Another fortnight is in the books for 2024 and the last one of Australia’s domestic track season. As such, the Australian Athletics Championships are on this weekend if you haven’t heard… of course you have, what do I take you for?! This issue exposes some of the storylines to keep an eye on over the weekend, recaps the World XC which happened as well (but of course you know that) and seeing as I have your attention in what is the busiest weekend of athletics I editorialised about opportunities for the growth of running that hopefully the big wigs in the industry find time to read over the weekend. Enjoy.
I’ve broken free from my shackles by innovating the podcast highlights section and bring it to you in a form all runners inherently understand, the Monday-Sunday training week.
On Monday’s in this fortnight you might’ve had an easy run where you probably listened to Spiked Up and learnt Rose recorded 10 hrs of screen time in one day or that Brian Fay ‘would’ve bitten someone's arm off’ to be signed with Nike. Maybe you went an extra ten minutes too because of all the chocolate you ate on Easter Sunday as well.
Tuesday was probably a session day. Did you drop a 2:57 rep like Sarah Billings? Or maybe you did 10*300’s like Joel? Or maybe you ran around 20 km’s on the track like Phil and Marc sometimes do?
On Wednesday in your mid week long run you felt you needed to catch up on the news of the week from the Hot Takes pair which led you to asking the question of what type of training do I need to do to get a result mentioned on Hot Takes. Well, the training talk special episode would have covered that for you.
If you’re a three session a week type of person, perhaps you thresholded on Thursday. Did you do it like Rose in week 1 or Rose in week 2 at Falls? Or are you more of a wobbly calf operator? Maybe you’re not even listening to a podcast in your threshold, you might be tuning into Grattan House's spotify playlist.
For Friday you caught up for an easy run with a mate, probably told them how good FTK and associated shows were this week. Same again at parkrun on Saturday but when the parkrun director asked you if you were training for the Olympics in those fast shoes of yours you said ‘nah, going off what Brett and Phil thought of the hilly Paris marathon course it’s probably not going to look that good on my Strava’.
Which brings you to Sunday, either a long run or a race like Marc! Altough is it really a race if you didn’t have a bib or timing chip on? How’d that happen? Well you’ll just have to join FTK Patreon to find out of course…
It was over a fortnight ago and the actual results were covered as always on Hot Takes but for those who don’t sacrifice a couple of coffee’s a month for Patreon, here are a few quick highlights out of the World Cross Country Championships.
The Australian Men’s team recorded a team score of 106 pts for 5th. At Bathurst we came 4th which is better on the medal table obviously but in Bathurst our team score was 116 pts. I went back through the years to see how 106pts compared and I got all the way back to Durham’s event in 1995 without finding a lower score until I realised they changed the scoring somewhere along the way to include all six finishers. The tip-off for that fact was at Durham we scored 596 pts which would’ve been a very very high score with only four runners…
Even though our Men scored well, the critical viewpoint on that statistic is that the depth of competition is no longer what it was. Having now been to nine World Championships, Liam Adams has the best set of results to analyse over this period of decline. At his first few events, Liam averaged in the 70’s. At his last couple of events, Liam has averaged in the 20’s. Even accounting for his improvement as a runner you’d think that indicates a fair bit of thinning out in the competition. All the better for people like Liam though who are bothered enough to get time off work and compete for their nation because they’ll be rewarded with nice high finishing positions!
A full write-up of the results is here if you did miss all the hullabaloo over the Easter Weekend but you can also rewatch the action by signing into World Athletics too. Keep an eye out for Zach Facioni starting out strong in the lead pack, Haftu Strintzos moving into at the end of the first lap and then Strintzos and Ed Marks sprint for the finish where they almost stand on someone who is collapsed at the end. Shoutout as well to Paige Campbell and Melissa Duncan for their races ensuring that young Australian women at home have someone to look up to at these events and aren’t just watching Aussie men roll around wondering ‘why are there no women running?’
As for the event itself, it wasn’t as well attended as Bathurst, it didn’t have as tough a course as Bathurst and it didn’t have any weather events like Bathurst. The caveat is that Serbia only picked up hosting rights late so we should be a little bit sympathetic to them for not providing something as good as Bathurst (from our biassed Australian perspective). However, here’s a thought for World Athletics. Instead of shifting it around every two years to an entirely new audience and hosting organisation why not make World Cross Country rotate between 1-3 venues. It would allow those courses to become ‘feared’ or hyped up, the local crowds would know to attend this big running event that comes around every few years and the hosting organisations would have their s*** together each time of course too which helps. It works for the tennis grand slams and the Masters with golf. If you had Bathurst, the Denmark event from 2019 and probably one in Africa on a rotating schedule you’d have a lot of athletics fans pretty satisfied. Just you wait little Timmy and Bridget, in another four years, Jacob Kiplimo will be back at Bathurst for his fourth straight world title.
The South Australian Tourism Commission is urging the media to stop calling Adelaide by the City of Churches from now on. I’m fully on board. You know why? Because I understand their game plan, they want everyone to know Adelaide is the City of Athletics! Well, for this weekend it is and that’s good enough for me. Get the f*** out of here AFL and let the real athletes gather round!
All weekend long we have the culminating event of the domestic track season and the opportunity for our top athletes to claim a top two finish which significantly increases the likelihood of their chances to join the Olympic team. It’s not all over if they don’t finish top two, the fine print just paints the picture that an athlete can still be selected as long as they did actually compete in the championships or applied for an exemption. Enough of the technical stuff though the racing is of course the main feature so here’s a list of the main events to follow, the times and the potential storylines. I’ve only focused on the 800m events up, the 400m runners and below didn’t pay the bribe money for exposure, aren’t subscribers, blew out the word count. Click through to this Roster Athletics page for full startlists and start times.
Friday
7:10pm - Women’s 3000m Steeplechase. Cara Feain-Ryan is the defending champ and her 9:00 3000m at Sydney to go with her Adelaide steeple victory this season makes her the favourite from what we’ve seen locally. Amy Cashin though, who was the champion in 2022, has a faster PB, and has also ran a 9:00 3000m in the US in February so will be Cara’s main challenger and if someone is flying from the US for this race they’re obviously not here to muck around (remember Lauren Ryan at Zatopek?). Georgia Winkcup, Olympic representative along with Amy at Tokyo, is another one to watch.
Saturday
4:00 pm - Women’s 1500m. Jess Hull’s fabulous start to the year will be put to the test by Linden Hall (who has run a faster 800m this season than Jess) but not Abbey Caldwell who along with Claudia Hollingsworth were both late scratchings and will instead be focusing on the 800m. From the heats yesterday, the Puma pair of Linden Hall and Georgia Griffith dictated the first heat as a pair while in the second heat Jess Hull had Sarah Billings for company early before pulling away from her in the back end of the race. Sarah briefly spoke with TBL afterwards and was pleased with her run and glad to stay out of trouble as she progressed to the final.
4:10 pm - Men’s 1500m. With so many challengers in this race surely it’ll be fast from the start. The top three favourites of Cam Myers, Stewy McSweyn and Olli Hoare all won their heats and speaking with Stewy afterwards it seemed to be a matter of 'get out and get it done… nice to string it out and not trip over’. Olli did have the quickest heat time of the three (3:38) but thought he’d only run 3:40 so looked pleasantly surprised when I told him ‘3:38 mate’. In Saturday’s final I hope someone like Adam Spencer or Jack Anstey, who is my dark horse considering how focused he looked post race yesterday, reprises Craig Mottram’s size of your balls attitude and takes it to the field.
5:05 pm - Men’s 3000m Steeplechase. Ed Trippas has never won a National Title but this would have to be his best chance. Keep an eye on a hopefully improved Matt Clarke who didn’t finish his last race in Adelaide while question marks surround veteran steepler Ben Buckingham after his 8:10 performance in the Box Hill 3000m recently. Then again, he is a four-time medallist at Nationals and four-time international representative in this event.
Sunday
3:00 pm - Women’s 800m. Catriona Bisset is going for title number 5 in a row. Pre event I thought this was Claudia Hollingsworth’s best chance of making an Olympic team so to see she dropped the 1500m from her program to focus on the 8’ tells you how serious she is about it. Abbey Caldwell has also done the same thing which given she hadn’t actually raced a 1500m this season (OK, she did the Mile a couple of weeks ago, technically not a 15’) makes sense too.
3:10 pm - Men’s 800m. Peter Bol has gotten his rust buster races out of the way and scrapped the 1500m from his program so surely he must be ready to fire up at Nationals? The form pair of the season in Peyton Craig and Luke Boyes have raced each other 4 times (3-1 in Peyton’s favour) in their careers, but it will only be Luke and Peter’s second race against each other and Peyton and Peter’s first.
3:45 pm - Men’s 5000m. The depth in this race is next level. Morgan McDonald has the fastest season’s best (13:07) but pulled out of The Ten event recently so may have lost a touch since that late January result. Callum Davies is the defending champion but there are 17 other athletes in the field with a PB faster than him so I don’t have high hopes for the bespectacled Queenslander to defend his title. Will anyone who is named to race both the 1500m and the 5000m be able to prove this fortnight’s Fraser Fact wrong?
4:50 pm - Women’s 5000m. The grand finale. Will everyone leave the pacing up to Izzi like the National 3000m race? Did Lauren Ryan’s dash at the Mile in Bankstown give her the confidence to try to sit and kick over the top of Jess Hull or will she look to leverage off her 10,000m fitness? And then there’s Rose Davies to consider too!
If you’ve just been skim reading up until now and didn’t click through to Roster Athletics, shame on you, but the safest assumption to make is that every elite Australian athlete is running in an event except for Jye Edwards and Joseph Deng. Yep, everyone who’s a chance of making the Paris team is on the start line so there’ll be no, oooh Cam Myers is good but would he have beaten Olli Hoare today. Besides the Olympic qualification ramifications remember that this is also the last time these athletes get to race domestically and it’s also for a National Title!
Another point worth adding in this preview is that there are still plenty of opportunities for athletes to get the qualifying time after this event so it’s not too important to win in a fast time. The win is the main thing. Again, it’s a National Title, they don’t grow on trees! Illustrating just how difficult, or impressive, it would be for an athlete to win and get the qualifying time take a look at these meet records which show that the Women’s and Men’s 800m events are the only ones where the meet record is faster than the qualifying time. Most other distance events are over 10 seconds off the qualifying standard.
The last important thing worth telling you is to keep an eye on FTK’s Instagram page for photo and video updates as we cover some of these results. By the time you’ve finished reading this though it could be Friday night 7:09pm local time so in the words of a good ol’ boxing announcer or that scene from Space Jam, let’s get ready to rumble!
At the Australian Athletics Championships this weekend you’d like to assume it’s an opportunity for all the stakeholders in athletics to get together and talk business. You know, a junket for interstate athletic organisations, an opportunity for sponsors to be wined and dined and the chance for some shady backroom deals by someone in a cheap suit… you get the picture. What I hope those ‘in’ on the business talk are discussing is how to capitalise on the rapid growth of running culture since the last championships. How do we turn the rise in entry numbers in recreational road races and prevalence of run clubs into dollar signs to help grow athletics so more Australians can participate and so the elites are better supported.
One option I hope the big wigs consider is to do what the government does and introduce a tax or levy. If there was a $10 increase in the cost of entries or memberships that runners only had to pay once a year that’d make a few dollars. Call it the ‘Sustainable Athletics Fund’ because without it, athletics might become extinct. Before you say, yeah but the cost of living is so steep, that’ll turn people off events, have a look at what happened in Tasmania with the new football club. A foundation membership package costing $10 was introduced last month and the organisers had expected to sell only 40,000 in the first year. Instead, they have now sold over 120,000 in less than a month. If athletics could tap into that enthusiasm there’d be an extra $1.2 million dollars at least in the budget.
Even if an extra million dollars is still not a good enough reason for a new tax, what about the option the fitness industry is calling for by making gym memberships tax deductible and extending that to running races and gear? There’d need to be a few regulations around it of course, the whole budget of your week on the Gold Coast to race the 10km is probably not tax deductible but the entry fee at least would be a start. If it’s good enough for elite athletes whose profession is running (and therefore everything running is technically a tax write-off) and coaches are always saying that anyone who runs is an athlete then perhaps it’s time to incentivise athleticism further.
Those first two ideas are relatively simple and easy to implement. The big wigs in the conference room at Adelaide’s track this weekend probably didn’t need my brain to come up with them either. What isn’t so simple and is perhaps the result of an underlying problem in Australian running is my last suggestion. Find a private equity firm that has an interest in running and let them take the reins. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund made headlines when they funded LIV Golf as a form of sportswashing and they’re probably not the right group to help support Australian athletics but you get the idea of what private equity can bring. Instead, closer to home, the Melbourne Rebels who are $20 million in debt and could fold are still considered a viable investment prospect by private equity. The crux of the Rebels potential investors is that it is being led by a gentleman who is the father of the CEO of the Rebels. Talk about who you know…
Which leads me to consider the underlying problem of Australian running. We’re all just a bunch of poor addicts who are either currently foregoing academic and career prospects or who have done so in the past. All because instead of slaving away in the office or classroom, we’d rather be running and were going to figure out the money part later. The reason other sports attract so much more sponsorship dollars is because the CEO’s of those larger companies either played those sports when they were young or are fanatics. Runners are often too busy running to become a CEO. Maybe in ten, twenty years time when those young university students and professionals currently flooding the streets of our capital cities at their 6am run club have finally climbed the corporate ladder to become CEO’s we can then attract a sponsorship of a big four bank. Until then though, we’re left to fight for whatever sponsors we can attract to running.
So big wigs, if you are reading this Issue of The Blue Line like I fantasise, take a look around at the depth of talent on display at this weekend’s championships, add in the rise of run clubs and there is a terrific opportunity to capitalise on this to further grow the sport. You may argue that doing what you have done over the last five years has brought us to this level of elite talent. True, however, every athlete knows that every once in a while you need to take risks and change the stimulus to reach that next level. The question is, are the big wigs prepared to do what their athletes do?
Jess Stenson placed fourth at the Daegu Marathon last Sunday in 2:24:01 (and put up a brilliant recap available here). The winner of the women’s race was Ruti Aga who won in 2:21:08. Aga has a PB (2:18:09) which is three minutes faster than what she ran and so does second place Angela Tanui (PB 2:17:51) so given that, Jess's Daegu result is probably worth a new Australian record of 2:21:01 if it was on a faster course right? Tempting but no that’s not how it works. Although it didn’t put Jess into the top 3 of our qualified athletes it was still an Olympic qualifier and a big PB for Jess who had run 2:25 in 2021 and 2:25 in 2018. If she is one of the runners not picked for Paris you’d have to think this gives Jess the confidence to nudge a 2:22 marathon later in the year or perhaps improve on her 9th place finish at New York from 2022 where she can use some of her ‘championship’ racing skills to the best of her ability.
On the topic of international marathons there is the Boston (April 15th) and London (April 21st) marathons happening within the next fortnight and if it weren’t for the National Championships, they probably would’ve dictated conversation in this Issue. Instead, here is the full pro field for Boston (which also has links to in depth previews for both the Men and the Women). Likewise, here is the London field which of course includes Marc Scott and another friend of FTK/The Blue Line, Sean Tobin who has also been named to debut.
In local domestic marathons, the Canberra marathon and the Hobart Airport marathon were ran last weekend. Interestingly, Wayne Spies won his second Hobart based marathon for the year while Milly Clark, who ran in the 2016 Olympic marathon if you’re new to this whole running thing, won the female race there.
The English Road Running Association’s National Road Relays event, which Phil and the Chasing Paris UK crew spoke about, was held last weekend. It’s a 12 person relay in the Men’s event and Phil’s club Leeds City AC won first place in 4:11:28. There’s a stack of other results that if you’re reading from the UK might interest you, otherwise if you’re an Aussie, you’ll be impressed (and jealous) to know this is the 56th time the event has been held, it features the top clubs from England plus invitations to Celtic clubs are sent out as well. Australia’s distance between states and cities makes it logistically and financially difficult to get a bunch of amateur club runners together for a similar event but we can at least dream one day of having an event like this a reality in our country too on an annual basis.
Lastly, if you happen to be a Bronze medallist in the marathon at the last Olympics but won’t be going to this Olympics because you were injured at the trials what do you think you might do instead? Run a big city marathon in your home country and get a big appearance fee? Try and qualify in a different event? All plausible options. Except if you’re Molly Seidel. The past guest of FTK (# 11) instantly rocketed further up my appreciation charts by entering into one of the most competitive trail races, the Canyons 50k, on April 26. Listen to her talk about her reasons (spoiler alert: it’s just for training and building some strength really, she’s not switching to trails 😢) on the Freetrail podcast with Dylan Bowman.
Given the difficulty in backing up between the 1500m and 5000m finals over consecutive days surely no-one has ever won both at the same championships? … eghh, wrong*. Jess Hull did it last year. Course she bloody did. Hey, so did Cal Davies as well! Right, maybe it’s pretty common then?
No not really actually. Before Cal Davies, Craig Mottram is the only other male to simultaneously hold both the 1500/5000m crowns however when he did it in 2002 the 5,000m race was held at a separate competition a few weeks earlier. So, the big fact for this fortnight is Cal Davies is the only Australian male to have ever won the 1500m and 5000m National Title on the same weekend.
On the females side it has been done on the same weekend by Kalia McKnight in 2012 and a host of women in the 70’s when only the 1500/3000m double was offered.
April 11th - 16th: Australian Athletic Championships. 7plus has the action each day if you’re not in Adelaide. If you are in Adelaide, get your ass down there (read that last part in Will Smith’s voice for extra pizazz). The venue was pretty packed yesterday and that was just for the heats! The food truck options are also plentiful!
April 14th: FTK x Runhouse x Nike Long Run in Adelaide with special guests (including yours truly!). Follow this link to learn how to win free stuff!!!
April 15th: Boston Marathon.
April 20th: Diamond League kicks off in Xiamen. Youtube is set to broadcast the action. One of the World’s best distance runners is running. No I don’t mean Jack Rayner who is doing the 5000m, I mean Faith Kipyegon. Undefeated in 1500’s since 2021 (reminder it’s now 2024). Entry lists are available here.
April 21st: Run the Tan. A new clock and teams event this year for the event which includes some nice prize money for elites.
April 21st: London Marathon.
April 27th: Diamond League (Shanghai/Suzhou). Entry lists were released yesterday and just like Xiamen, there’s a stack of Aussies to watch out for.
This division of Grattan House welcomes any and all reader feedback. If you want more or less of something, want something investigated then please enquire at theblueline@grattanhouse.com. If you want to read something very similar to this which even imitated this sign-off making me feel very flattered but also concerned for my exploitation then read this Australian cycling flavoured newsletter. Otherwise, thank you for your attention through to the end, my name is Ron Burgundy Fraser Darcy, you stay classy running nerds.
I feel like there's a lot of work that can be done to bridge the gap between the professional, broadcasted side of athletics and the people running at your local run club. Aside from the rare case of a record being broken, people don't seem to chat much about the competitive side of athletics. If I had to guess I'd say 90% of the people in my club who did City2Surf last year don't even know who Ed Goddard is, most have probably never even heard his name. As an enthusiastic hobby runner and not some bigwig (sorry to disappoint), my suggestion would be making these running events more accessible to watch and find ways to generate discussion about the results within these running communities.
Maybe at the next sold out local road race, give out free subscriptions to watch the upcoming athletic event. Maybe clubs can 'adopt a pro', where a small amount of the clubs membership cost goes directly to an athlete competing at these events, the pro in turn showing up to a couple of club meets to build rapport and support. Maybe we can televise some of the world majors or athletic events on free-to-air outside of the olympics. Whenever I'm out and about watching track events livestreamed on my laptop, I end up with someone watching the race over my shoulder asking questions and getting sucked in to it. People just need better access and a strong narrative to keep them interested and the sport will flourish.