Team GB’s flag carriers for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics opening ceremony unveiled

Team GB has announced a 'Little and Large' duo as our flag bearers for the Tokyo opening ceremony tomorrow. Sailor Hannah Mills, who is 5ft 2in tall, received the honour alongside rower Moe Sbihi – a giant at 6ft 8in. She said it was an 'emotional' moment when she was told that she had been chosen for the role. The pair were first nominated by their teammates before British Olympic Association officials made the final decision. Tokyo 2020 organisers had […]

July 1, 2021

Sir Mo Farah fails to qualify for Tokyo Olympics after missing 10,000m time

Sir Mo Farah will not be competing at the Tokyo Olympics after he missed his final attempt to qualify for the 10,000m event. The four-time champion missed the qualifying time in an invitational 10,000m at the British Athletics Championships to suffer a devastating blow in Manchester. Farah needed to go under 27 minutes 28 seconds at Manchester Regional Arena to book his place on the plane to Tokyo ahead of Sunday night’s deadline. But he clocked 27 minutes 47 seconds […]

March 8, 2021

Adam Peaty’s coach Mel Marshall: If someone tells me NO, I’m up for a fight

Ask Mel Marshall the secret of her success and the coach of the world’s best swimmer will tell you straight. “I’ve just never seen boundaries,” she said. “I’m like ‘impossible is nothing’. If someone tells me ‘no’, I’m up for a fight.” Marshall has coached Adam Peaty since he turned up at the City of Derby swimming club as a 14-year-old. He has become the fastest human in history at breaststroke and four months from now defends his 100 metres […]

February 9, 2021

‘Entirely my decision’: Athletics boss quits months out from Olympics

Athletics Australia chief executive Darren Gocher has quit months out from the Olympics and ahead of the merger of the sport with Little Athletics. Gocher, who has been CEO for three years, will work through until the end of April. He insists the decision to resign was his and he was not pushed out the door. Outgoing Athletics Australia CEO Darren Gocher.Credit:Getty Images “It was entirely my decision. Ahead of the merger [of Athletics Australia and Little Athletics] in October […]

January 26, 2021

Don’t let us jump the vaccine queue: Australian track stars

Australia’s top runners say athletes should not be able to jump the vaccine queue for their once-every-four-year chance to compete at the Olympics. Rising middle-distance star Stewart McSweyn and Brett Robinson, who on Tuesday night won his second national 10,000-metre title when he won the Zatopek, said sport should appreciate its place in the priority of life and wait in line for vaccinations. “It’s a hard one because at the end of the day we are sport and there are […]

January 22, 2021

London Marathon ‘optimistic’ record 50,000 runners will participate in October

Runners participate in the 2019 London Marathon “And that’s what the London Marathon has done over the last 40 years and that’s absolutely what we hope to deliver on 3 October 2021.” Mr Brasher said “human beings want to be together, we want to celebrate, it’s part of what most human beings want to do, whether it’s at festivals, whether it’s at a pub, whether it’s at a sports event, that camaraderie, that feeling of being at one, even with […]

October 9, 2020

Joshua Cheptegei, Nike and the rise of technology in running

The ghost of Bekele’s 2005 effort then, in the form of neon green lights, failed to escape Cheptegei’s metronome-like rhythm, but now, with Tokyo on the horizon, a debate over technology and fairness lingers. “The main thing for me is I’m happy with what I wear,” explains Jake Wightman, a New Balance athlete who ran the second fastest British 1,500m of all time in Monaco two months ago. “I never feel like I’m at a disadvantage because the spikes I […]

October 3, 2020

Brendan Foster hails Blitz spirit of London for not giving up on Marathon

Brendan Foster has hailed the Blitz spirit of organisers in refusing to surrender to the pandemic and pressing ahead with tomorrow’s London Marathon. Every major city marathon from Berlin to Chicago, Boston to New York, has been called off in this coronavirus-blighted year. Yet London has found a way to stage an elite race in a bio-secure bubble in the nation’s capital – and even got Mo Farah to run as a pacemaker for Brits in search of an Olympic […]

September 13, 2020

‘I’m black and I’m the best there is’: Freeman’s race was all about race

Twenty years later, Cathy Freeman still sits at the end of the track in quiet bewilderment. She remains shocked, not only at what she did but what people thought of what she did. Now, 20 years on, she has a skimming appreciation of the enormity of what she did. The least of it was to win a footrace. Cathy Freeman, with documentary director Laurence Billiet and co-director and choreographer Stephen Page. Like Adam Goodes before her, Cathy Freeman decided to […]

August 6, 2020

London Marathon 2020 will be for elite runners only as organisers abandon mass-participation plans

The 2020 London Marathon will not be a mass-participation event, organisers have announced, and will instead be open only to elite runners. The race route has been redrawn to entail 19.8 laps of St James’ Park before finishing on the Mall, and spectators will not be allowed to attend. The event director, Hugh Brasher, said in a latter to runners that he had little choice in the current climate of the coronavirus pandemic. “We had hoped that by moving our […]

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