Call me when the season starts: By Len Johnson

It’s Olympic year. According to the calendar, the Australian domestic season has started. We’ve had three meetings – Brisbane, Newcastle and Adelaide, the latter the first of the ‘big four’ meetings making up the Australian Athletics Tour.

So when is the action going to start? According to the hype, we are meant to be experiencing amazing at about this point. In reality, we don’t seem to be experiencing much of anything.

Thus far, if I’m counting correctly, three meetings have produced a measly two Olympic A-standard performances. And one of those was to Sally Pearson in the 100 metres in Brisbane, one she didn’t need (even if the season desperately did, and does), the other to Alana Boyd in the pole vault in Adelaide (Boyd likewise already had the standard).

Granted, Brisbane and Newcastle were never going to be stand-out meetings, the former with its strong focus on relays (and let’s gloss over the results there) and the latter robbed of some of its traditional middle-distance strength by being a week before the higher-priority Adelaide meeting.

To be fair, too, Adelaide was better than it looked. Heat, dust and swirling winds made conditions difficult, and the performances by Kelly Hetherington in the 800 metres, Georgie Clarke in the 5000 and Youcef Abdi, to name three, were far superior than the times indicate.

The fact remains, though, that we are four weeks away from the Olympic selection trials and three meetings have produced an average of 0.66 A-standards per meeting. Even adding all the B-standards to the list – two to Pearson in the Adelaide sprints and one to Dani Samuels in the discus – does little to brighten the overall picture.

Of course, a number of our best athletes have already earned Olympic nomination through their performances at last year’s world championships. Perhaps everyone else is waiting for the big Sydney (18 February) and Melbourne (2-3 March) meetings to stake their claims to places on the London team.

I hope so, but that might leave very few athletes to name after the selection trials. The only automatic selections for the team are trials winners who achieve the A-standard at the trials, achieved it in Daegu, or have achieved it on two other occasions within the qualifying period.

Recent experience suggests Australia will ultimately select every A-qualified athlete, but should current trends continue the domestic season is more likely to dumbfound than amaze us.

It’s all a far cry from the pre-Sydney 2000 domestic season. Things got under way a little earlier then, to accommodate the fact that the national championships were held at the end of February (though that is only a week earlier than this year’s trials). The championships were the first event conducted at Stadium Australia, too, which gave people extra motivation to be on their game early.

The 2000 season got under way in Canberra on 15 January with a meeting which produced no fewer than 21 A-standards from 20 athletes (Patrick Johnson got two).

Among the highlights, Lauren Hewitt defeated Melinda Gainsford-Taylor and Cathy Freeman over 200 metres, with all three bettering the A-standard; Tamsyn Lewis (now Manou) ran her personal best 1:59.21 in beating Georgie Clarke in the 800; Johnson ran 10.21 in his heat of the 100 then beat Matt Shirvington, 10.15 to 10.24, in the final; Patrick Dwyer ran 45.16 in the 400 and Kris McCarthy broke through with a 1:45.77 win in the 800; Peter Burge won the long jump with 8.09 metres.

The pre-Athens 2004 year opened on a lower key in Perth, where pole vaulters Dmitry Markov and Kym Howe got A-standards. In Brisbane a fortnight later, Markov (again), Paul Burgess, Casey Vincent (400) and Justin Anlezark all got A-standards and in Canberra, the third meeting that year, Vincent again got the 400 A and led Clinton Hill, John Steffensen and Dwyer under 46 seconds.

By 2008, and the lead in to the Beijing Olympics, the trend to fewer early-season A-qualifiers was starting to assert itself, but there were still more A and B-standards achieved in the first three meetings of the season than so far in 2012.

 So what’s happening here? It’s hard to say without an exhaustive study, but could it be that more athletes and coaches are relying on the fact that A-standards ultimately mean selection and that, when it comes down to it, they can be achieved in Japan, the USA or Europe as readily as Sydney, Melbourne, Perth or Adelaide.

I hope that is not the case, because if it is, our Australian season is being diminished. Let’s hope the remainder of the season, starting with Hobart this weekend, brings a surge in fierce competition, and Olympic qualifying performances.

Oh, and we can't let the week go by without 'welcoming' another athlete to the Australian Olympic marathon twilight zone. Lauren Shelley finished eighth in last Sunday's Osaka marathon in 2:35:57, another to fall in between what the IAAF regards as an A-standard (2:37:00) and the Australian 'A-standard' (2:32:00).