Silver anniversary milestone is a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned after a quarter of a century at the world’s No.1 athletics magazine

It is 25 years since I joined AW. I doubt you’ll believe me, but I don’t keep track of such anniversaries. Instead, I got an online alert reminding me that I started working full-time for the magazine in the early summer of 1997.

When the notification landed my first instinct as an athletics writer was to write a piece about it. Not some self-indulgent ‘hurrah, my silver anniversary at AW’ kind of article, but rather I thought I’d take a look at the changes I’ve reported on during a quarter of a century at AW and trends I’ve noticed from covering the sport.

Certainly, much has changed. When I joined AW emails and the internet were in their infancy and barely anyone had a mobile phone. Our weekly magazine’s HQ was in Peterborough and a team of copy-takers helped fill a large section of each issue with results dictated over the phone or taken via fax.

I edited the magazine from 2001 until the pandemic in 2020 triggered a change of ownership and the decision to publish once a month with increased content on our website and social media. Now, in 2022, the splendid new monthly magazine edited by my colleague Euan Crumley is complemented by news, results, events coverage and features on our website. Naturally, we all work from home, although we’ve actually been doing this since 2008 when we created what we called our ‘virtual office’. Ahead of our time, eh?

Hopefully any athletics fans worth their salt follow our 24/7 updates on social media too. For someone who learned shorthand in the 1990s, I’m now more likely to film a video interview of an athlete than scribble quotes into a notebook. In short, it is a very different landscape to the one I walked into in 1997.

So what so-called pearls of wisdom can I share after 25 years at AW? Here is one for each year I’ve been at the magazine.

No.1 – Athletes are increasingly hard to speak to. In my early years at AW I had a bulging ‘contacts book’ full of athletes’ phone numbers. It sounds rather quaint now, but athletes merrily handed them out and were happy to be called at home. I would ring world record-breaking athletes without hesitation whereas it’s now frowned upon if journalists dare to bypass the small army of agents, PR people, sponsors and governing body staff who control the “access” to athletes and dangle “interview opportunities” (often with the caveat of plugging a product) to journalists who are merely trying to give them free publicity anyway.

No.2 – Athletes have become more boring. Sorry, it’s true. Of course there are still great characters out there who are a joy to speak to. Josh Kerr, for example, refreshingly pulls no punches during interviews. Reece Prescod famously admitted last year to binging on junk food and marathon sessions on his Playstation. Internationally, Sha’Carri Richardson is dynamite. But on the whole athletes are far more guarded with what they say than they were 25 years ago. Today’s athletes should realise that saying something mildly controversial will probably help rather than hinder their career. Sadly, however, caution rules the day with athletes often worried about whether they are even allowed to mention their next competition in case it hasn’t been “officially announced” yet.

No.3 – Who wins the gold medal when it comes to interviews? A number of contenders spring to mind but decathlete Dean Macey takes some beating. Funny, brutally honest and guaranteed to give you a good story every time you spoke to him. No surprise he’s gone on to become a success in the world of fishing. Athletics’ loss is angling’s gain. Similarly, the coach Charles van Commenee was a journalist’s dream. Straight talking, sharp-witted and didn’t suffer fools either, as I discovered myself once or twice! Lots of the leading athletes when I joined AW were incredibly articulate and have not surprisingly landed roles in the media. They include Ato Boldon, Michael Johnson, Iwan Thomas, Katharine Merry, Colin Jackson, Denise Lewis, Paula Radcliffe, Steve Backley, Jonathan Edwards and Darren Campbell.

No.4 – Most of the “ideas” people have to improve the sport are not new and have almost always been tried before. Right now, for example, I hear people talking about staging more ‘event-specific competitions’. In other words, a Night of the 10,000m PBs-style meeting for sprints, jumps, throws etc. Apart from the fact the British Milers’ Club with its event-specific middle-distance races dates back to 1963, during my early years at AW there were “jumps and throws fests” in Britain but they didn’t take off.

No.5 – Doping will always be a problem. People will always cheat. It’s human nature and happens in all walks of life. The general public will probably also always view athletics as “a dirty sport”. Why? As Dave Moorcroft once said: “Athletics is a victim of its own vigilance.” More testing not surprisingly leads to more drugs positives.

No.6 – World records will continue to fall. During my 25 years at AW the men’s 100m mark has dropped from 9.84 to 9.58 and Flo-Jo’s 10.49 does not look particularly invincible these days, while the marathon records have gone from 2:06:50 to 2:01:39 for men and 2:21:06 to 2:14:04 for women. Even with the help of super shoes and a phalanx of pacemakers, not many experts believed we would see a sub-two-hour marathon happen quite so soon. With advances in medical science, injuries have become less common and athletes able to train even harder – and there is still plenty of scope for improvement.

No.7 – The growth of women’s athletics has been huge. The year before I joined AW the Olympics in Atlanta was still missing the following female events: pole vault, hammer and 3000m steeplechase whereas triple jump and 5000m were only just making their debut. Today, in some road races the number of women outnumber the men.

No.8 – It is amazing how little the fundamentals of track and field have changed in the past century, let alone 25 years. With the odd exception of things like the Fosbury Flop in the 1960s, most athletics technique and training ideas have been largely set in stone for decades. Even ‘super shoes” are not really that new. Back in 1957 the Russian high jumper Yuri Stepanov set a world record wearing a shoe with a heel so large that it caused him to limp as he ran up to the bar. L’Equipe described the footwear as acting like “little trampolines”.

No.9 – Athletes, coaches, parents, spectators and especially event organisers always believe that The Most Important Event of the Week is the one they have just attended. When Sir Arthur Gold, the long-time athletics administrator, died in 2002, we ran a single page tribute piece in our magazine but the mother of a young athlete angrily called us to argue that space should have been devoted to the results section to allow her son’s name to be printed.

No.10 – Saying that, obituaries get a large number of views on our website. When it comes to popular topics, our stats tell us that AW readers enjoy reading about deaths, doping and event previews. Morbid lot, aren’t you?

No.11 – Some AW readers love to concoct conspiracy theories. At various times editing AW I’ve been accused of being anti-Scottish (my mum’s Scottish), being biased toward events in the South of England (I was born in the North of England) and most annoying of all “being in the pocket of UK Athletics”. On the latter, I’ve always tried to be “an honest friend” when writing about UKA and we take them to task when necessary but not needlessly the entire time. Ironically, UKA staff over the years have occasionally accused AW of being out to get them too.

No.12 – AW readers generally don’t have much of a sense of humour. Various light-hearted columns have been tried over the years with little success. The Bill Shankley quote “some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that” could easily be applied to athletics.

No.13 – Contrary to the previous point, athletics is not more important than life or death. We should never forget that the sport is just running, jumping and throwing … hurdling and race walking. As my early mentor at AW, the magnificent Trevor Frecknall, was fond of saying, “If you don’t laugh, you’ll go mad.” Although good luck in telling that to the parent of an athlete whose name you’ve spelt wrong.

No.14 – Weird and wacky stories have grown in popularity. When Eliud Kipchoge’s shoe insole began flapping around in the closing stages of the 2015 Berlin Marathon, or high jumper Ivan Ukhov tried to compete in Lausanne while clearly drunk, or Jimmy Gressier face-planted at the 2018 Euro Cross, these daft moments made global headlines and led to the athletes getting far more coverage than they would have for merely winning. If you want to make a name for yourself, it seems, winning a medal or breaking a record is no long enough.

No.15 – Storylines and themes in athletics tend to repeat themselves through the generations. Many of the same issues that we complain about in 2022 were happening 20-odd years ago and almost certainly 30, 40 and 50 years before that. Selection controversies, doping dramas and dysfunctional governing bodies are nothing new. The last three or four years at UK Athletics, for instance, have been turbulent but when I joined AW the governing body – known the time as the British Athletic Federation – was literally about to go bankrupt. “BAF goes bust!” rang the headlines in some of the first issues I worked on.

No.16 – So-called negative stories in athletics are not as destructive as people think. They are part of the sport’s ongoing pantomime and contribute to what makes it so interesting to follow. Thankfully a few key players understand this, such as Seb Coe, who once pointed to the vibrant discussions in football relating to ‘controversial incidents’ that helped keep it in the news.

No.17 – Social media has truly taken over with most fans now using their phone to keep track of news and results in the sport. Well-known athletes use their channels to announce everything from competition plans and injuries to what they’ve eaten for breakfast that day. When I joined AW in 1997 such a concept was beyond our imagination. Given this, how can any of us have any idea how athletics news will circulate in 25 years’ time? We just have to adapt.

No.18 – Whereas my email inbox was full of messages from club secretaries telling me about upcoming events and grassroots news, my emails are sadly now dominated by unsolicited guff from PR agencies who try to entice me into writing effectively a free advert for whatever product they are promoting. Most of the time it isn’t even athletics-related and they invariably send multiple follow-up emails “in case I missed it first time”. Meanwhile the ability of most athletics clubs to publicise their success has not really improved in the last 25 years.

No.19 – The history of the sport is easily forgotten and every effort should be made to keep it alive. As the brilliant Scottish athletics writer Doug Gillon once said: “History is the sport’s most valuable currency.” Given this, it remains a travesty that a West Ham Utd supporters’ shop was built in the shadow of the London Stadium instead of an Olympic museum.

No.20 – Governing bodies no longer simply govern. They used to merely set the rules for the sport, organise various championships and, in the case of national bodies, select teams, whereas a solitary press officer would answer journalists’ queries on the phone and send out press releases via fax. Yet today the internet has allowed them to now become mini media organisations in disguise as they publish reports of their own events online and even broadcast the action via a stream. Increasingly fans find it hard to distinguish between athletics news generated by independent sources like AW and sanitised news produced by governing bodies. Under pressure from sponsors and their own bosses to grow their brand, media officers at governing bodies unwittingly spend half their time helping and half their time hindering publications like AW. I must add, this scenario has no doubt unfolded throughout every sport, though.

No.21 – No one wants to know about the problems journalists face covering the sport. At AW it’s tempting to moan in our articles about broken laptops, dodgy wifi at events, unhelpful event organisers or rude athletes or coaches, but readers don’t care about excuses. They just want a good product, which is perfectly understandable. I’m fine with this too. As Bryan Cranston tells Ben Affleck in the movie Argo, “If we wanted applause, we’d have joined the circus.”

No.22 – Athletics is undoubtedly the best sport in the world. The simple concept of who can run the fastest or jump or throw the highest or furthest is a winning formula that has fascinated people for thousands of years. The sheer variety of disciplines means there is something for everybody too. My favourite athletes from the last 25 years? It has to be Usain Bolt and Paula Radcliffe. Biggest interview? Sir Roger Bannister on the eve of the sub-four-minute mile 50th anniversary in 2004. Best event? Sydney 2000 and London 2012 aside, the 1999 European Junior Champs in Riga quirkily stands out. What’s more, low-key domestic dust-ups in grassroots events or schools championships can often be every bit as heated and entertaining as Olympic finals too.

No.23 – Elite athletes are freaks of nature. I never cease to be in awe of how talented and unusual the world’s top athletes are. This is never more striking than when a group of lanky high jumpers, or giant discus throwers or waif-like distance runners pass through the mixed zone interview areas en masse at an event. The absolute best who go on to win major medals have to be incredibly selfish too. It goes with the territory.

No.24 – Athletics is not about to die. If only I had a pound for everyone who had predicted to me in the last 25 years that “athletics is on its last legs and has no future”. Yet here we are, still rumbling along as the leading Olympic sport, although there is no doubt the general sporting landscape is far more varied and competitive these days.

No.25 – After 25 years at AW I sometimes joke that I have a “life sentence”. But, seriously, who wouldn’t want to be paid to write about the best sport in the world? It’s not ‘work’ either. It’s a pleasure. So here’s to another 25 years!