Victorian Australia was a tough and wild place. Transports from Britain had dumped over 160,000 convicts there between 1788 and 1868, and from 1851 onwards the first gold rush inspired thousands of volunteers to follow them. The frontier society that emerged from this potent mix of criminality, ambition and entrepreneurialism was one in which fortunes could be made and lost overnight. Gambling was rife amongst gold prospectors in particular, who were eager to multiply their new found wealth by betting …
Author: Neil Baxter
I read an interesting article on Medium the other day, in which Paul Flannery, an American sports journalist, talks about why he and countless others have turned to running as …
Whenever I get asked about the subject of my PhD I have to suppress the urge to launch into a sort of paranoid defence of the sociological relevance and intellectual …
These days the pub is probably not the first place that springs to mind when thinking about top class athletics. In fact, going to the pub and competitive running are …
Second part of my selection of important or interesting running statistics derived mainly from the Big Running Survey. …
What stops runners from running as much as they'd like? This post explore some of the most common barriers, and how they change over the life course. …
What’s the most common question you’re asked after finishing a race? In my experience it’s almost always ‘what was your time?’, and talking to other runners it seems this experience …
This post presents a selection of statistics covering a range of running demographics, from participation rates and gender balance to ethnicity and disability. …
