Dispirited

One theme of this summer’s Olympic sports coverage will be the weak challenge by British athletes in the men’s and women’s middle distances – in the women’s 800 metres for example, UK athletics have been able to fill just one of the three potential spaces . There is no expectation of a serious medal challenge at any distance between the 400 metre and Mo Farah at 5k

It hasn’t always been like that. There was of course the Ovett-Coe-Cram moment, but in the thirty years before that, UK middle distance running was generally competitive; and (as I’ve posted before) elite UK marathon times have been getting consistently slower, year by year, for a while. Where did the previous tradition of middle-distance running come from?

Once answer, I suspect, is the figure of Alf Tupper, who was a staple of many working-class childhoods, from his first appearance in the Rover in 1949. Aged 18…