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.
Two critical video referrals saved Australia's men's hockey team as they scratched out an unconvincing victory over New Zealand in the Kookaburra's first hit out of the Olympic campaign.
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.
Russia's only track and field athlete at the Olympics games, Darya Klishina, is training at the same Florida base as Australia's athletics team.
Australia has two key medal hopes in athletics but a pass mark in Rio would be for a minimum of six athletes to finish in the top eight according to head coach Craig Hilliard.
Cheating middle-distance runners are running scared after the world athletics body's tough stance to ban Russia from the track in Rio, says Australia's head coach Craig Hilliard.
There is no Sally and so no rolled-gold golden hope. But there is Fabrice Lapierre jumping in the sand pit, and Jared Tallent walking clear of doped-up Russians and Italians.
John Steffensen, long considered an enfant terrible of Australian athletics, has joined the national sports federation as a director.
John Steffensen is calling it straight. Of course he is. Big things have changed since he was cast an enfant terrible of the last Australian Olympic team. But in sporting retirement the man who generated hot headlines aplenty during his 12-year professional sprint career has hardly become a wallflower.
Jess Trengove was injured before the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow then she won bronze. She knows what it is to lift for the big stage.
Members of the Russian track and field team, barred from the Rio Olympic Games over a doping scandal, competed among themselves at what looked like a high school stadium on Thursday evening.
Australian sprint hopeful Josh Clarke has pulled out of the Rio Olympics citing poor form after injury.
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