Prior to retiring as chief football correspondent for an international news agency five years ago, a close friend asked if I knew who John White was. Now, it may be a function of my great age, rather than my knowledge of football history, but, ‘Sure,’ I replied, ‘he was the Spurs’ footballer killed by […]

  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, […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  Two years after Paavo Nurmi won what would turn out to be the last cross country race (so far) at the Olympic Games, in Paris 1924, the Inter-Counties cross country championship was born, in Beaconsfield, west of London. During close to a century, the ‘inter-counties’ graduated to being second only to the English ‘national’ […]

  Dana Zátopková, the 1952 Olympic javelin champion died yesterday (Friday), aged 97, at home in Prague; thus ends one of the most famous families in Olympic history. Though an Olympic and twice European champion (and silver in the Rome Olympics 1960), as well as a world record holder, during most of her competitive life, […]

  The stable door was wide open, and the shoe manufacturers (of whatever stripe) just drove the coach and horses, loaded with super-shoes, right out; and there’s no catching them. And closing the door now, as World Athletics is reportedly about to do is going to serve no useful purpose. Publicity and profit-driven enterprise has […]

  Twenty four hours is a long time in marathon running. Barely was the ink dry on Eliud Kipchoge’s ‘aided’ sub-two hour run in Vienna on Saturday morning than his Kenyan compatriot Brigid Kosgei was writing her own impressive headline, breaking the seemingly inviolable women’s world record at the Chicago Marathon on Sunday morning, with […]

  If there were any doubts about the primacy of Eliud Kipchoge in modern marathoning, they were expunged in Vienna on Saturday morning when the Kenyan Olympic champion and world record holder ran the 42.195 kilometres in one hour, 59 minutes and 40.2 seconds, the historic first sub-two hour marathon. Granted it was done with […]

  It’s unlikely that Haile Gebrselassie ever finished 22nd in anything, unless maybe it was a Latin exam; but such has been the great leap forward in marathon times in recent years that Geb’s 2hr 04min 53sec victory here in Dubai 15 years ago – just 16 seconds off the then world record – doesn’t […]

  Around 25 years ago when the use of EPO, the most effective drug of choice for distance runners was spreading wider and wider, one of my oldest running friends, by now a successful coach took on a young athlete who was destined for great things. The pair shall remain nameless to avoid embarrassment but, […]

    DANA INGROVÁ-ZÁTOPKOVÁ EMIL ZÁTOPEK Born September 19, 1922 d Dana March 13, 2020 d Emil November 22, 2000 ENDING ON A KISS – Globerunner Blog ZATOPEK’S GREATEST VICTORY – Globerunner Blog

  ‘If you want to run, run a hundred metres; if you want to experience another life, run a marathon!’ I suspect that this example (of many) of Emil Zátopek’s peasant wit and intelligence came after his second marathon, a laboured run in torrid conditions at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 when, six weeks after […]

  Immediately after the hugely successful World Athletics Championships in Gothenburg 1995 – highlighted by Jonathan Edwards’ world record triple jumps and Michael Johnson’s double gold rehearsal for the following year’s Olympics – IAAF chief Primo Nebiolo declared that future championships were too important to be held in such a small venue. Sweden’s second city […]

  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; […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  You’ll recognise the face and the frame, and some of you, particularly those from north London might recognise the teeshirt. But what you might ask, is Saïd Aouita doing in a Muswell Hill Runners vest? Apologies for the shadow on the shirt, but the man responsible for it and for persuading Aouita to pose […]

  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 […]

  Two years after Paavo Nurmi won what would turn out to be the last cross country race (so far) at the Olympic Games, in Paris 1924, the Inter-Counties cross country championship was born, in Beaconsfield, west of London. During close to a century, the ‘inter-counties’ graduated to being second only to the English ‘national’ […]

  The potential Olympic reinstatement of Russia by the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA) from a suspension occasioned by the revelation of wholesale doping at the Sochi Olympics coincides uncomfortably with the 30th anniversary of the busting of Ben Johnson following the Olympic men’s 100 metres in Seoul. State sponsored doping meets free market enterprise doping, […]

  Remember Berlino? Of course you do; the Bear was the star of the show at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, even outshining his young pal, Jumpin’ Jack Flash from Jamaica (see below). Well, Berlino is in big trouble. His natural habitat is in grave danger! The iconic Olympiastadion in Berlin is under threat […]

It is a measure of how much long distance running has jogged its way into public consciousness over recent decades that the BBC Radio 4 national news on Saturday morning culminated – admittedly in a spot reserved for amusing items – with news that the organisers of the south coast of England race, the Brighton […]

Not necessarily, but I would hate to watch the run-off to decide, between her and her cousin Derartu. Having suffered the mind-numbing experience of watching a woman who can run 14min 11sec for 5000 metres, dawdle through a fifteen and a half minute race against women she knows she can beat, without once taking the […]

It’s been gratifying to get a bit of support for my views on the way Tirunesh runs her races. These folks at least seem to have read and understood the broader implications of my critique. To them and, of course to my detractors, I offer a story from a bygone age, the better to illustrate […]

ATHLETICS KENYA – TAKE TWO! Back in the bad old days of amateur athletics, when the federation was God, and even a penny earned for your exploits could get you banned as a ‘pro,’ there was a time-honoured device known as the ‘brown envelope behind the beer tent’. This was the jokey reference to being […]

  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 […]

  If there were any doubts about the primacy of Eliud Kipchoge in modern marathoning, they were expunged in Vienna on Saturday morning when the Kenyan Olympic champion and world record holder ran the 42.195 kilometres in one hour, 59 minutes and 40.2 seconds, the historic first sub-two hour marathon. Granted it was done with […]

  As usual, it was left to the athletes to save the day at the IAAF World Championships in Qatar. They almost made it! They certainly weren’t getting much if any help from the IAAF, whose major input was imposing a torrid antipathetic venue like Doha in the first place. And that decision was almost […]

  When the Ancient Greeks, who invented the Olympic Games as an afterthought to laying the ground rules of Drama, Philosophy, Ethics, Medicine, Astronomy, et al, wanted to venture a bit of soothsaying as well, they would despatch a slave to Delphi to consult the Oracle. We slaves to track and field athletics have a […]

Kenenisa Bekele went to the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon, on January 20, as the strongest possible favourite to win. He was so confident of his superlative form that he even predicted a world record, which was hardly outrageous, since he had come within six seconds of Dennis Kimetto’s 2.02.57 when winning in Berlin just over […]

  Did he fall, or was he pushed? The answer to both of those questions is an unequivocal yes. But the corollary to the second question, was it deliberate? leads us dangerously close to the field of conspiracy theory. I am of course talking about the fall of Kenenisa Bekele at the start of the […]

  (this is Part Two of a lengthy feature on the British-born Canadian phenomenon, Ed Whitlock If you have not read the first part, please go to: http://www.globerunner.org/01/extraordinary-mr-whitlock/) A year or two prior to the turn of the millennium, Ed Whitlock started seriously considering that he could be the first person over 70 (in his case […]

  Ed Whitlock ran the Toronto Waterfront Marathon two months ago in three hours, fifty six minutes and thirty three seconds. So far, so fun-run. Except for the fact that Ed Whitlock is 85 years old; and he broke the previous record for an 85 year old marathoner by 38 minutes, an improvement of close […]

Sixty years ago on Tuesday, Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four minute Mile in history. In the following three months, Bannister, now Sir Roger won two other internationally significant races, the Empire Games One Mile, and the European Championships 1500 metres. Of those three events, the sub-four Mile was by far the least important. Yet […]

Just over ten years ago, the teenage Eliud Kipchoge sprang into the public consciousness by holding off the celebrated Hicham El Guerrouj and Kenenisa Bekele to win the World 5000 metres title in one of the most exciting finishes in the history of track distance running. Despite a decade of superlative performances since then, including […]

For tenacity, Worknesh Degefa was the star of the show in the 21st anniversary race of the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon this morning, the Ethiopian enduring mid-race physical problems to clock 2.19.38 and win the women’s race. But for sheer opportunism, debutants Olika Adugna of Ethiopia and Eric Kiptanui of Kenya carried the day, outwitting […]

  Twenty four hours is a long time in marathon running. Barely was the ink dry on Eliud Kipchoge’s ‘aided’ sub-two hour run in Vienna on Saturday morning than his Kenyan compatriot Brigid Kosgei was writing her own impressive headline, breaking the seemingly inviolable women’s world record at the Chicago Marathon on Sunday morning, with […]

  If there were any doubts about the primacy of Eliud Kipchoge in modern marathoning, they were expunged in Vienna on Saturday morning when the Kenyan Olympic champion and world record holder ran the 42.195 kilometres in one hour, 59 minutes and 40.2 seconds, the historic first sub-two hour marathon. Granted it was done with […]

  Equilibrium is restored. Eliud Kipchoge, a man who can already lay claim to being the greatest male marathon runner in history underlined that status by finally adding the kudos of world record holder to his curriculum vitae. In the latest (and greatest?) of a string of world records on the race track that is […]

  So now we know how to beat the East Africans. Simply arrange for (close) to zero temperatures, high winds, and incessant, driving rain, as happened in the Boston Marathon on Monday. Of the dozen and a half East Africans, thirteen failed to finish; and from having no US women’s winner since 1985, five of […]

  In addition to seven men under two hours, five minutes, and four women under 2.20 – in both cases, more than the aggregate for all last year’s marathons – the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon last Friday landed the considerable coup of having world record holder Paula Radcliffe as a race commentator. As well as […]

  Thirty years ago, when the first wave of East African marathoners was giving suspicious hints of the tsunami of excellence to follow, the coach of the two outstanding Djibouti marathoners, Ahmed Salah and Jamah Robleh gave his trainees some advice which seemed counter-intuitive. Jacky Fournier suggested to Salah and Robleh that they should model […]

  So, Superman is not a big, chisel-jawed white Jewish guy from New York, after all*. He is a weedy little black guy from 3000 metres up in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya But one who runs long distances so fast it’s as if he is running down from that altitude to sea-level. His […]

  Earlier this week, the European Athletics Association passed a resolution for a wholesale reassessment of world records, just days before we are due to get a staged manipulation of a potential sub-two hour marathon. The implication of the former move, welcomed by IAAF President Seb Coe, is that too many of the current world […]

  Tamirat Tola of Ethiopia broke the course record in the Standard Chartered Dubai Marathon on Friday morning, with two hours, four minutes and eleven seconds. But the much heralded world record attempt by his star colleague, Kenenisa Bekele was strangled at birth when the multiple champion and world record holder fell at the start, […]

  Dana Zátopková, the 1952 Olympic javelin champion died yesterday (Friday), aged 97, at home in Prague; thus ends one of the most famous families in Olympic history. Though an Olympic and twice European champion (and silver in the Rome Olympics 1960), as well as a world record holder, during most of her competitive life, […]

Vĕra Čáslavská, Olympic hero, gymnastic innovator and national icon of resistance to totalitarianism has died in her home town of Prague, Czech Republic at the age of 74. Competing for the then Czechoslovakia, the peerless gymnast who introduced a dynamic athleticism into […]

Ron Clarke, one of the all-time greats of long distance running has died, far too early. Setting close to a score of world records, and taking huge chunks off the best times for the classic 5000 and 10,000 metres events in the 1960s, the Australian more than justifies his central place in a pantheon of […]

With the death of Chris Chataway on Sunday morning, British and world athletics has lost not only a champion and world record holder, but a Renaissance man. Sir Christopher Chataway was a world class athlete, broadcaster, government minister, businessman, and retired as Head of the Civil Aviation Authority. He also kept running throughout his life, […]

Alain Mimoun, one of those rare athletes, who was equally dynamic in and outside competition, has come to the end of the road which he so distinguished by his presence. The Algerian-born Frenchman, an Olympic gold and three-time silver medallist, died on Thursday evening, at the age of 92. Mimoun, whose original first name was […]

It was a tiny gesture, but it spoke volumes. Two years ago, an already frail and forgetful Emil Zatopek was introduced to the wife of a visitor to the Prague Marathon, of which Zatopek was patron. Prompted by his still vibrant wife, Dana – herself an Olympic gold medallist – Zatopek rose unsteadily from his […]

  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 […]

Apologies, dear readers, for the unexplained absence; but after the extraordinary success of London 2012, the only reasonable thing to do was to jump a jet immediately, and check out the next summer Olympic location – Rio de Janeiro. I was surprised to arrive at the tiniest international airport imaginable for a city of ten […]

A world record is, by its nature, extraordinary. But there are some performances which go beyond that limit, inspiring awe and even reverence. David Lekuta Rudisha produced such a performance in the London 2012 stadium on Thursday night, winning the Olympic 800 metres gold in a world record time of 1.40.91sec. And the Kenyan led […]

Following one particularly arduous conclusion to an Olympic decathlon – ie big guys running 1500 metres – an Italian colleague turned to me and said, ‘This is heavy gold’. What he meant was that here was a gold medal won, if not ten times over, then with rather more effort and application than it takes […]

When hundreds if not thousands of demonstrators were killed by the police, army and paramilitaries in the run-up to the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, the students, who were the principal victims could at least claim that they had a justified, even a noble cause, ie demanding to know why a country mired in poverty, […]

  Andrey Zvyagintsev may just be the most important film-maker to come out of Russia since Andrey Tarkovsky. But whereas Tarkovsky’s cinematic vignettes, suffused with unforgettable poetic imagery and symbolism often take a while to unfold in the mind, Zvyagintsev’s social commentary has a more immediate impact, including a firmly contemporary political one. Nevertheless, there […]

Leonard Cohen has died; and for those of us who came of age in the sixties, and found his melancholy words and music an effective counterbalance to the raucous rock that otherwise permeated our lives and threatened out eardrums, it is a sad day, and a reminder of our own fragile mortality. The man himself […]

Grief is a hard act to conjure, and sustain for well over an hour centre stage; and Kristin Scott Thomas, trying hard to disguise her dainty frame and fine features with a grubby shift and bedraggled hair, is clearly experimenting with a variety of registers in her interpretation of Sophocles’ Electra at the Old Vic. […]

Roman Polanski must have salivated when he first heard of the 2010 off-Broadway production of David Ives’s play Venus in Fur. Polanski, of course, couldn’t see the original production in person, since he is still subject to an arrest warrant in the USA, having absconded nearly forty years ago when faced with an almost certain […]

The conclusion of the Confederations Cup football in Brazil last Sunday has removed the immediate focus of popular anger at spendthrift authorities. But with ample time to go before next year’s World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics, whose cost has sparked these massive protests, the Brazilian authorities might do well to heed the lessons […]

Well, that was an experience. And I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone, but maybe not as long as a month, what with power cuts and water shortages, and dirty, noisy streets, and an intrusive police presence. No, pilgrims, I wasn’t in New Orleans, or even New York City; I was in Havana. The only […]

It’s that time of the year for folk tales and fairy stories, notably the one about the jolly, red-suited old guy with the white whiskers, who rides across the sky in a sleigh pulled by reindeer. In the unlikely event of telling that tale to someone who’d never heard of him, the listener might well […]

Ron Clarke, one of the all-time greats of long distance running has died, far too early. Setting close to a score of world records, and taking huge chunks off the best times for the classic 5000 and 10,000 metres events in the 1960s, the Australian more than justifies his central place in a pantheon of […]

Since my latest blog (see below) has provoked a lively, private exchange with several colleagues, I thought it was worth revisiting, on a couple of counts. Why, one asks is it so important that everyone in the race finishes, in order to validate any record. Another correspondent replies that there is no logic to it, […]

Just over ten years ago, the teenage Eliud Kipchoge sprang into the public consciousness by holding off the celebrated Hicham El Guerrouj and Kenenisa Bekele to win the World 5000 metres title in one of the most exciting finishes in the history of track distance running. Despite a decade of superlative performances since then, including […]

Oh dear! I watched Everest On The Track, the documentary of Roger Bannister and the four-minute Mile on BBC4 the other night with mounting interest, thinking that here we finally have a piece about sport, putting it into a political and historical context – with its preamble about World War Two and its potential for […]