world championship gold medal in the 400, seventh in 1999 (when she retained the title), and third in 2000, when she won at the Sydney Olympic Games and made the final in the 200.

More surprisingly, Emma George was ranked 10^th overall in 1997. The pioneer star of the women’s pole vault, George set two world records that year. Not that they counted in 1997 considerations, but George set plenty either side of that year too.

Finally, Jana Rawlinson (then Jana Pittman), earned a top 10 ranking in 2003, the year she became the youngest woman to win a 400 metres hurdles world title, defeating world record holder Yuliya Pechonkina in Paris. Rawlinson also ranked in the 400 that year, via a personal when she handed Freeman her first defeat in over 40 races. (Note: Rawlinson was originally voted number 11, but has subsequently been elevated by the BALCO-related disqualification of American sprinter Kelli White.)

Clarke, O’Brien, de Castella, Freeman, George and Pittman _ Steve Hooker is joining an illustrious band. Of course, with Freeman, he belongs to an even more exclusive club: Australians to have won both an Olympic and world championships gold medal.

 

Remember those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer? When did they drop the hazy and crazy and become just plain lazy?

We’re talking sport here. And I’m not referring to the whole of summer _ just January. Likewise, I’m referring to just one of the whole range of summer sports _ athletics. When did January, or the greater part of it anyway, become an athletics-free zone?

Athletics has abandoned a period in which it once thrived, the Christmas-New Year-early January period. Depending on the calendar, athletics association offices shut down about a week before Christmas, not to re-open until mid-January. Then, when it gets going again, takes time to re-establish momentum.

This year, there’s nothing much on the national calendar until Sunday, 17 January, when the selection trial for the world cross-country championships is conducted at Melbourne’s Brimbank Park.

To a certain extent, athletics is following the rest of the country. As annual leave entitlements stretched from two to three to four weeks, more and more people came to consider Christmas-January as the perfect opportunity for an extended break.

In sport, we have gone from a multiplicity of competitions over this period, to a shallow pool of major events. The Boxing Day and New Year Tests and, in the second half of January, the Australian Open tennis, leave other sports gasping for the oxygen of publicity.

Mass media has abandoned the broadcast in favour of a broader coverage of a narrower range of sports and events. Then there is the inane coverage of our major winter events for those who can’t live without them. “Dog Bites Man” may still not be a story, but ‘footballer has drink of water after pre-season training session’ _ mystifyingly _ is.

So maybe the decision by athletics _ and so many other sports _ to virtually close up shop at this time makes sense. But it wasn’t always so _ and hasn’t always been even in relatively recent times.

Major championships in our region in Auckland (1990 Commonwealth Games), Sydney (2000 Olympic Games) and Melbourne (2006 Commonwealth Games) have seen adjustments to the domestic season which resulted in a lot of action early in the year. The Auckland selection trials, for example, were in December in Sydney and by early January we were watching the likes of Sebastian Coe, Liz McColgan, Linford Christie and Colin Jackson warming up with competition in Hobart and Sydney.

In 2000, the domestic season kicked off early (the nationals were the final weekend in February). The Canberra meeting, held on the 15^th, saw Lauren Hewitt beat Melinda Gainsford-Taylor and Cathy Freeman over 200 metres in 22.52 seconds, Tamsyn Lewis run her fastest 800 at 1:59.21, Benita Willis produce a solo 4:08.59 1500 and Kris McCarthy break through at 800 with a 1:45.77. There were something like 15-20 Olympic A-standard performances.



These years were aberrations, however, as by that stage the sport had already pretty well abandoned Christmas-New Year. But in earlier times, this was precisely the time when things started to happen.

In 1956, it was all of four days into January when John Landy took on world 880 yards record holder Lon Spurrier of the USA at Olympic Park in Melbourne over Spurrier’s distance. It was Landy’s comeback race after having all of 1955 off and, fit as a trout after training in the mountains while on teaching assignment in the Victorian High Country, he ran the American to within inches, both men clocking 1:51.8.

That was a mere pipe-opener. By the end of the month, Dave Stephens had broken Emil Zatopek’s world record for six miles and Landy had run the first sub-four minute mile on Australian soil.

Regular interstate matches _ New South Wales v Victoria, Victoria v South Australia _ also took place in the January period, with the likes of Betty Cuthbert, Marlene Mathews, Ron Clarke, and Albie Thomas representing their states.

Clarke, as in all things, was a benchmark. In 1965, he had no less than eight races in January, including a world record 13:34.8 5000 in Hobart. That was run on the North Hobart Oval which had a slope from the 220 yards point to the finish. Clarke broke Vladimir Kuts’ record by 0.2 and was seriously concerned that the performance would not be ratified because he ran 13 times ‘down’ the hill and only 12 times ‘up’.

It didn’t matter: Clarke went to New Zealand where he broke the world record again in Auckland on 1 February, his ninth race in 32 days!

The following year, Clarke raced ‘only’ six times in January, but that included a 5000 on New Year’s Day (one of three races for the month at that distance), another 13:31.2 for 5000 (Kip Keino held the world record then at 13:24.2) and a 28:41 for 10,000 metres, so he wasn’t slacking.

Herb Elliott, too, ran regularly in January. He had four races in 1957 (plus a Boxing Day 880 to close 1956) and four more to begin 1958 were highlighted by his first sub-four minute mile at Olympic Park on 25 January, followed by a second five days later.

I know the world has changed, but it must have been great to have such feasts served up back in those days. Beats the heck out of today’s Januaries, I reckon.