Is it time we all gave up on Athletics Weekly?

They put a very young lad on the cover a few weeks ago. A shameful mistake in my opinion. Far to much pressure on a developing talent.

The internet spelt the end for AW with most people buying it for results. Why wait 5 days and spend almost £3 when they're now online within 24 hours? It's disgraceful the coverage they give to kids too, piling unnecessary pressure on them and treating them like celebrities because they got 5th in the Youth Olympics or something. Can you imagine a football magazine giving the same prominence to youth team football? It would be laughable. Jason Henderson wrote a great article once on athletics being a kid's sport for elite seniors but he should still focus on seniors and stop youngsters thinking they've made it at 14. Why do they all disappear when they stop progressing at 22? Because they're not used to persevering and being under the radar. Quite often our most successful seniors at the longer distances were very ordinary juniors who stuck at it. Perhaps AW toning down the child celebrity factor might help UK athletics in the long term?!

The free running thing just totally pissed me off. What a waste of money and a crap article that had no place in the magazine but more in joggers world. They are just dumbing the magazine down.

Why can they not put interviews in the magazine with top athletes and their training and let the younger generation see what it takes to get to the top and give an insight in how the top athletes see themselves.

If they continue to put in some of the crap that they have been putting in lately then the magazine is dooomed.

I feel that the magazine was at it's peak in the late 80's early 90's when it had some great articles in it.

I trust you all filled in the readers survey to make your views known to the Ed. I agree that it's not a great intellectual insight page after page, but if it was it'd sell even fewer copies. Bear in mind the title isn't 'endurance weekly' . The editor is probably more knowledgable across the sport in all its elements than 99% of folk who post here and he's receptive to sensible comments. I think it's actually better than a couple of years ago partly because some profles are now a bit more extensive. My guess is that part of the issue is the teeny budget can't get much decent writing done, hence the 'comment' pages given over to that painful fellow who shares as urname with a Prime Minister from the 50s. I resent paying to read his nonsense.

I;m kind of surprised that people aren't a bit more receptive to possible x-over benefits from the 'parkour' scene. Arguably it's a damn sight more likley to feed decent young athletes into certain event groups in the sport than some of the antiquated structures within T+F that have them quit it before they have got near senior age group.

Why wait 5 days and spend almost £3 when they\'re now online within 24 hours?

Why wait 24 hours ? TrackAndFieldPhoto.com this summer had coverage of the Brussels Golden League, Berlin Golden League, Zurich Golden League, Goteborg European Championships, Stuttgart IAAF Finals, just to name a few, by the time I woke up in the morning and had my Pete\'s coffee.

I enjoyed the free running article. What was it - two pages? I'd rather read that than all the stuff about XC and marathon running which has zero relevance to me, and there is a LOT of that in there right now. It's not track & field or 'athletics' in the traditional sense though. Having said that I'd rather they take out all the crap on fell running, trail and frigging road races than take out that article, so each to their own.

They have to aim for the average readership, and I don't think an article about free running or something new every once in a while is too much. Like david said, free running IS likely to get people involved and athletics has to move with the times or be left behind - something which, sadly, I think has been happening for a long time now. There are so many avenues which could be exploited yet are not - I don't know why, but I wonder if it is due to people being stuck in the past and simply not looking at what young people really are interested in.

I agree about AW BASICS though - I doubt many beginners would buy AW anyway so it seems a bit of a waste of time.

Free running? Don't you know it's called parkour? Just remember that the next time you leapfrog a dustbin in town.

The job of Athletics Weekly isn't to get people involved in the sport, by the time they start buying it they will already be involved, as its a specialist magazine.

I don't disagree free running has merits, but there are plenty of other activities which are also useful to athletics. I was an international and got involved as I used to run my paper round pretty quick each week, it doesn't mean paper rounds deserve the front cover and a two page spread. Although if Henderson is reading this....

The reason AW puts juniors on the cover and runs articles on them is that the seniors, with a couple of notable exceptions, are a bunch of professional losers.

I've never tried it. That doesn't mean I'm not interested in reading about it though. I thought it was a better article, and definitely a lot more interesting to a lot of people, than some of the stuff they put in there.

Well one of the problems with covering athletics is that its such a varied sport anyway. You maybe interested in throwing whereas I'm interested in MD and LD running. They should have enough to talk about without going into other areas. They would be far better concentrating their efforts and resources on the actual disciplines of our sport, whether that's sprinting, throwing, fell running etc.

Oh and the worse thing in AW Basics ever was that thing about athletics for toddlers a few weeks ago. They had kids walking on the bit of metal between lane 1 and the field. How crazy is that, every track I've ever been to has encouraged kids to be careful of lane 1 and the field. It might be unlikely they'll get hit by a javelin, but it would be pretty bad if they got the full force of a group knocking out 400s at 15mph.

Guarantee 90% of readers are middle/long distance runners and 50% of those are kids.

Well, yes, I'd have prefered a sprinting article to the free running article and I do see your point, I just thought for how often it occurs it was OK (that's my take on it - obviously other people weren't interested in reading it!). They also covered things recently like sportshall which might not be interesting to anyone over the age of 15 but a lot of champions have come from there too.

I really like athletics weekly. We're the only country to have a weekly athletics magazine I think. I wish they'd take BASICS out though!

it has its up and downs but it's still pretty good - and if you subscribe it is good value for money

TO get into pretentious mode, good writing about sport will appeal beyond the technical geeks of the event. A couple of the best pieces in last couple of years were both by IAAF freelancers, one about T+F structures in Sweden ( which went a lot beyond 'aren't they great at jumping') and one about Morifushi the japanese hammer whiz. But I doubt that many U16s would have read these.

On endurance, there' s v little that adds much to what we can all dig up on letsrun where most of the inside knewledge gets posted but that's perhaps the way of

the media world now.

Personally I don't like the pages of v mediocre domestic results at the expesne of decent coverage of international stuff of really top class, but, sadly perhaps, many people go straight to the results just to check that their 58 mins in the Wherever 10m has been brought to the nation;s attention.