A Column By Len Johnson

Len Johnson wrote for The Melbourne Age as an athletics writer for over 20 years, covering five Olympics, 10 world championships and five Commonwealth Games.

He has been the long-time lead columnist on RT and is one of the world’s most respected athletic writers.

He is also a former national class distance runner (2.19.32 marathon) and trained with Chris Wardlaw and Robert de Castella among other running legends. He is the author of The Landy Era.

New York offers one of the strongest women’s fields ever assembled.
It’s too early for most of us to be thinking about the Brisbane 2032 Olympic marathons just yet (though it’s worth pointing out that new men’s world record holder Kelvin Kiptum will be ‘only’ 32 years old then).
At the past two world championships, Eugene22 and Budapest23, there were 108 places available in the 10,000 metres. Guess how many were filled by Australians? One, just one. A big ‘come on down’ to Jack Rayner who ran the 10,000 in Oregon. In Budapest, there were no Aussies.
Australian athletics has been impacted by the tyranny of distance – and the tyranny of seasons – through 2023. And that won’t change as we enter 2024.
There’s a lot of noise about shoes right now, a rumble that only intensified when Tigst Assefa ran that other-worldly women’s marathon world record 2:11:53 in Berlin. In case you missed it, Assefa was shod in the very latest adidas super-shoe.
There’s more than a touch of ping-pong – more formally, table tennis – in the relationship between Linden Hall, Jessica Hull and the Australian women’s national record for 1500 metres.
Is Matthew Denny now Australia’s best male athlete? Undeniably so, I’d say, a judgement that was true even before he burnished already considerable laurels by winning the discus at last weekend’s (16-17 September) Diamond League final. Victory merely confirmed his status.
Well, there you go. Just a couple of days before the Diamond League final in Eugene this weekend DL organisers announced a new system of wildcard entries.Seemingly moments later again, out come the entries. Guess what? A number of US athletes who have shown scant interest in the diamond league all year long are suddenly in the fields for the final, that’s what. The most notable? Athing Mu in the 800 metres.
Sometimes it is only in defeat that you realise how good an athlete is. In the case of Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, that should be how great.
More colloquially, Zurich’s meeting has been dubbed “the Olympics in one day.” A touch pretentious, yes, but when you’re there, the description so often seems apt. Like the night three world records went in 45 minutes, for example, just one of many such nights in the fabled history of the Zurich Weltklasse.
                   

Brilliantly

SAFE!

2022