Celebrating the rich history of AW
In December 1945 a monthly magazine called Athletics was launched with long jumper Jim Morrish on the cover. Priced at just sixpence it contained just 24 pages and was curiously numbered Vol 2, No.1. This was due to post-war rationing rules barring the launch of new publications, so the creator PW ‘Jimmy’ Green sidestepped the problem by claiming the magazine had been ‘revived’ after a lapse of six years.
It was, of course, a white lie. There had been no Athletics magazine prior to World War II although, to be fair to Jimmy, he first had the idea for it in 1935 after being inspired by a paper called Athletic News which operated until 1931.
Not surprisingly copies of the first-ever issue are hard to find. Eagle-eyed collectors occasionally spot it on eBay but they should be careful they are buying the real thing because in the early 1990s a number of duplicate ‘first issues’ were published with identical content albeit with the addition of one or two modern-day adverts!
Jimmy had served in the RAF and was a businessman, national-standard endurance runner and international-level official. Most people thought he was mad to try to launch an athletics ‘periodical’ but he ploughed on regardless and created a publication which would go on to record every run, jump and throw of note for the subsequent three-quarters of a century.
EJ ‘Billy’ Holt, the honorary secretary of the AAA at the time, was also in on the ruse. In the first issue, he wrote: “I am sure all athletes will welcome the re-publication of ‘Athletics’, a paper devoted solely to track and cross-country running, field events and walking.”
Holt added: “The undertaking of this publication in these difficult days of restrictions, shortages and many other obstacles requires courage and, if for this reason alone, deserves success, but I feel the athletes will support the venture wholeheartedly and give every encouragement to the proprietors. I sincerely wish the publication success.”
From the start Jimmy, who was 36 at the time, made a plea for club secretaries to give him the “newsy items, fixtures and results and we’ll do the rest”. But it was hard going to begin with and the magazine was hardly a roaring success with the inaugural issue selling just 2000 issues.
The magazine’s mission statement was to “bring all enthusiasts in the athletics world details of recent results, the latest information regarding coming events, club notes and news, results and news from the Colonies and other countries overseas, and articles of interest to the athlete generally”.
Certainly, the ethos was that this was the magazine mainly for “the club athlete” and Jimmy added: “Remember, the success and continuation of this paper depends on the support we receive from the athletes themselves. So if you want a paper of your own, rally around and tell your friends about it.”
For much of the magazine’s history the most popular area undoubtedly has been the results. Nowadays they are widely found online but up until recent years results formed the bulk of the magazine effectively as ‘news’ and the majority of each issue simply taken up with times, distances and heights recorded at various meetings.
It is somewhat ironic, therefore, that the man who would invent a machine that would lead to the creation of the internet – Alan Turing – was one of the many names who appeared in the early issues of AW. As well as being the brains behind the Electronic Brain Machine and subsequently immortalised in the movie The Imitation Game, Turing was an Olympic marathon hope who ran for Walton AC and appeared in our pages from 1946 onwards.
Kent Art Printers in Chatham was the first company to print the magazine. Within the magazine’s first year there was also the timely boost of the news that the Olympics would be held in London in 1948. During those Games, Jimmy provided day by day commentary for the subsequent Olympic coverage special issue although due to lack of space and resources his reports filled a mere 20 pages in a 32-page issue with room in results for the top six alone plus notable performances in heats.
Now growing fast in popularity, the magazine was selling around 5000 issues by the end of 1949. To meet demand, Jimmy took on the task of turning the monthly publication into a weekly with the first issue of Athletics Weekly out on January 7, 1950, costing just sixpence for 16 pages. As Mel Watman, who would later succeed Jimmy as editor, remembers: “To mark the occasion Jimmy doubled the size of the staff by taking on a typist to help him out.”
This was the era of ‘hot metal typing’ – a technique that would continue into the 1980s – and involved all the words having to be retyped into a particular format before being ready for publication. It was slow and cumbersome and most of the news and results was sent through the post. However, with a weekly magazine it meant a far wider variety and depth of material could be given to the readers.
In 1953 Watman had his first articles published in the magazine and the following year, aged 16, his first bylined piece – a profile of Bob Matthias - appeared. Watman widened AW’s coverage to the world of international athletics as he started his long and illustrious relationship with AW (you can read his special tribute to AW’s 75th anniversary in our December magazine).
AW went weekly at a perfect time too. In 1954 Roger Bannister ran the world’s first sub-four-minute mile and the White City saw Chris Chataway’s famous victory over Vladimir Kuts over 5000m. Jim Peters, Derek Ibbotson and Gordon Pirie also lit up the sport domestically and AW was trackside to cover it all.
The magazine was not entirely full of results of course. There were fixtures listings, news stories, coaching features and athlete interviews such as the long-running ‘Questionnaire’ series and, later, ‘Spotlight on Youth’. The letters pages of AW were also often the scene of heated debate. Everything from pacemakers to poaching and fixture clashes to controversial team selections were discussed with many of the same topics still being argued about today.
Through the 1960s AW covered the exploits of athletes like Mary Rand, Lynn Davies, David Hemery and Ann Packer – to name just a few – and by 1969 the magazine was 36 pages in size with 11,000 readers in 50 countries.
The magazine also saw its first colour photo on the front cover in December 1966 when the 21st anniversary issue had an image of Olympic long jump champion Davies. However regular colour front covers did not become a feature until 1979 when Marlies Göhr, the East German sprinter, featured.
Jimmy and Mel formed something of a dream team, too, with the former’s business acumen complemented by the latter’s writing skills, love of stats and youthful enthusiasm. As Watman wrote in a six-part series on the history of AW published in 2002: “In some 30 years we never exchanged a cross word. We agreed on the fundamentals … that AW should always be regarded as the club athlete’s magazine above all else, that we would print every significant result we could obtain, publish training and technique articles by leading coaches and enable anyone to express their viewpoint as long as it wasn’t libellous.”
On the ethos of AW, Watman added: “Like any good, responsible magazine, AW has reflected the ups and downs in its particular milieu, opened its columns to comment and suggestions and, where appropriate, campaigned for reform. Right from the outset its function was to inform its readership – primarily active club athletes – of what was happening in the big wide world of athletics and how it might affect them.”
The 25th anniversary issue in December 1970 featured an eye-catching and appropriately silver-embossed front cover and its 48 pages contained a congratulatory message from the Duke of Edinburgh. Jimmy finally retired in 1979 and was succeeded as business and advertisement director by his son Tim – and the magazine continued to prosper. Readership soared under Watman’s editorship, reaching a reputed 20,000-plus in around 70 countries during the golden era of the 1980s as Daley Thompson, Seb Coe, Steve Ovett, Steve Cram and others made the sport more popular than ever.
This was despite the team still wrestling with archaic methods. After Tessa Sanderson won the Olympic javelin title in Los Angeles in 1984, for example, Watman had to bash out several hundred words on the event to complete that day’s report before rushing to the press centre to catch the last postal collection. He recalls: “I made it with a couple of minutes to spare. In these days of computers and instant communication it may seem laughable but on the shoestring editorial budget under which we operated then the only way we could afford to send copy back to the printers was by air mail!”
Soon after those LA Games, the magazine sales were a reported 25,000 with a total readership estimated at 60,000. The magazine – which was still a pocket-sized A5 format – ballooned when it came to the number of pages, too, reaching 70-80 pages in the early 1980s and 120 pages for the London Marathon preview special in 1983.
In 1985 the magazine celebrated its 40th anniversary and the issue contained congratulations from Coe, Thompson, Bannister and other legends. “The only morning I get up before the crack of noon,” wrote the reigning Olympic decathlon champion, “is on a Friday when the postman pops my AW through the door around 10am.”
READ MORE: The secrets behind AW's success
It was all change, though, in 1987 when the magazine was sold from the Kent publishing firm which had run AW for many years to Peterborough-based publishing giants Emap. Almost immediately there were big changes – the ‘on sale’ day was brought forward to Thursday, the size of the magazine was controversially changed to larger A4 format, Keith Nelson was installed as its new editor and the readership figures began to slide.
As David Powell, long-time athletics correspondent of The Times, wrote: “Readers were cast out of their safe world of statistics, interviews and concise reporting into a jungle of trivia, sensationalism and screaming headlines.”
Watman’s experience and ability was not valued by the new owners and increasingly snubbed he left in 1988. The new-look AW took a further hit in 1989 when a rival weekly magazine called Athletics Today was launched under the ownership of Sir Eddie Kulukundis and a team that included Watman. AW's loss was Athletics Today's gain.
As the two magazines went head to head in competition for readers, AW eventually ‘won’ the circulation battle when Athletics Today closed down in 1993. But the experience had no doubt put a further dent in AW’s readership.
Running out of enthusiasm to own the magazine, Emap decided to sell it in 1999. Matthew Fraser Moat, a businessman and athletics fan with a background in the British Milers’ Club, stepped in to buy AW and went on to run the title until 2010 with Descartes Publishing. It was a bumpy decade – not helped by the advent of the internet, decline of print media and the struggling fortunes of British athletes – but Fraser Moat proved a safe pair of hands and eventually passed the baton to Richard Hughes and a small consortium of investors in 2010.
The five-year period that Hughes ran AW was buoyed by the fact London staged the Olympics. This was a home Games and AW was the sport’s only magazine covering the No.1 Olympic sport on home soil. Still, publishing a weekly magazine was becoming tougher and in 2015 he sold AW to The Great Run Company.
As a record-breaking athlete who had featured in its pages many times, Brendan Foster always had a soft spot for AW. So when the magazine passed into his hands – as chairman of The Great Run Company – AW had found a loving home. For five years Foster’s company owned AW, with Olympic silver medallist Wendy Sly appointed managing director and with myself continuing to edit the magazine after first being appointed to the role during the early years of Fraser Moat’s tenure.
Then the pandemic struck. Concerned about the future of its core business – the staging of events like the Great North Run – Foster reluctantly put AW up for sale. With coronavirus raging and a recession imminent, surely no one would want to take up the challenge of buying a magazine that covered a sport that effectively wasn’t even happening? But Hampshire-based company 21six stepped in to save the title and to begin a new era with a monthly magazine complemented by more online material.
» For more on the latest athletics news, athletics events coverage and athletics updates, check out the AW homepage and our social media channels on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
