Home A Column By Len Johnson

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.

Clark was a month short of his nineteenth birthday when he led the final of the men’s Olympic 400 metres into the final straight of the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1984. The length of that straight later he had missed an Olympic medal by an agonising four one-hundredths of a second.
Athletics Australia have announced the teams for the world cross-country championships in Belgrade. And, on International Women’s Day no less, the selectors have decided to send precisely half a women’s senior team. Actually, that’s a mis-speak. There is no such thing as half a team: the decision is to send...
What a race that was last week (Thursday 22). Cameron Myers leads home a stellar 1500 metres field - including 2022 world champion Jake Wightman – runs the fastest time ever by an Australian man on Australian soil, leads six other Australians and four internationals, under 3:40.c
It’s a tough gig in athletics proposing new things. People all over don’t embrace change. Not all athletes are runners. But the overwhelming majority of them will run a mile away from a change. This is not necessarily a bad thing: to run 100 metres in under 10 or 11...
Time is marked out in finite units – seconds, minutes, hours, days, etc. But neither time nor events seem to work out that way. Sometimes nothing much seems to be happening. Other times everything seems to be happening at once. That’s the way it’s been for the week beginning Sunday...
It won’t be easy making the team to represent Australia in the men’s middle-distance events at the World U20 championships in Lima, Peru later this year.
It’s early in an Olympic year. An unknown young man breaks through at 800, running 1:45.77. A scarcely better-known young woman breaks the national record in the 100 metres, speeding down the straightaway in 11.10 seconds.
This writer has long adjusted himself to the fact of not being lord of his own household. Even so, being told not to sit in any chair I chose at the empty kitchen table was a confronting reminder of my status. That it was because one of the world’s greatest marathoners had recently occupied it took a little longer to sink in.
Someone recently had the temerity to suggest that this column lives too often in the past. We could respond that there’s a lot more history in the past than there is in the present. And who knows the future anyway? But fair comment we replied and since then have tried to avoid the past as much as possible.
Since assuming the leadership of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe has repeatedly championed the need for change.
                   

Brilliantly

SAFE!

2022