As we ‘progress’ ever further into this strange time of lockdown, increasingly the past is becoming our new future.
Denied competition to get enthusiastic about we dig ever deeper into nostalgia. And the good thing about nostalgia is that – despite its not being as good as it used to...
Can it really be just a few months (spoiler: yes, it can) since many of us were aghast at World Athletics’ decision to trim formats to fit Diamond League meetings into a 90-minute television window.
In those pre-coronavirus days, the decision to defenestrate some beloved events – the 5000 metres,...
A strange thing happened when Track & Field News published its annual rankings for 1990. The number one in the men’s 1500 metres had never ranked in the top-10 before. Even more strongly, neither had number two; nor, for that matter, had number three.
Performance governs the rankings: Noureddine Morceli,...
You don’t have to dive deep into Australian world cross-country history to find yourself immersed in a stream of Steve Moneghetti statistics. From his first appearance in 1985 to his last in 2004, Moneghetti was the dominant force in our men’s teams.
Had the story of Australian participation been written...
Athletics can be one of the most democratic of sports, accessible to both the fastest, highest and strongest and the slowest, lowest and puniest.
Such is true of most sports, of course. Tennis is played both at the sublime Federer-Nadal-Williams level and as hit-and-giggle social doubles. Golf is Tiger Woods,...
One day at the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games, I watched on as the American 5000 metres representative, Duncan MacDonald, did a training session.
My billet was a few metro stations beyond the Olympic stadium. A relatively short run took me down to the stadium and Village precinct. I ran there...
O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is the 2000 Coen Brothers comedy about the adventures – misadventures, mostly – of three escapees from a chain gang on a quest to regain the proceeds of a robbery committed by one of them.
It is a satire loosely based on Homer’s epic Greek...
Remember when Australia ruled the world at men’s steeple? No: well, I don’t either. In fact, I would never have known of this brief domination had it not been for the coronavirus pandemic.
Until very recently, I had thought that the history of the men’s steeple was pretty much the...
There’s different ways you can look at Eliud Kipchoge’s latest world record, 2:01:09 in Berlin. But any way you look at it – it’s fast.
O tempora, o mores - oh what times, oh what customs - declaimed the Roman orator Cicero to his fellow senators in 63 BC, in a speech attacking a political rival. Or, to put it (very) loosely, things couldn’t get much stranger than this.
Oh yes they can. To cite...
