In a field long dominated by Kenyans, Australia’s track athletes are gaining serious pace.
It’s 8am on a Tuesday in April, and a testing laboratory inside the Victorian Institute of Sport fills with the staccato steps of a 19-year-old on a treadmill. Wearing a heart-rate monitor and breathing tube, he looks like a runaway hospital patient, except that he seems to be going rather fast.
“I can’t speak on the era of athletics that came before me,” offers Craig, huffing down recovery breaths, “but this looks as good as it gets right now.” From the mouths of babes … Mottram, of course, challenged the established Kenyan dominance in middle-distance running two decades ago, beating reigning Kenyan world champion Benjamin Limo, for instance, to a silver medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. Now the man they used to call “The Big Mzungu” leads Peyton Craig and other jets as coach of the On Athletics Club Oceania.
Star 1500 metres runner Georgia Griffith says training facilities are better in Melbourne than Sydney.Still, Victoria has nothing on America. The US college system is a big factor in our running resurgence, with about 150 young Australian athletes supported via sports programs at American universities. “As a sport, you grapple with that talent drain,” says Faichney, “because they go overseas and you lose them within our competition structure.
The information helps coaches become more flexible and creative, too. Rinaldi recently got a great idea for his own fleet from an altitude workout posted by British 1500m runner Elliot Giles. “We’re just more willing to try new things,” he says, shrugging. “The older-school coaches had this mentality – ‘This is what we did in the 1970s, and what we’ll keep doing now’ – and it meant that we got to the 1990s and we hadn’t advanced at all.
“Let’s be real. We still haven’t won a middle-distance medal at the Olympics since Ralph Dobell in 1968, but we’re getting closer,” says Bideau with characteristic frankness. “It’ll happen.” Take the men’s and women’s 1500m in Tokyo – Australia had two runners in each final. Astonishingly, almost one-sixth of the field was Aussie. “Maybe this year we’ll get three in each final – a quarter of the field?” says Bideau. “That’s how you get medals.
The Olympic selection process, however, remains complicated and opaque. Only a few middle-distance runners have been selected so far – Bol, Hull, Hollingsworth and Abbey Caldwell – while the rest are still racing, hoping to prove themselves before the qualification period ends on June 30. The remaining runners will be chosen in early July by a selection committee with an unenviable task.
Lisa Weightman failed in her appeal to claim a spot on Australia’s Olympic marathon team for Paris 2024.Scheduling plays a part, too. Some runners excel over multiple distances, but if the heat of the 1500 is the same day as the 5000m final, they can’t run both. A choice needs to be made, so the selectors talk to coaches and athletes. Nothing is done in isolation.
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