One of the greatest regrets of my four decades of writing about athletics is that I never got to meet Aussie miler John Landy, who has died at Castlemaine, Victoria, aged 91. I should have tried harder, because Landy was a seminal figure in my formative years as an athletics fan and aspiring runner; […]
We should, at least give the Russians some credit for ingenuity; they came up with a new excuse for the positive dope test on the 15 year ice-skating phenomenon, Kamila Valieva, currently competing at the winter Olympics in Beijing. Valieva failed a dope test taken at a competition on Boxing Day (an arcane feast, […]
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 […]