Italy’s spectacular summer scuppered golden dreams in the men’s 4x100m, while the women’s team took bronzeThe mixed relays may have finished last weekend, but what a lot of conflicting emotions for the eight British sprinters who won medals in the 4x100m on Friday night.The men won the silver behind Italy, the women the bronze behind Jamaica and USA, and between them the British athletes ran the gamut from joy to frustration, anger and regret. Dina Asher-Smith was among the disappointed; she had hoped to win more than one bronze at these Games. It was not her injured hamstring that was nagging at her, but the sense that the relay team should have done better. Related: Laura Muir keeps faith and...
Ben Stokes produced two match-winning innings but Dina Asher-Smith made history and Lewis Hamilton got title No 6Stride by stride, second by second, Dina Asher-Smith had a 2019 for the ages. To win one world athletics medal would have been staggering enough. To become the first Briton to leave with three from the same championships was a monumental statement of intent. Best of all was her 200m gold in 21.88sec, a time so fast it smashed her national record and made her the first British woman to win a global sprint title. Further silvers in the 100m and 4x100m highlighted the potential for more glory at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. No wonder Sebastian Coe has predicted she will be the...
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...
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...