Letter From Australia:Craig Mottram's poor performance in the 5,000-metre final at the world championships last night left a strange taste in many mouths. After the success of Jana Rawlinson and to a lesser extent Nathan Deakes, it was as if the feast were over. No longer could Australian athletes ask for an extra dollop of luck.

Mottram will have tests in an attempt to reveal the reason for his failure to even keep up with the leading bunch over the last two laps. The results will be awaited with interest. The 26-year-old had seemed primed to improve on the bronze medal he won in the event at the 2005 championships in Helsinki. He certainly should not have finished toward the rear of the field in the race won by Bernard Lagat.

Deakes's victory in the 50-kilometre walk was full of merit but went largely unnoticed by a public that regards race walking in a similar light to tractor-pulling. They're both a bit of a joke.

It's now an unfortunate joke that Australia's top female walker, Jane Saville, gets disqualified whenever there's a major championship. This view is flavoured by her dramatic expulsion just as she was about to enter the stadium at the Sydney Olympics, but sure enough, she was disqualified halfway through the 20-kilometre race in Osaka. Once again her tragedy was splayed across front pages throughout Australia.

Saville continues to compete in an event whose judges disapprove of her technique. Deakes is also persistent and deserves his reward. But somehow it must be doubted whether his name will enter the lexicon of sporting champions. The public has little interest in walking events, which are really not quite running events.

Unlike Deakes, Rawlinson will be mentioned down through the ages after winning the 400-metre hurdles just eight months after giving birth to her first child, a son called Cornelis (I'm not sure either).

The scale of her victory is understandable to anyone who's had anything to do with childbirth. It's a story with a reach far beyond the athletics world.

A year ago, Rawlinson had one of the highest profiles in Australian sport, but mostly for the wrong reasons. She was a world champion, having won the 400-metre hurdles in Paris in 2003, but she was in the habit of pouring out her soul to anyone who put a microphone in front of her. And, just to make it handy for headline writers, her first name goes nicely with the word "drama".

At the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in March 2006, Rawlinson had a very public "bitch fight" with Tamsyn Lewis, another member of the 4 x 400-metre team. Whether Rawlinson was right or wrong, most Australians blamed her. And when she left for England in tears soon afterwards she declared the media had driven from her homeland.

Rawlinson trained in England under the coaching of her husband, hurdler Chris Rawlinson, and said nothing to the Australian press. The 24-year-old's victory in Osaka caught many by surprise. Her maturity during interviews caught more by surprise. No longer were there sobbing bleats about the wrongs visited on her. She was very likeable. Perhaps every female athlete should have a baby.

The highs and lows of the Australian athletics team in Osaka have nothing on the highs and lows that rugby league great Andrew Johns admitted to this week. Johns is arguably the greatest player in the history of Australian rugby league. In the northern states, which is to say the rugby league states, his retirement mid-season because of a neck complaint was considered a natural end to an era in the game.

Johns, 34, was arrested in London last week in possession of an ecstasy tablet. The jolt served as a catalyst for him to reveal his sordid secrets about problems with alcohol and recreational drugs. The northern states and a good portion of the southern states were transfixed as Johns revealed the extent of his battles with depression and, it was later revealed, bipolar disorder. His heavy consumption of mind-altering substances was an attempt to maintain the highs and keep the lows at a distance.

Johns revealed he had been drug-tested 17 times while playing with Australian rugby league club Newcastle and was negative every time. His admissions cast the sport's drug-testing procedures in a poor light. I don't believe sportsmen should be tested for recreational drugs any more than librarians or shoe salesmen, but given there is a testing regime it's reasonable to ask how he escaped detection. Johns has spoken of helping sportsmen with mental illness. His frankness about his own illness has no doubt already made an impression. Here's hoping he finds peace in his years after the game.

Increasingly, there appears little hope of peace in the war against equine flu. Racing returned to the southern states this week, but the northern states of New South Wales and Queensland remain blighted by the highly contagious disease.

While authorities believe they have stymied the disease's spread, racing owners and trainers are raising the heat in their campaign to have an independent inquiry. Some are threatening to sue for lost earnings.

The disease took hold in the Eastern Creek quarantine centre just out of Sydney. Discovering the reason for its outbreak could prevent a similar catastrophe.

Yesterday's papers carried photos of the infamous annual race meeting at Birdsville, in outback Queensland. Usually, a collection of motley thoroughbreds fight their way around the dirt course. But on this occasion, with the transport of horses in the northern states forbidden by law, racegoers were forced to improvise. The picture that made most newspapers showed a dozen men pulling rubbish bins as fast as they could up the red and dusty straight.

Back in Melbourne, the talk is about what will happen to the nation's most famous horse-race, the Melbourne Cup. The trainers of international horses have all ruled out any chance of bringing their prized beasts to Melbourne. Trainers in Sydney and Brisbane have also said it would be doubtful they could bring their horses south during the spring.

This year's Melbourne Cup might just be for horses from Victoria and a little beyond. A parochial air might return to the event, if only for a year. It sounds quite fun.