Canberra sprint star Melissa Breen says the relentless pursuit of an Olympic Games qualifying time "broke my heart", but Australia's fastest woman will use a dogged mindset to fuel her Rio ambitions.
Australia's first medal could come from a walker - not Jared Tallent - with Dane Bird-Smith hoping to get the athletics off to a flyer in Rio on day one of the track and field competition,
Athletics world body will revisit the vexed issue of intersex athletes and most likely appeal a court ruling blocking the sport monitoring testosterone levels in female athletes such as controversial South African runner Caster Semenya.
It is doubtful Pauline Hanson would have wanted Peter Bol to come to Australia. On Friday he will run for Australia.
Australia's fastest woman Melissa Breen knows she could break her own national record and probably still not be quick enough to get out of the heats at the Olympics.
Jared Tallent has won gold again and he is yet to even compete in Rio.
By Pat Graham and Eddie Pells
Kenya's Olympic athletics team manager Michael Rotich has been arrest at Nairobi's international airport after being send home from the Rio Games.
The world's fastest ever man believes, or hopes, but with Usain Bolt you take is an article of faith, that at this Olympics he will become the first man ever to break 19s for the 200 metres.
Australian pole vaulter Alana Boyd was going to retire. She told us so last year. This was going to be it, the samba-dancing, Brazilian carnivale end to a fine career.
Alone in his apartment in south London, a 69-year-old man named Neil Horan watched a middle-of-the night broadcast of the opening ceremony for the Summer Olympics. Like other viewers, he wondered which Brazilian would get the honor of lighting the Olympic cauldron.
A hamstring injury for Australia's gold medal hope Jared Tallent has forced him to pull out of the 20km walk.
Despite not being in Rio de Janeiro for the Olympic opening ceremony, Australia's track and field team didn't let distance get in the way of a good time, holding their own athletes' march in Florida.
The problem with having the modern Olympics in a developing country is that the distance between the pretentious ideals of olympism and everyday life comes into unseemly focus. The whole show emerges in real time as a kind of wealthy dream-carnival, the outcome of a bidding and courting process for distant executives, myopic politicians and alchemists that ends with the host country paying fortunes to have its photo taken on a global stage.
Gen LaCaze and Ryan Gregson have been together for three years. When the athletics start the two middle distance runners will put the Olympics first.
Usain Bolt is promising to let American sprinter Justin Gatlin "feel his full wrath" as he zones in on an unprecedented treble-treble of gold medals at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
New Athletics Australia director John Steffensen previously coached and recently mentored a Maltese runner, who also won Commonwealth gold for Australia, and has been banned from the Rio Olympics after failing a drug test.
Australian sprinter Alex Hartmann knocked back abdominal surgery to compete at his first Olympics after a mystery stomach bug caused him to lose 10 kilograms in four days just weeks out from the Rio Games.
The track and field events at the Rio Olympics this month will showcase elite athletic talent and, if you look closely, creative subterfuge.
For a girl who has so much time ahead of her Jess Thornton has to put time behind her.
Angie Ballard's teammates say she's a Paralympic hero, but the Canberra-born wheelchair racer has her sights firmly fixed on one goal – winning a gold medal.
Three years ago Kurtis Marschall met Steve Hooker for the first time. He knew Hooker had never seen him pole vault, had probably not even heard of him, but he asked the Olympic and world champion what he could change to be better.
Morgan Mitchell knew something had to change. She went to Glasgow for the Commonwealth games and looked at the athletes there and wanted to be more like them. She could see what she wasn't.
She has not won a medal. She has not made a final. She knows medals are not seriously in the conversation in Rio but hopes to make the final. Yet Michelle Jenneke was the face they wanted for the Olympics.
Carrying the torch of Australia's track and field medal hopes in Rio, Fabrice Lapierre has defiantly declared he is the one to beat for Olympic gold.
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