As Daley Thompson was completing the successful defence of his Olympic decathlon title in Los Angeles in 1984, I happened to be passing the desk of an Italian colleague, a long-time athletics journalist, who nodded towards the exhausted athletes littering the track after the concluding 1500 metres, and said sagely, ‘This is heavy gold’! […]
Edward Snowden and Dr Grigory Rodchenkov are whistle-blowers whose revelations were so explosive that they have become political refugees from their homeland, the USA and Russia respectively. Snowden was the internet tech wiz, working for the CIA and NSA (National Security Agency), who became increasingly alarmed at the degree of invasion of citizen privacy […]
I’ve mentioned my US colleague, Walt Murphy’s newsletter This Day in Track & Field a couple of times in the past. Walt has given me permission to reproduce a recent obituary about the extraordinary life of Joe Clark, immortalised by Morgan Freeman in the film, Lean on Me, but perhaps better known in athletics […]
When former IAAF President Lamine Diack was sentenced to four years in prison, two suspended, for corruption by a court in Paris last week, I was going to revisit the whole sorry saga; but, apart from the fact that the 87 years old Diack is never going to get banged up (he’s already been […]
Saturday, September 19 is the 98th anniversary of the birth of Emil Zátopek – and, coincidentally that of his wife, Dana Zátopková who only died a few weeks ago. Emil died in 2000. As you will doubtless know, the couple won Olympic gold medals within a half an hour of each other, Emil in […]
Here’s a piece of arcana which should be of particular interest to runners and athletics aficionados of my generation, ie anyone over 60. I was browsing my bookshelves of Saturday evening, as one tends to do with increasing frequency whenever the Plague is stalking the pubs and restaurants, which would be my natural weekend […]