The world’s #1 athletics magazine was first published in December 1945 and is still going strong today.
From the days of Fanny Blankers-Cohen, Emil Zatopek and Roger Bannister to the era of Mondo Duplantis, Sidney McLaughlin-Levron and Noah Lyles, AW: (He has been covering sports since December 1945, and the magazine celebrates his 80th birthday this month.
The magazine was founded shortly after the Second World War by Jimmy Green, a former sportsman and official, who originally published it from a room in his country house in Kent, south-east England. Interestingly, the first issue had “Vol II, No I” on the cover, but Green maliciously made up this white lie to get around post-war rationing regulations that prohibited the release of new editions.
For the first five years, the magazine was published once a month and was called Athletics. But such was the thirst for athletics news and results, it became a weekly in 1950.
World Athletics 2019 AW: one of its authority Heritage plaques. In 2020, the magazine returned to a monthly edition, but with a greater emphasis on digital sports coverage, and it is still going strong under its current ownership of Iconic Media.
AW: From 1948 to 2024, London has recorded every Olympic Games, in addition to countless mass, national and international events. Being based in the UK, the magazine has always had a British bias and all the country’s top athletes can trace their early appearances back to “AW:‘.
Olympic heptathlon gold medalist Jessica Ennis-Hill, for example, first appeared in the magazine at the age of 13 when she finished just 10th in the 1999 English Schools’ High Jump. Mo Farah’s first mention was equally humble as he finished 10th in the under-13 division of the London Mini Marathon in 1995 aged 12.
Greg Rutherford, another British Olympic champion, got off to a similarly inauspicious start when the 11 July 2001 edition of AW included his fifth place in the English Schools Long Jump Final. Others, meanwhile, got off to a winning start, such as Daley Thompson, the decathlon legend who made his debut AW: After winning the Sussex Schools 200m title as a 15-year-old in July 1974.
Seb Coe appeared in the pages for the first time AW: On 13th March 1971, as the winner of the Colt Race in the Yorkshire Cross Country Championships. The list goes on, and naturally, Usain Bolt was photographed in the magazine’s 2002 Junior World Championships coverage and went on to appear on the front cover dozens of times before hanging up his tops in 2017.
Politicians such as Ming CampbellCecil Parkinson and Geoffrey Archer are among the many celebrities who have appeared in the pages over the years, while scientist Alan Turing has been featured in a Hollywood film. Simulation gamewas he AW: regular 1940s.
No one has appeared in the magazine more than Eric Shirleyhowever. The 1956 and 1960 Olympian made his 3000m debut in early 1946 after winning the Middlesex Youth Cross Country title, and the 96-year-old has still featured in our team in recent years.
It’s incredible to think that when AW: was born, athletes competed on a gray track, with performances measured in feet and inches and the hand of a clock. The four-minute mile was still a dream, and women competed in a number of events compared to men.
However, sub-four miles are now relatively commonplace, women have run the marathon faster than the men’s world record in 1945, which would have been unthinkable at the time, and an official two-hour marathon seems a matter of “not if, but when”.
Check out our August issue for a big feature celebrating the 80 greatest athletes in the history of AW sports coverage.
Or see the latest December issue of AW for a fun feature that asks various experts what athletics might look like in another 80 years.
