Latest from Bob Phillips
In isolation and autonomy: the marathon ambition of a computer genius, Alan Turing Which British athlete has made the greatest contribution to society in the course of his life’s work ? It’s an interesting subject for debate, and there are some notable candidates who spring to mind: Lord Noel-Baker, Olympic 1500 metres silver-medallist in 1920, later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; Eric Liddell, the 1924 400 metres champion, and a missionary who died for his beliefs; Lord Burghley, the 400 metres hurdles champion in 1928, who became a leading figure in the Olympic movement. Others have been surgeons, soldiers, politicians of great repute. Who of them, though, has left a legacy of Worldwide significance to match that of Alan Turing ?
A Re-evaluation of the Career of Sin Kim Dan
A Re-evaluation of the Career of Sin Kim DanSuddenly there is a sound. “Ooosh ! Ooosh !” The “superwoman” can be beaten Mysterious. The same description has been used by both the pre-eminent writers, Robert Parienté and Roberto Quercetani, in their comprehensive histories of athletics regarding the exploits of an athlete known to them as Sin Kim Dan but now referred to, presumably in the light of heightened linguistic awareness, as Shin Gheum Dan. She ran 51.2 for 400 metres and 1:58.0 for 800 metres during September and October of 1964 in her home town of Pyongyang, in North Korea (more correctly, the People’s Republic of Korea), and neither performance was ever ratified. The official World records then stood at 51.9 and 2:01.2.
Going Great Guns: the Afro-American Pace-setter at the Olympic Games of 1924
Going Great Guns: the Afro-American Pace-setter at the Olympic Games of 1924 Frank Shorter’s 1972 Olympic marathon win rightly takes much credit for sparking off the distance-running boom in the USA, but maybe some consideration should also be given to the World record-breaker in that event in 1963, “Buddy” Edelen, The drawback regarding Edelen is that he had to go first to Finland and then to England to find the competition which transformed him from being a worthy but not exceptional college two-miler, and his exploits largely went unnoticed in the country of his birth.
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"A bit of a novelty in those days." Who was the first Afro-American to break four minutes for the mile?
27th April 2018
“A bit of a novelty in those days”. Who was the first Afro-American to break four minutes for the mile?There are now more than 1,500 sub-four-minute milers, and so the names of Reggie McAfee and Tommy Fulton are just a couple among many which don’t immediately strike a chord. Yet within a lapse of time of only a few weeks 45 years ago they made a significant contribution to miling history. McAfee and Fulton were both Afro-Americans, and McAfee is the first US-born Afro-American to have broken four minutes for the mile, with 3:59.3 on 21 April 1973, which he improved to 3:57.8 three weeks later, and this latter time was equaled by Fulton in the most unlikely circumstances on 25 May.
A century Ago in War-time: How Athletics Survived and a Swedish Runner Prospered
“You Can’t Out-run a Bullet”. A Century Ago in War-time: How Athletics Survived and a Swedish Runner Prospered “Don’t you know, there’s a war on ?” It would be natural to assume that athletics was on hold a century ago. The battle-fronts had been set remorselessly in Flanders fields since 1914, and in April of 1917 President Woodrow Wilson won a 74-to-nil vote of confidence from Congress to bring the USA into the conflict. Mere sport was bound to suffer when hundreds of thousands of able-bodied men in uniform were being slaughtered, but the story is rather more complicated than that.
A Re-evaluation of the Career of Sin Kim Dan
A Re-evaluation of the Career of Sin Kim DanSuddenly there is a sound. “Ooosh ! Ooosh !” The “superwoman” can be beaten Mysterious. The same description has been used by both the pre-eminent writers, Robert Parienté and Roberto Quercetani, in their comprehensive histories of athletics regarding the exploits of an athlete known to them as Sin Kim Dan but now referred to, presumably in the light of heightened linguistic awareness, as Shin Gheum Dan. She ran 51.2 for 400 metres and 1:58.0 for 800 metres during September and October of 1964 in her home town of Pyongyang, in North Korea (more correctly, the People’s Republic of Korea), and neither performance was ever ratified. The official World records then stood at 51.9 and 2:01.2.
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History
184 years of talking – Parrot fashion – about someone running a four-minute mileby Bob Phillips When I was researching a book I wrote to mark the 50th anniversary in 2004 of the first sub-four-minute mile I became intrigued by the ”near-misses” and the “might-have-been” – the performances by athletes who could perhaps have preceded Roger Bannister by a few years, or even more, had they been given the right opportunity. There are a surprisingly large number of them, and I came to the conclusion, for example, that not nearly enough credit had been given to the fastest mile run in the years before World War II. Contrary to what you might suppose, that was not the official World record of 4:06.8 by Great Britain’s Sydney Wooderson in 1937 but the 4:04.4 indoors by the USA’s Glenn Cunningham the following year.
Early marathon running - the British and Irish influence
Los Angeles and Paris will bid on 13 September to stage the 2024 Olympics. The first Games that were held in Paris, in 1900, were prolonged and often chaotic – in particular, the marathon, which was to be highly influenced in its formative years by British & Irish involvement. Pandemonium in Paris. “Preposterous”, says the perplexed Mr Poolby Bob Phillips The marathon race at the first Modern Olympic Games of 1896 in Athens was a rip-roaring success, and the main reason was that it was won by a Greek, accompanied for the last few yards by royalty, no less, to the immense pleasure of the 40,000 or so onlookers packed into the stadium and many thousands more on the surrounding hill-sides. The home victory was certainly helped by the fact that the only competitors who had any experience of marathon-running were the Greeks themselves, who had qualified via two trial races, and a lone Hungarian, whose athletics administrators had also been sensible enough to stage their own eliminator to see if any of their countrymen could last the distance.
Why Is the Marathon 26 Miles, 385 Yards Long?
We all know that the marathon is 26 miles 385 yards. But why? Whose idea was it?by Bob Phillips Pheidippides didn’t do it. Or if he did, the Ancient Greek press corps were a bit slow on the uptake, and there could only have been a blithe disregard for any sort of reasonable topicality among the scribes of the day. Treating deadlines with disdain, one of the most widely read columnists of 2,400 years or so ago, Herodotus, only picked up on the story some three or four decades later. Plutarch – even more renowned among his avid readership – waited half-a-millenium before putting a pen to paper, or more precisely a split reed to papyrus/ Maybe he was short of anything newsworthy that week and so revived a vaguely remembered myth instead. Even in the 1st Century A.D. when Plutarch was scribbling away (or should that be “scratching” away?), publicity for Greek war messengers was still a sensitive subject because they had often been suspected of being deserters.