Humanity returned to the moon this week, made at least one trip around it, and one mathematician won the Stawell Gift from scratch. Historically, these two events occur with approximately the same frequency.
Okay, okay. I can already hear some smarty-pants screaming at their smartphone or computer screen that someone else won the Stawell Gift from Scratch last year too. True enough. Shakari Richardson did this year what Ray Rizzo did last year, I’ll admit that.
Melissa Breen also won the women’s giveaway from the back end in 2012. With two men – Jean-Louis Ravelomanantsois in 1975 and Josh Ross in 2005 – also winning from the back end, the feat has been achieved five times in 144 runs for the men and 37 giveaways for the women.
Man’s journey to the Moon began with the first lunar orbit by the US Apollo 8 mission in 1968, and there were six missions that landed as part of the Apollo program from the first in 1969 to the last in 1972 (the Soviet Union conducted unmanned missions over a similar time period).
So, six moon landings, five victories in Stawell’s gift from scratch. Since the first winner of the From-Scratch Giveaway came three years after the last moon landing to date, we’d venture to say that landing a human on the Moon has proven easier than winning the Stawell From-Scratch Giveaway.
I wouldn’t say so, but I’m sure you won’t have to ask more than a couple of Stawell Gift supporters before you find someone who will. And you don’t have to ask many competitors who have tried, and failed, to win the Stawell from the back mark, let alone from the scratch mark!
Athletics fanatics can argue until the cows come home – or, perhaps more accurately, until they’re red in the face – about the real merits of para-racing. The ideal of paralympic running is to give each runner a start, their ‘mark’, based on their ability.
In theory, this would give everyone an approximately equal chance of winning. In practice, the ideals of the disability system are honored or disrespected in a similar way to the ideals of the Olympic Movement. The ambitions we aim to achieve are the ones we often miss, often by embarrassingly large margins.
The recent history of Al-Hiba is filled with elite international athletes who have come, been seen and triumphed at the hands of an unknown target. If Shakari Richardson knew any of this, it clearly didn’t worry her.
Wearing the backmarker’s red jacket, she improved from the preliminaries to the semifinals and from the semifinals to the final. She ran 13.82 in winning the heat on Saturday afternoon, improving to 13.53 in winning the half (just 0.007 seconds behind second place after easing off before the line) and then to 13.15 in the final, this time with five hundredths (at least four of them missed!) to spare for second place.
Despite improvements of 2-3 meters per run, the three views to watch were similar. One of the beauties of the handicap system is that the sight of the backfield player chasing outside markers is the same, regardless of speed. And they will certainly be able to catch up with them only in the last 10-20 meters. In centimetres, as Bruce McAvaney said in his comment.
As previously mentioned, Richardson became the first winner of the scratch competition since then Checks notes -Brie Rizzo last year. Even if these two gorgeous women return for the 2027 giveaway, you wouldn’t want to bet on a trilogy. It may be a sure path to ruin!
It’s been a big week in other ways too. As “The Stawell Gift” was being paraded on Easter Monday, the world was holding its breath, waiting not to see if any runner could win, but to see if it was about to be plunged into war as a result of Donald Trump’s extreme statements demanding that Iran halt its blockade of a vital waterway that is being obliterated “to the Stone Age.”
Fortunately, someone missed the mark, and we moved on to the next crisis point.
It would be a cliche to suggest any equivalence, but there is a faint echo in the transition from Stawell to this weekend’s national championship in Sydney. The Stawell Oval Football Ground, with its grass track, slightly uphill slope and lanes defined by ropes threaded through metal pegs, is a world apart from the newly resurfaced synthetic track at the Sydney Olympic Athletics Centre.
But the metaphorical stakes are high, as the Commonwealth Games team is guaranteed selection of winners who have met, or have already met, the criteria set by the selectors. Instead of chasing athletes with limited abilities, it’s back to direct competition among their peers. Chalk and cheese, but with greater consequences.
Whatever happens at Sydney Olympic Park, the biggest Australian performances of the week may have actually come at a stadium outside a small town in Oklahoma, USA. Matt Denny hit the third 74-meter throw of his career to win the discus competition in the Ramona Throw Series.
Denny needed almost every centimeter as German Steven Richter snatched the lead midway through the competition with a throw of exactly 74 metres. The Australian set the current Oceania record of 74.78 seconds in Ramona last year when he also clocked 74.25 seconds.
The two men compete again on Sunday with Christian Seah running a personal best of 72.26 in a previous competition in the series.
