Well here we are, 2024 and kicking it off with your fortnightly hit of running and smack talk. Happy New Year and thanks for your readership. To crack into 2024 and get the ball rolling on our biggest issue this year, Beatrice Chebet’s new 5km World Record is covered off, there are some outlandish predictions, reasonable expectations and please don’t happen’s to read through. Brett, Joel and friends have put down their New Year’s resolutions and finally there’s a deep dive into what running has to do to put itself in the minds of the public coming into 2024 plus all the usual segments. Enjoy!
Main Show
Brett and Joel are no different to your office worker folk and took the fortnight off recording but not running. Brett visited ACT, NSW, the surf coast in VIC and then Melbourne in his 156km’s in between Christmas and New Years and is on track for a good week in the bank this week. Joel has also had some good running including a notable solo threshold while putting less frequent flyer miles in. They should both be back in the Grattan House office to check on me next week.
Izzi Batt-Doyle Interview
Patreons were treated to a late Christmas present with an early release of this interview. Izzi talks about her plans for the first few months of 2024 (hint: Falls Creek, hitting the track a bit more), transports us to her living room to see what’s on for Netflix and chill and adds a bit more colour to her Font Romeu and whole European extravaganza.
It’s technically last year’s news but Kenya’s Beatrice Chebet set a new 5 km World Record of 14:13 in Barcelona last weekend. This result bettered both the previous women’s only and women in a mixed race records of 14:19 and 14:25 respectively. Much like Valencia is the place to be for fast marathon times, Barcelona, specifically the Cursa dels Nassos event, is the place for fast 5 km times with the previous record, 14:19 by Ejegayehu Taye, being set there alongside Berihu Aregawi’s 12:49 record back in 2021.
It’s likely Beatrice Chebet rings a bell for most of you but for some of us, it’s tricky keeping up with exactly which East-African female is currently dominating the global scene. As far as 5km’s are concerned though, Beatrice Chebet is certainly a name worth remembering and will only continue to get better (she’s only 23). As a junior she won World XC gold and African and World titles in the 5000m. Her first overseas flight was to the 2018 Junior World Champs which she won. Imagine trying to top that experience each overseas flight?!
As a senior, she has pretty much done the same thing if not more. The gold from World XC at Bathurst went home in her suitcase, she has a silver from 2022’s Eugene world titles and a bronze from Budapest in the 5000m to add to her gold in the African titles, Commonwealth games and World Road Running Champs, all across either 5000m or 5 km. The only thing missing off her resume so far is that senior 5000m gold medal at a World Championship and of course an Olympic medal. Hard to get that though if you weren’t selected for Tokyo and were only 16 when Rio happened.
To qualify her run at Barcelona even further, she beat the previous record holder, Ethiopia’s Taye, by almost eight seconds this year. The road mark is now only 13 seconds off the best 5000m track time held by Gudaf Tsegay. Chebet is third on that list only a smidge behind Tsegay and her fellow country woman and 1500m and Mile world record holder Faith Kipyegon. 2023 was one of the best years ever for 5000m with 6 out of the 10 fastest times being recorded so for Chebet to have muscled her way up to third is pretty darn good for someone who’s only been competing in senior ranks for a couple of years.
For all her success at a young age though, Chebet’s first Diamond League appearance shows she is human. Finishing last at a 3000m in 2018, Chebet was quoted here saying how Hellen Obiri provided advice that she should ‘make 5000m my main race… that losing wasn’t an issue but how I will pick up and dust myself off to continue’. Fast forward to 2022 and into 2023, Chebet hasn’t had to dust herself off much having won more than half of her races at 5 km distance whether on road or track. If Faith Kipyegon continues her trend of targeting the 1500m at the Olympics in Paris (she’ll be aiming for her third consecutive gold if she wins in Paris) then Beatrice Chebet will be aiming to go one better than her mentor Hellen Obiri, who has fallen short at Tokyo & Rio in the 5000m, and win gold at Tokyo. When she does, you’ll know her name of course.
Last issue we looked back on some great highlights for 2023. Would we have expected those back in January? Probably some of them. Others not so. Of course there’ll always be great results but who will be achieving them! That’s where the money is in professional sports gambling. Not that running is big in that space. But hey, it’s January 2024, prime time to throw a few accusations, predictions and what-not’s out there because by July or September you’ll likely have forgotten how accurate these are. If they come true though, call me Matt Groening because I’ll be the greatest fortune teller since The Simpsons. Please Australian running scene, give me your palms and let me read your future…
Reasonably likely to see:
Brett runs 61:high in a half marathon either overseas or in Australia. If it’s in Australia there’ll be talk of him claiming the All-comers record (61:11, held by Pat Carroll, set in 1994!) but the conditions, either weather or race-wise, will be against him.
A top-10 finish in the Olympics from any of our athletes across the 1500-Marathon. Could go even bolder here and say top 5 when you consider Olli Hoare, Jess Hull, Linden Hall, Stewy McSweyn, Sinead, Bretty-boy, Ky Robinson, Morgan McDonald will all be peaking.
Sydney Marathon becomes a World Marathon Major in perfect weather. The female (2:23:14) and male (2:07:03) all-comers record will go down as well. And before you say, isn’t the Sydney marathon course too tough for that… well, these records are already set on old Sydney marathon courses so it is definitely reasonably likely… if the weather is right.
Manifesting some optimism with these predictions:
Kipchoge and Kiptum go head to head at the Olympic marathon for 35km until one of them, I’m going with Kiptum, looks deep into the other’s eyes and blasts off to win in 2:04:low with a 58 minute second half.
The Minister for Sport subsides super shoes costs for all runners. They do it for solar panels, why not shoes right?
Cam Myers runs 3.30 for the 1500m.
Gen Gregson sharpens up her endurance-speed with a crack at the current longest standing record in distance running for Australia, Kerryn McCann’s 67:48 set in 2000, and breaks it by a handful of seconds in front of her home crowd in Gold Coast.
Touch wood when reading these but there is every chance they could happen:
Australian athletes absolutely crush it at the Olympics but none of the athletes themselves out manoeuvre our swimming stars onto the back of a Weet Bix box.
The fight against athlete doping continues without any end in sight.
We don’t see any Australian Records set. The 800 (men and women’s), 1000m (women’s), 1500 (men and women’s), mile (womens), 2000 (men’s) all went down in 2023. The marathon records tumbled in 2022. Please don’t let these be the peak!
Sometimes dreams come true, hopefully it’s these ones:.
Sinead Diver finishes top 5 in the Olympics, recovers quickly and then runs sub 2:20 at Valencia to set a new Aussie record.
Jack Rayner, Brett and Joel all race each other at World Cross Country in Serbia. Joel trips early in the race, fights Old Joel off, and storms home to finish top 20.
Brett put his junior reporter hat on for this segment and asked some of his pals what their New Year's resolutions were for 2024. We’ll check back on these, along with my predictions from the crystal ball, in 12 months. The athlete who successfully keeps their resolution will win a 12 month free subscription to The Blue Line (it’s free already idiot) be the superior human being.
Dave McNeill - ‘No screens in bad at night.’
Georgia Griffith - ‘Non running: Be less polite. Running: Turn up to the start less stressed.’
Cam Myers - ‘Pass all my year 12 classes.’
Jess Stenson - ‘Get back into racing and prove my Garmin wrong (marathon prediction 2:43:28).’
Joel Tobin-White - ‘Not spread myself too thin and say no to things.’
Cara Feain-Ryan - ‘Spend less time on my phone and finish my uni degree.’
Matt Ramsden - ‘Have the lushest front lawn on the street.’
Sarah Billings - ‘Take more risks in races.’
Gen Gregson - ‘Stop playing on my phone before bed.’
Ryan Gregson - ‘Get a pool.’
Rose Davies - ‘Actually keeping a training diary instead of relying on Strava. Usually I start the year with one but then become lazy real quick.’
Cat Bisset - ‘Start a rival podcast and edge your (FTK) podcast out of the market.’
Linden Hall - ‘Be better at replying to messages after races and packing my lunch.’
Caitlin Adams - ‘Start journaling, recording not only running based reflections and goals but all life things too. Complete my prehab exercises and stretching regularly. Really need to get more flexible and work on some weaknesses in my ankles.’
Brett Robinson - ‘Eat veges.’
Jordy Williamsz - ‘Hit more greens (golf greens).’
Sinead Diver - Sinead was inspired by this very segment to trial a resolution this year and has chosen to follow the 30-day minimalism game. ‘I started today. I love the idea of simplifying things in life in general, but it’s also applicable to running - it doesn’t need to be complicated, keeping things simple is the best approach.’
Stewy McSweyn - ‘Me and my teammates get a clean run of health this year and can run to our potentials in Paris.’
If you haven’t picked your own resolution yet maybe you could copy one of these?!
Reading one of our trusty News Corp produced newspapers in the last fortnight left me feeling a little more bitter and twisted than normal. It featured the Top 50 Aussie sports stars of 2023. No prizes for guessing why I wasn’t pleased… there were no bloody Aussie runners in there!
Jess Hull had one of the best seasons and Gen Gregson, one of the most followed runners on Instagram and darling of athletics, had a ‘comeback’ in the marathon (even though her comeback was of a LL Cool J variety, ‘don’t call it a comeback, I’ve been here for years’) which was very inspirational. Sprinkle in some Jack Rayner domestic road running magic and I started to wonder ‘WTF do these athletes have to do to get noticed!’.
So what actually makes an Aussie sporting star then? How do our top runners get noticed by the mainstream media? Why does the most accessible sport to anyone have the least recognisable stars? Why can’t Google answer these questions for me?!
In trying to answer my own first question, an Australian sporting star is someone who excels at their sport (runners tick that box), endears themselves to the Australian public (ok, we can do better here) and consistently performs on the world stage (another tricky one for runners).
Our runners at the moment are excelling. Look at how many records have been set in the last 3-5 years across the track and roads. This current crop is not a weak batch. If they excelled anymore there would be media attention as to how they are doing it so well when others before obviously didn’t.
Endearing themselves to the public is an area to be worked on. Instagram and Strava are helping generate a following but something that is more an Australian market issue than a global issue might be the thing to solve. Major sporting codes in Australia (AFL, NRL, NBL, BBL, A-League) have passionate fans, members of the public, who live and die by their team results. Each team has superstars that garner a large following but overall I am an Essendon diehard, not a Zach Merrett man as much as I love Zach. Tennis and Golf are other sports that suffer from cutting through to the Australian public except for the big shows of Nick Kyrgios and Cam Smith. Can you name the fifth ranked Australian golfer or tennis player now? What about the fourth fastest female marathoner of 2023 for Australia? I’d imagine the responses would be flipped for readers of Golf Digest while any AFL Record readers would struggle with both but could name the fifth best player in any of the 18 teams.
So cutting through to the public without a team might be tricky but it’s still possible. Maybe we bring back Nitro Athletics and form teams for the domestic track season and then the domestic road running season. Possibly devise a bit of a fantasy coaching league on the internet, badda-bing badda-boom, hello endearment? Or maybe we just keep true to the process most athletes follow by posting on Instagram, Strava and being as available to the media as possible. The issue with capturing the general public, not just the running fanatics, attention is there is only a limited amount of minutes an average punter can attribute to consuming sports media (and I’m wasting some of that valuable time here!), hence, running needs to compete with either a better individualised product than AFL, NRL, cricket stars etc. (being more open to training sessions, pre-race and post-race interviews and hype, rivalries, smack talk, daily updates) or align themselves to the big codes with more of a team style product to leverage off the attention those sports already enjoy. The Essendon Football Club currently manages a wheelchair rugby team while the Adelaide Football Club used to manage an E-sports team. Why not a collaboration between Team Tempo and Adelaide Football Club, or MTC and Melbourne Football Club? That might invite a whole new audience to running who instead of supporting just Joel Tobin-White in his running, might be cheering on MTC v Team Tempo at Launceston the morning before Adelaide plays Melbourne in the AFL. Japanese running has had teams for years supported by corporates so there’s another avenue to investigate there. Overall, teams endear themselves to the public through loyalty, mateship, rivalries and easy to recognise merchandise. Three out of four of those elements are hard to create with just an individual so kudos to any training group in 2024 that tries to cut through to the public following that strategy.
The ability for our runners to have their performances overseas recognised in Australia is an even trickier problem. On one hand you have the successful swimming team bringing home medals while our athletics team fights hard for one or two (or maybe three or four this time with some optimism?!). A medal or two is great but in comparison to the swimmers it’s not good enough. That’s just the Olympics too. The results obtained at Diamond Leagues and World Marathon Majors among other random events need about thirty seconds to explain how good they are for the average sports fan. Is that too much to ask from the sports reporters at the nightly news? An extra thirty seconds to show how good Jess Hull is when she finishes third in a Diamond League race? Not every person will understand after an additional thirty seconds (do a quick check on how many people don’t understand cricket after having it shoved in their face every summer) but given enough education and time, the average fan will realise how good our stars are.
Heading into 2024 with these thoughts in mind for both our elite athletes and my fellow running fanatics, there is no better time to hit the accelerator, flick the NOS button and get the Australian athletes the media attention they deserve. There’s a marathon boom happening in Australia and the Olympics are coming up in seven months so get on the blower to every Tom, Dick and Harry and tell your friends about how good our stars are. This week’s fact (see below) demonstrates just how big the marathon boom is at the moment and so the least we could do is start to bump up our appreciation of our top runners. How good would it be if it weren’t just running nerds idolising our stars and the local parkrunners and average Joes and Janes all looked up to the Liam Adams’ and Lisa Weightman’s of this world.
In summary, an entry into the ‘Top 50 Sporting Stars of 2024’ for one of any of our runners would be nice but at the very least it’d be great to see more than a token appreciation of who won the Sydney, Melbourne or Gold Coast marathons in 2024. This all comes back to developing that storyline for each of our excelling athletes, endearing them to the public with Masterchef style emotional stories or rivalries, and sharing the bejesus out of if across all forms of media for longer than thirty seconds. So yeah, maybe that’s what we have to do to get our athletes noticed by News Corp.
Good news first, two Kenyan athletes were suspended for doping with one, Maurine Chepkemoi, being a classic case of her results not stacking up and then getting busted. Bad news now, Spain’s Anti-Doping agency and WADA have both been called out by a Spanish sports website for improper practices surrounding punishments, investigations and retrospective exemptions for prohibited substances.
Japan’s most famous Ekiden relays were run and won this past week. If you’re interested in learning more, head here, but essentially Aoyama Gakuin University won in course record time which is kind of a big deal.
Garmin rep, Australian representative trail runner and guest on Q&A Session Sixty Three, Nathan Pearce, just put together a mightily impressive training camp in New Zealand. While you were getting through your Christmas leftovers Nath ran 104.4km with 5260m vert and set a handful of CR’s on Strava including a 15:38 parkrun in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. PLUS some more running this week. Check out the elevation in the 5th kilometre of this run… (422m!)
Tasmanian fans were gifted a treat with Jess Hull and Linden Hall attending the Devonport leg of the Tasmanian Athletic League’s summer carnivals. With both coming off a 125m handicap they weren’t high in the results but Hull did pip Hall by almost ten seconds. Hull then followed up at Burnie in another mile that saw the winner and second place separated by only .38 of a second but $2400 in prizemoney. Ooooh, that hurts…
The boffins at Ausrunning updated their website at some point in December and now feels like an appropriate time to give their facts some air time. Hence, this segment should really be called Fraser’s STOLEN Fact for this week.
In 2023 there were 39,433 performances by Australians in a marathon last year. This is an increase of 16,017 performances from 2022 (23,416) and represents by far, the biggest single increase (almost 70%) in one year of performances. The caveat here is that the website only measures performances so don’t skip to thinking almost 40,000 Australians ran a marathon (it’s probably closer to 30-35,000 which is still a lot more than any other year). Before we pat ourselves on the back for getting in on the running boom, we still have some way to go before we achieve those numbers, with the help of international tourists of course, in our-hopefully-soon-to-be World Major, Sydney marathon.
On top of this massive increase, the proportion of males/females running marathons stayed relatively the same across 2022 and 2023. In 2022 the split was 73.7/26.3 (%) and in 2023 it was 73.5/26.5 (%) which given such a large increase in performances is pretty interesting unless my intuition on statistics and group dynamics is out of whack. Surely a fact like this screams ‘Hey, why don’t we help more women get involved in marathons’ to our big events to help increase participation, women do after all make up 50% of the population.
January 7th: Cadbury Marathon. Hobart, Tasmania. Less than 50 entries remained a week out from the event so the marathon boom is well and truly continuing into 2024. The Dubai Marathon is also on this date. $80K USD prizemoney for men’s and women’s winner.
January 14th: Houston Marathon. The elite field hasn’t been released yet but my spidey senses tell me Pat Tiernan might be there. Check this link in a week.
February 4th: Marugame International Half Marathon. Jack Rayner and Riley Cocks ran Australia’s 1st and 4th fastest half marathons for the year 2023 at this event last year.
February 10: Adelaide Invitational (next Chemist Warehouse Open event). Buy tickets here.
February 15: Maurie Plant Meet. Australia’s only ‘World Athletics Continental Tour Gold Meet’. Buy tickets here.
This division of Grattan House welcomes any and all reader feedback. If you want more or less of something, want something investigated, or Jordy Williamsz hasn’t dealt with your complaint in a timely manner, please enquire at theblueline@grattanhouse.com.
My thoughts on making running more popular with the general population; the thing that helped me become more invested in the professional running scene was running myself on a regular basis, understanding the numbers and having the realization that the people running at a professional level are just regular people with training and determination. For the first two points, parkruns and club runs are the perfect place to find regular people who love running and are passionate about it but don't pay any attention to the professional scene, how can those people be reached? On the third point, rather than just focusing on times, humanizing those racing could help people become more invested, take Gen's journey as an example of how seeing the mundane, day to day stuff helped many people buy in and follow her story.