by Robbie | May 27, 2018 | News
Great Britain’s team at the 1948 Olympics was a mixture of veterans and novices. Many of them had lost their best years – and some others who could have been at the Games had even lost their lives – during World War II. There were 14 among the men who were making...
by Robbie | Nov 16, 2017 | News
Memories of Steve Backley, Mick Hill, Fatima Whitbread and Tessa Sanderson over the last 30 years or so cloud the fact that javelin-throwing in Britain was very much one of the poor relations of the sport in earlier times, and even more so than most of the field...
by Robbie | Nov 7, 2017 | News
British field-events athletes were of no great consequence in the 1920s and 1930s, with the notable exceptions of the Liverpool high jumper, Benjamin Howard Baker, and the Cambridge University hammer-thrower, Malcolm Nokes. Even so, one of their contemporaries who was...
by Robbie | Oct 20, 2017 | News
Sam Ferris and Ernie Harper are understandably the best remembered British marathon runners of the 1920s and 1930s. Both of them were Olympic silver-medallists. Yet neither won as many marathons as did the much lesser known Harold Wood, who raced the distance on 29...
by Robbie | Oct 10, 2017 | News
The most famous Olympic marathon of all is that of 1908 in London, in which the Italian, Dorando Pietri, was disqualified after passing the finishing-line and victory went instead to Johnny Hayes, of the USA. Another feature of this race was the failure of the large...
