By Tony Wright
Australia’s Herb Elliott steamed towards the bell lap in the 1500-metre track race at the Olympics and saw in the distance a yellow towel flapping madly.
Striding – why, thriving – through the pain that punishes every runner in such a race, Elliott couldn’t quite remember what the sight was supposed to signify.
Herb Elliott breaks his own world record for the 1500m at the Rome Olympics in September 1960.Credit: AP
His coach, the unconventional Percy Cerutty, had declared he would wave a towel if Elliott was on pace to break the world record, but also to warn him if there was another runner on his heels.
Elliott, all his nervous energy focused on the upcoming contest, hadn’t listened closely.
And here, having surged from fifth to lead the Olympic pack, he decided Cerutty’s flapping flag could only be a signal that he had to run faster.
With 600 metres to go, he accelerated, his elegant stride lengthening, the wind in his face and daylight a poor second.
He won by 20 metres: 2.6 seconds ahead of the second runner. It was the widest margin recorded in the men’s 1500 metres in Olympic history.
It was a new world record: three minutes and 35.6 seconds, breaking Elliott’s own world standing of 3:36 and establishing a new Olympic record by almost five seconds.
It was 1960. The Rome Olympics.
“It was Elliott, with the hawk nose, the gaunt Viking face; Elliott of the lean body and the smooth stride; Elliott, lithe and stealthy, about as gentle as a tiger,” wrote Roger Bannister of the race in Sports Illustrated.
“This was a man made for this form of self-expression, the rest of the field having somehow learned it painfully and inadequately.”
High praise. Bannister was the first man to run a sub-four-minute mile. His great run was in May 1954, just six weeks before Australian John Landy became the second to run what had long been considered beyond human ability, and a distance Elliott would make his own four years later.
Herb Elliott’s greatness and his extraordinary philosopher-trainer, Percy Cerutty, will be on show again for Australians in a documentary touring the country after the Paris Olympics.
The short film was made by Australian journalist Ian Henschke, who bought the rights to Elliott’s autobiography, The Golden Mile, in 1984. He planned to make a telemovie, but changes to film investment tax concessions and a change of ownership of the TV network he was dealing with meant the project stalled.
Having recently achieved the rare opportunity of interviewing the notoriously media-shy Elliott, now 86, and sourcing previously unseen footage of both the runner and his coach, Henschke wants to revive his long-term project.
Percy Cerutty holds Elliott’s hand high after his protege ran a mile in 3:57.9 in California in June 1958.Credit: AP
He hopes his 24-minute documentary, an engrossing work of art itself, might excite an investor to help him make the film about the greatest partnership in Australian sporting history.
Shades, you might think, of the magnificent Chariots of Fire, the 1981 film based on two British athletes in the 1924 Olympics: Eric Liddell, a devout Christian who ran for the glory of God, and Harold Abrahams, an English Jew who competed to overcome prejudice.
The story of the young Elliott and the visionary Cerutty has its own themes as deep as the soul.
Running through pain was merely a way for both to gain self-realisation about what it was to grow and to be a human.
Training then tea: Cerutty discusses life with Elliott after a running session.Credit: The Age
Cerutty was, in many ways, more philosopher than running coach. Having suffered a midlife breakdown, he healed himself through brutally hard physical and mental training, and along the way developed a doctrine he called “Stotanism”: a blending of stoicism and the Spartan lifestyle.
He had his athletes run barefoot along beaches and sandy tracks through tea-tree forests, and famously, urged them to sprint up and down sandhills at Portsea until they dropped. They ran naked into wild surf, led by Cerutty to understand the natural world was central to the experience of a worthwhile life.
He fed his runners dry oats and bran and yoghurt and fruit when bran was considered food fit only for animals, and had them lift weights.
He read them poetry – Tennyson was favoured, and you can all but hear Cerutty reciting from Ulysses “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” – and introduced them to the thinking of the greats, from Leonardo da Vinci to philosophers and saints, particularly the mystic and lover of nature St Francis of Assisi, and had them read H.G. Wells’ monumental Outline of History.
Elliott in 2010 in his then role as chairman of mining company Fortescue Metals.Credit: Erin Jonasson
Cerutty’s approach was lampooned and criticised. But it worked. Spectacularly.
Since Elliott’s glorious day in Rome 64 years ago, no runner has broken a world record in the 1500m – known as the “metric mile” – at the Olympics.
Elliott during his time at Cambridge.Credit: Reuters
(The world record, of course, fell over the years at other events until 1998, when Moroccan runner Hicham El Guerrouj achieved what is still the fastest time in the world: 3:26.)
Elliott’s win in 1960 was so crushing that his time would have won him gold at seven of the next nine Olympics, all the way to Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992), Atlanta (1996) and even Rio (2016).
Why, he would have been able to qualify for the Paris Olympics, though he would have been required to find a lot more speed to have beaten Cole Hocker of the US, who won this week’s 1500m in an Olympic record time of 3:27.65.
We can indulge only a flight of fancy about whether Elliott could run stride for stride, and maybe even push a nose ahead, of today’s 1500m stars.
What if, we might dream, he could travel through time, ditch the primitive running shoes with their long metal spikes of the 1950s and ’60s and run on a fast, bouncing modern surface, rather than the crushed red scoria tracks of his era.
Dream on.
Soon after Rome, Elliott retired from running aged just 22, to study at Cambridge before embarking on a successful business career.
Incredibly, he never lost one of his 44 one-mile and 1500m races. He ran 17 one-milers under four minutes.
But what of the excitable little man flapping a towel in Rome to urge his champion on?
Cerutty found himself in police custody for jumping from the stands to wave his towel trackside, though he avoided charges.
In 1969, he declared himself tired of running up sandhills and retired from training.
He died at his home in Portsea on August 14, 1975, at the age of 80.
In 1989, his status was confirmed when his name was admitted to the Sport Australia Hall of Fame at the MCG.
The Golden Mile will screen at Sydney’s Roseville Cinema on August 14, and in Melbourne at The Lido, Hawthorn (August 21) and the Cameo, Belgrave (August 22).
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