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 …
Category: Running
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 …
300 years before the 'first' modern Olympics in Athens in 1896, a hill in the Cotswolds saw the first reincarnation of the ancient Greek Olympic tradition. And it's still going today. …
Explore the history of running through a set of articles examining some of the unexpected stories from the sport's long and colourful history. …
Why do I spend so much of my time researching running? I’ve been asked variants of this question on many occasions… I’ve even asked it myself a couple of times …
