It’s THE most important athletics event of 2015. And the only one that involves cake. Yes, it’s the Winner Gets A Cake league in the Fantasy Diamond Race. If there’s one thing that 2015 has taught us, it’s never doubt Usain Bolt. But if there are two things this year has taught us, it’s that athletics fans like cake. They must do, because more than 200 of them joined in with the cakey athletics fun. Track and field ...
According to the numbers, 2015 could possibly be the best year in history for the 100m. The table below lists the number of sub-10 and sub-11 performers in each of the past 20 years. It makes for fascinating reading. Already in 2015 there has been a flurry of fast times, leading to 10 men joining the sub-10 club and five new additions to the women’s sub-11 club. It now means that more men have run sub-10 (23 in ...
I’m a stickler for equality. So following my list of the chronological entries into the sub-10-second club for the 100m, I had to do the same for the women; this time using 11 seconds as the benchmark. To date, 84 women have achieved the feat. As was the case with the men’s, there were one or two debatable performances too. Some sources still credit Angella Issajenko with her 10.97 PB, but others have wiped it from the ...
When Adam Gemili clocked 9.97 in the 100m in Birmingham last weekend, there was some confusion over whether or not he became the 100th member of the sub-10-second club. Some stats sites listed him as the 102nd member, others the 100th, the 101st, the 103rd. You get the picture. It’s exactly the kind of minutiae that keeps me awake at night, so I had to sort out a chronological list of all sub-10-second performers (based on their ...
There’s an unwritten rule in sports journalism: never cross the line into fan territory. But some people are worth breaking the rules for. My first memory of watching Paula Radcliffe run was probably in 1999 at that year’s World Championships. I’d become full-on obsessed with athletics the previous summer at the age of 13, so I remember being glued to the TV for all of the action from Seville. As a British fan, you couldn’t help but root ...
