Ah, Melbourne: on a weekend, sitting inside and watching the world unfold after spending the day enjoying the beautiful autumn weather; The next day, you’re wondering how many layers to wear to ward off the expected cold – and perhaps rain – as the annual Melbourne Classic gets under way in the Gold Series of the World Athletics Tour’s Continental Tour.
These days, the Melbourne classics are run under the title of The Murray Plant Meeting. Like the weather, Mori can be moody, mostly gentle, but also prone to hitting anyone he judges to have crossed him with a slushy drizzle. More than once he fired some undeserving people A phrase I first heard the all-time great Daley Thompson use: “The problem with… You Did you know? nothing About athletics.”
Anyway, Morrie is sadly gone but the weather in Melbourne is still there. Or rather, no It remains, and that’s the problem in a nutshell, bringing up the old joke that if you don’t like the weather now, just wait a minute and things will be different. However, Melbourne’s weather is nothing if not aberrant: let’s just hope that on 28 March 2026, that aberration is expressed by being, if not good, then not as bad as predicted.
It will be cold, and possibly wet as well. There may be headwinds to the sprints. Whatever happens, sprinters Gout Gout and Lachie Kennedy, 400-meter men Jacorey Patterson, Reece Holder and Aidan Murphy, and vertical jumpers Nicola Oleslagers and Nina Kennedy – in short, anyone whose performance depends on a bit of explosive ‘pop’ – will need to keep their hamstrings warm and stretched.
When I wrote about the World Indoor Championships last time I noted that it was difficult to categorize the event. The world of indoor and short track athletics, known only to World Athletics, is now a small circle within the much larger circle of outdoor athletics. Modern track design means the transition from the 400m to the 200m oval is much easier, but some still struggle to adjust the first time to the curved turns of the latter (just ask Bob Abdul-Rahim, DQed about a track violation in his first indoor 800 qualifying race).
But it was more about the discrepancy between the events I mentioned. At the Olympic Games or World Outdoor Championships, almost every event is as strong as it can be in practice – only those injured or hopelessly out of form are missing, and usually a few turn up for desperate dice rolls. Not so for the world inside. Athletes, and sometimes entire federations, are fickle in their support.
This is what happened in Poland last weekend, where for every strong event there was another that was correspondingly weak. The women’s high jumpers – Jaroslava Mahushykh, Nikola Olesligers, Angelina Topic, Yulia Levchenko, Maria Zudzik and Eleanor Patterson – had a field worthy of an Olympic or world championship final. So, too, were the men’s pole vaulters – Mundo (no second name required), Emanuel Karalis, Curtis Marshall – similarly loaded.
Other events were lackluster at best. Of course, we’re talking about athletics, so some of them produced great competition. The sprints were very average, with due respect to the winners; The field events are truncated anyway – the shot put is the only throwing event contested. Multiathlon is a different world, so what is heptathlon for men and pentathlon for women? If we are going to have shortened versions, why is the men’s event over two days and the women’s event in just one day?
And please don’t get me started on the 400m, where there were two finals in which the medals were decided by combined times. I understand why it is now thought that winding corners make winning on some lanes impossible, but if that is the case, why not break up the event as it has already happened with the 200m. Anything is better than medals awarded and places marked in a race that was never actually run.
And so we don’t start the 400 while he’s down, do we really need a 4 x 400 relay when the world relay starts in six weeks?
As previously shown, the tournaments were great entertainment. As always, a lot is happening at once, but there is only one incident (I think) when the quick action of an official prevented a long jump competitor who ran across the hole during the warm-up from staying on course and clearing the middle distance field.
Kelly Hodgkinson was emphatic in winning the women’s 800 meters and Cooper Lutkenhaus was early in winning the men’s race. Josh Kerr put last year’s World Championships terror (where he dropped to last after a calf injury) behind him by beating a bizarrely tactically inept Cole Hooker in the men’s 3000m, and Georgia Hunter-Bell took the women’s 1500m giving Britain a women’s middle distance double.
Adam Spencer ran most of the men’s 1,500 finals on the inside middle of the field. But he didn’t panic and when the gap opened he sprinted on his way to bronze – and it almost all happened in the last 25 metres.
And then, of course, there’s Jess Hall. As in Tokyo last year, Hull has doubled, 800 and 1,500 then, 1,500 and 3,000 now. In the longer race, Hull and eventual winner Nadia Pattocleti battled it out over the final three laps with the Italian dominating to win. Emily McKay of the United States just edged Hull for the silver medal.
Hull wasn’t quite as close in the 1500, as Hunter-Bell’s 3:58.53 took her to the line almost a full second ahead of the Australian’s 3:59.45 – the first sub-4 by an Australian woman.
Hunter-Bell’s time was world leader indoor and second overall behind the outdoor lead of 3:58.09 by Claudia Hollingsworth two weeks earlier. The two were scheduled to meet at one of Melbourne’s expected landmarks.
Finally, a special word about one of my favorite athletes, Tom Walsh, who won his fourth gold medal at the World Indoor Championships (along with a silver and two bronze) with a time of 21.82.
Leonardi Fabbri, silver medalist Jordan Guest and bronze medalist Roger Steen have all thrown over 22 meters this year. Four others, including Walsh, had all-time best results starting at 22. Walsh was only 10th on the 2026 list with a sixth of those men competing in Poland.
What a win. The IAAF must have known something when it appointed one of the greatest female shot put athletes of all time, Dame Valerie Adams, as its ambassador.
This was one of the decisions that paid off.
