In short:
The sporting partnership forged by Australian running legend Herb Elliott and athletics coach Percy Cerutty is being celebrated in a new documentary.
Elliott won gold in 1960 in a time that would still have secured Olympic selection six decades later, and Cerutty’s unconventional approach to the sport was instrumental in that success.
What’s next?
The short film will be screened in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and the United States.
Australian legend Herb Elliott was the last man to set a world record in winning the 1,500m on the track at the Olympics.
Elliott ran a time of 3:35.60 in 1960 at Rome.
Incredibly, his effort on a track made of crushed red scoria (volcanic rock), and achieved while wearing running shoes with 2.5-centimetre spikes, would still have been enough for him to qualify for the final at the Paris Olympics.
Elliott is considered Australia’s greatest middle distance runner and Adelaide journalist Ian Henschke has spent the best part of four decades researching the story.
The Australian legend has been on Henschke’s mind for even longer.
He read Elliott’s autobiography when he was in primary school.
“The thing that fascinated me about Herb Elliott was that he never lost a race over the mile or 1,500m and I could never get my head around it as a child,” Henschke said.
“How could you always win? Everyone loses at some point but Herb Elliott didn’t.”
Along his athletic journey, Elliott also became the first teenager to break the four-minute mile barrier and ultimately ran under that mark 17 times.
Henschke’s fascination with the great athlete drove him to write a telemovie script, suggest a television mini-series and ultimately settle for producing and funding a documentary.
The short film delves into what drove Elliott to be unbeatable.
“Herb Elliott was a teenager just like any other kid,” Henschke said.
“This is a film not just about Herb Elliott, it’s about Percy Cerutty, who was his coach.
“Cerutty is the person, who in a sense, created Herb Elliott.”
Cerutty, who died in 1975, was considered a somewhat eccentric coach.
He coaxed his athletes to run up sandhills for hours at Victoria’s Portsea beach and pushed them to heroic feats on the track in the 1950s and 1960s.
Elliott recently gave Henschke a rare interview about just what Cerutty’s coaching mantra involved for the athletes.
“The reason I ended up being so successful was five days out of seven I would run to exhaustion and then a couple of days out of seven I’d have sort of just a nice canter,” Elliott said in the film.
“Make one compromise, it smashes everything.
“So compromising is not in the book under any circumstances.”
The Golden Mile
While he wrote an autobiography in 1961, Elliott prefers to leave his athletic career in the past — something his six children can confirm.
His son, John Elliott, said it took a lot of convincing for Henschke to get his father in front of a camera.
“He’s never ignored it,” John said of his father’s feats.
“He just hasn’t dwelt on it and so as a father he was just a lovely dad that other people tell me used to run.”
He said there was a lot of footage in the documentary he had not seen before.
“It’s great to see the impact Herb had at the time on running and the inspiration he provided to other people,” John said.
While he has seen the documentary, the extended family will see it for the first time when it is screened in Melbourne later this month.
“We’re going to learn things about Herb that we don’t know and for us that’s terrific and we’ll be forever thankful,” John said.
Henschke’s documentary carries the same name as Elliott’s long-ago autobiography, The Golden Mile.
It will be screened around Australia and will also shown in New Zealand, the UK and the United States.
