IAAF’s sellout to Qatar was the first leg of a double which sees the 2021 follow-up take place in Eugene, Oregon, home of NikeWhen Adam Gemili walked towards his blocks in lane seven for his heat of the men’s 200m at the IAAF world championships in Doha on Sunday night, he looked up and waved to friends and family in the grandstand. They wouldn’t have been hard to spot among a crowd estimated at around 1,000 scattered around a stadium built for 40,000.On perhaps the worst weekend for athletics in the sport’s long history, there seemed no end to the ways being found to insult the people who actually do the running, jumping and throwing. All the poisons to have...
The IAAF president knows the next four years could make or break the sport as interest declines despite the presence of stars such as Mondo Duplantis, Noah Lyles and Dina Asher-SmithHere is a challenge for anyone with 53 seconds to spare – Google “6.05m slow motion pole vault”. Then try to stop your jaw hitting the floor as the Swedish teenage athlete Mondo Duplantis soars skyward, jackknifes his body, dances his hands up the pole, and flips – just! – over a height greater than a double decker bus. The new super slow-motion footage of his feat at the 2018 European championships in Berlin has been seen 4.5 million times on Twitter in the three weeks alone. The twist in...
A new book blows out of the water the theory that the key to sport success is relentless practice and focus from an early ageThis column comes from the sleepy Austrian town of Götzis, where Katarina Johnson-Thompson has obliterated a world-class heptathlon field, winning four of the seven disciplines. Her event is a supreme test of speed, strength, stamina and technical skill. Yet Johnson-Thompson did not start out wanting to be an athlete. Instead, while still in nappies, she began taking ballet classes. Then, later, she became obsessed with football, kicking about with friends outside her house in Liverpool while wearing a Steven Gerrard top. Only when she was older did she focus on track and field.I mention this because...
The South African’s challenge to the IAAF’s testosterone rules could be as profound and far-reaching as the Bosman rulingIt is just one case, brought by just one athlete, against a single organisation. But Caster Semenya’s challenge to the IAAF’s testosterone rules for female athletes, which begins on Monday at the court of arbitration for sport, may yet be as far-reaching and profound as the Bosman ruling.It is not only that the court holds the career of the brilliant Olympic 800m champion in its hands. That, alone, is a weighty enough responsibility. But it also knows that its ruling, which will be announced next month, will be pored over by other organisations trying to wade through the murky waters where gender,...
From Chris Froome’s breakaway in the Giro d’Italia to an epic Wimbledon showdown, my year featured a number of breathtaking highlightsWhen the New York columnist Jimmy Cannon was starting out in journalism, the playwright Damon Runyon gave him some impeccable advice: “The best way to be a bum and make a living is to write about sport.” The game has changed in the intervening 80 years, but Runyon’s words still hold true. So as 2018 comes to an end, here is this bum’s favourite memories of the sporting events he witnessed at first hand … Continue reading...