http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/more-sports/a-new-punchline-for-steffensen/story-e6frey6i-1226275157011
A new punchline for Steffensen
by: Mike Hurst
From: The Daily Telegraph
February 20, 2012 12:00AM
London bound: John Steffensen. Picture: Phil Hillyard Source: The Daily Telegraph
JOHN Steffensen locked in his place on Australia’s Olympic 4x400m relay team and came a step closer to earning an individual run with a commanding 400m victory at the Sydney Track Classic at Homebush on Saturday.
With triple world boxing champion Jeff Fenech standing watch on the grandstand concourse, Steffensen received a lukewarm reception from the crowd when introduced and an equally muted response to his post-race interview despite his impressive run and encouraging time of 45.61sec.
Fenech does Steffensen’s padwork and it showed as the 2006 Commonwealth 400m champ kept his arms punching right to the line.
Steffensen is a flamboyant personality whose most recent effort to entertain served only to belittle his own relay teammates and distract from his own excellence as a master of 400m running.
“It was a murder scene out there, the way I murdered their little boys. Someone should call 000. It was a crime scene,” he said after a narrow win in Perth a week earlier.
The comment earned him a rebuke from Australia’s 100m hurdles world champion Sally Pearson, who said “slagging off” teammates was not on.
The reality is Steffensen is a class runner and does not need to imitate Muhammad Ali or Anthony Mundine in order to entertain. With Darrell Smith - a nephew of the world’s greatest 400m coach John Smith - in Australia to coach Steffensen (and US hurdler Nia Ali), the Olympic A-qualifying time of 45.20sec could come at the Melbourne Olympic Trials on March 1-3.
Certainly he has a great admirer in Athletics Australia’s head coach Eric Hollingsworth, who made a show of himself embracing Steffensen on the track after he had crossed the line, a public display of affection I saw no others receive.
And veteran Tamsyn Manou, 33, who won her 800m in Sydney (2:01.53) is also a fan: “John’s not being serious - it’s not how he is. He’s such a good teammate and he’s great to all of us.”
Yet Steffensen was far from the meet’s stand-out performer. That honour belonged to Kiwi Valerie Adams who won the shot put with a world-leading toss of 20.67m - 11cm further than her Olympic gold-medal effort in Beijing.
Adams’s performance was all but ignored by the meeting’s producers. She was not even interviewed over the stadium PA after her event. And obviously that is Steffensen’s point: he will never be overlooked.
Henry Frayne also excelled, beating the Olympic A-qualifying mark of 8.20m, making him Australia’s greatest long and triple combination jumper (8.27m and 17.09m), surpassing Phil May (8.02m and 17.02m) within a week .
