No city can match this: By Len Johnson

Interclub competition is the neglected child of Australian athletics. Occasionally we need a reminder of what an asset it is.

My memory was given just such a jolt recently when I went searching for a quote about interclub which I had found while researching The Landy Era.

The quote came from an article in The Argus, the Melbourne daily which ceased publication in 1957. Fired up with pre-Melbourne 1956 Olympic fever, the paper had sent a columnist down to check out the opening round of the 1953-54 inter-club athletic season.

Describing the “weekly, non-stop athletic carnival,” the writer asked readers: 

“Imagine, if you can, trying to watch: 

“A gruelling finish to a mile race; A mad dash over a 120-yd flight of hurdles; Breathtaking pole-vaults; Heroic, well-timed pole-vaults; Prodigious flights by the long-jump men.

“It happens, right here in Melbourne,” our columnist assured us. “And at 1:30pm today, it will begin again.”

Acclaiming the “scope and organisation of the Victorian Amateur Athletic Association’s weekly interclub contests”, our scribe continued:

“No city, anywhere in the world, conducts such complex, regular meetings, with so many athletes in action at the same time.”

(You can access the whole article, complete with pictures, at http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/23310897 .)

Apart from minor quibbles - the correspondent being so excited he mentioned pole vault twice – the picture is substantially the same today. Oh, and there’s women, too. Back then, women’s competitions, indeed women’s associations, were separate. If readers of The Argus wanted to see women back in 1953, they either sought out reports of the women’s competitions, or turned to other, more salacious sections of the newspaper.

There is one other substantive difference, too, and I didn’t have to go to the archives to bring that one to mind. The prompt came later the very same day when Tamsyn Manou (Lewis) happened to come into the same cafe at which a group of us were having lunch.

Three days of warm spring weather in Melbourne had been replaced by the sort of classical, grey day, accompanied by persistent drizzle, which gives our city a poor reputation climate-wise.

“Just in time for interclub tomorrow,” Tamsyn remarked, a reminder not just of Melbourne’s mercurial spring weather but also of the fact she is a regular competitor in club competition. It’s part of her training.

Back in 1953, any visitor to interclub would have seen some of the country’s best athletes. John Landy ran the mile on the day The Argus reporter attended. The Monday paper, two days later (no Sunday editions then) carried two back-page reports of the competition along with a picture of a competitor in the hop, step and jump (triple jump).

There was a further report of a national junior record in women’s high jump in Brisbane. That made three stories on athletics on the back page of a major metropolitan daily. Oh, happy day.

In fact, all the way through to the 1980s, regular club competition was part of the diet of all Australia’s international stars. Landy, Betty Cuthbert, Marlene Matthews, Herb Elliott, Pam Kilborn, Graham Crouch, Raelene Boyle – you’d be likely to see all of them out in their club colours. As for Ron Clarke, his racing program for Glenhuntly was similar to his international program – prodigious.

Nor was it just club competition. There were interstate matches – Victoria v New South Wales, Victoria v South Australia – as well as a surprising number of invitational meetings. The sponsored international meeting is not a recent phenomenon.

Athletes did not ignore their training. The training bloc is likewise not a recent invention, not even the high altitude training bloc. A report of a half-mile race won by Ralph Doubell mentions that he had just returned from four weeks’ training at Falls Creek.

No, the model up until fairly recently was simply that athletes competed more often. Now, the model seems to be one in which competition is something that gets in the way of training.

It’s a mistake to over-simplify comparisons. There’s also a danger that, in looking back, we tend to examine what champions did and try to apply it across the board.

Arguably, though, our very best performed athletes still do compete often. Cathy Freeman certainly did; Sally Pearson had a full domestic season this year, as did Mitch Watt.

It didn’t do any of them any harm. Maybe there’s a lot to be said for competing more often. Melbourne’s (and Sydney’s, and Brisbane’s) weekly, non-stop athletic carnival is still running.