This is an archive copy of a document originally located at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/sportsf/stories/s823522.htm
with Warwick Hadfield
4/4/2003
The Extra-Ordinary Percy Cerutty
Summary:
Almost two decades after his death, Percy
Cerutty's place in Australian sporting history is still uncertain. Was he the
charlatan and opportunist many still claim him to be. Or is he a prophet without
honour in his own land - an elite athletics coach (sub four minute!) miles ahead
of the rest of the field? We go running up and down the sandhills in search of
the answers.
Also this week, Hawaiian out-rigger canoes sighted on the Barwon River in
Victoria, and award-winning author and film-maker, Richard Flanagan, talks about
his other great passion, kayaking.
Details or Transcript:
Warwick Hadfield: Welcome to The Sports
Factor, and this week we’re taking to the water. We’ll check out the sighting of
exotic boats on the waterways of Victoria, Hawaiian outrigger canoes, and find
out what these rare birds are doing among the pelicans, the water hens and one
slightly damp Sports Factor presenter.
Also we’re talking to award-winning author, film maker and Archibald Prize
winning subject, Richard Flanagan about his other great passion,
kayaking.
But first this week, the extraordinary athletics coach, Percy Cerutty.
‘NESSUN DORMA’
Percy Cerutty: I would sooner die than be beaten, I’m extremely hostile
about the feet, I hate the person that’s beaten me and I hate myself worse for
being beaten, and the young get that from me.
Warwick Hadfield: Almost 30 years after his death in 1975, the place of
Percy Wells Cerutty among the myths and legends of Australian sport remains an
uncertain one.
Was he the unpopular polemicist, charlatan and opportunistic rogue that many
still claim him to be? Or was he a prophet without honour in his own land, a
person at the cutting edge of sports science whose training camp amid the
sandhills at Portsea on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula pre-dates the
establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport by at least a couple of
decades?
The answers should become, well a little clearer following the release this week
of a new biography called Why Die: The Extraordinary Percy Cerutty, Maker
of Champions.
Now the making of the maker of champions began in the late 1930s, when at the
age of 43, Cerutty suffered an almost complete mental and physical breakdown.
And with the doctors giving up on him, they said he wouldn’t last another two
years, he gave up on them, convinced now the only person who could save him was
himself.
In the good old days of steak and three veggies, he became a complete
vegetarian. He took up weight lifting and as his strength returned began walking
and then running.
He began listening to the works of the great composers, he adopted the postural
technique of Alexander, and he even, in the pursuit of this faster and fitter
Percy Cerutty, turned to help to a racehorse, as his biographer, Graem
Sims explains.
Graem Sims: It all began one morning at Caulfield Racecourse as he, for
reasons even he didn’t understand, he found himself heading there for a trek and
there he came into contact with the mighty Ajax, one of the great sprinters of
the day, one of the great milers out at the track. Percy saw this horse and as
he said at the time, ‘Something passed from that horse to me’. He began to study
the motions of horses, running beside them as they did their trackwork out there
at Caulfield, and he developed an entirely original theory of human movement
that postulated that there might just be one best way to travel over the ground.
He visited Melbourne Zoo to study the actions of antelopes and the chimpanzees.
This all came together in one unifying theory that Percy called his naturalistic
theory of movement. Now this was supported by other visionary scientists of the
day, including Alexander, Frederick Mathias Alexander, whose Alexander Technique
is still widely taught these days in dance and drama schools. It’s a form of
posture in which we basically, starting with the way the head is cradled in the
neck, that a particular type of movement can actually affect the way we think.
Warwick Hadfield: Another pivotal moment in the transition of Cerutty
from invalid into elite athletics coach was the establishment of the Stotans.
As well as loving Italian opera, he adored the Greek classics, and he invented
the name of his group of like-minded friends by mixing up the words Spartan and
Stoic. So, Graem, tell me more about these Stotans.
Graem Sims: Percy produced a document in 1946 which he called his Stotan
Philosophy. It’s an extraordinary document. It runs over six close typewritten
pages, it basically outlines a way of living based around this particular, well
it’s almost like a club that he postulated this Stotan Order. It was based
around the need for violent physical activity in one’s life, that by perfecting
our bodies we might come closer to our own inner gods ourselves. It entailed
diet, philosophy, cultivation of the intellect, openness to artistic endeavours,
he had them reading, he had them listening to Italian opera. It’s never quite
clear whether it was anything really much more than the document that Percy
actually produced while other runners certainly referred to them as Stotans, it
wasn’t as if there was a secret order or anything, but it just sort of brought
runners together in this particular gang. Percy just as much liked to refer to
them as a gang at the time, groups of like-minded runners who shared a passion
for philosophy and athletics, who would join him on some of his camps where he
first started to visit Portsea down on the tip of Victoria’s Mornington
Peninsula.
Percy Cerutty: I admit that the only God I worship or know is success.
And I try to put that into the minds, of personalities, of others. But I never
impose anything, they choose, they don’t even have to come here, but if they are
I’m going to talk on that level. I feel that it’s far better to know you’ve
tried and perhaps not succeeded, than to look back and wonder whether you should
have really tried hard.
Warwick Hadfield: Well how did he go from that to being an elite
athletics coach?
Graem Sims: Percy had outstanding success with some of this early
runners. By about 1946 he realised what his true vocation was, and that was as a
teacher. All his life he’d struggled to find out what he was going to be best
at, and now he realised that with this extraordinary breadth of knowledge that
he’d pulled together, that he really had something to impart and he thought that
he might well become a conditioner of men, instructing businessmen particularly
in health and lifestyle methods, taking them on one of the early personal
trainers, you might say. But he also gathered together these runners and had
extraordinary success with even among the first few runners who came to him. One
was Les Perry, who went on to become Australia’s champion miler and 3-miler, in
the late ‘40s, represented Australia at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, became known
as the Australian Zatopek in fact. These were just young Melbourne runners, or
Victorian runners, who had heard of Cerutty, heard that he was giving advice to
runners from his South Yarra flat, went and knocked on his door or saw the
advertisement that he placed in newspapers, and under the influence of Percy’s
motivational techniques, basically telling them that the accepted practices of
the athletics coaches of the day were absolute rubbish, and that all they had to
do was just get out there and stress the organism, run further and harder than
anyone else, put in the greatest effort and that this athletics effort could not
just affect their results on the track but could also impact on other areas of
their lives as well, in very powerful and positive ways.
Warwick Hadfield: Now he linked up with John Landy, of course now the
Victorian Governor, but back then a promising miler himself, and in 1956 in
March, there was an incident which is now part of Australian folklore, in the
Australian Championships when Ron Clark tripped and fell, Landy who was behind
him at that stage, might have just put his spikes into his arm, he went back to
make sure that Clark was all right, and then looked up, saw the field about 30
metres away, panicked and ran on, and then eventually won the race, and of
course even the cynics in the press gallery stood up and applauded this fine
action, and as we all know it’s now seen as the start of Gentleman John Landy.
But Percy Cerutty was not so impressed.
Graem Sims: Percy was privately scathing. He’d always had a very troubled
relationship with John Landy. Landy was never one for gangs, he was an
extraordinary runner by any standards of course, but Percy was very much the one
who sort of set him on his way in 1950 when he first came to him. They had a
massive falling out upon Landy’s return from Helsinki. The details of that
revealed for the first time here, Landy’s never spoken openly about it, he was a
gentleman even in those days. But because Landy had been only the third
qualifier in the mile to go to Helsinki, his fares were never paid for. So he
had only gone there under the charity and under the fund-raising efforts of
those in Geelong. He was actually quite disappointing in Helsinki. Upon his
return he set about a renewed training regime that basically left what he’d been
previously doing for dead, and started to record outstanding results. And Percy
of course thought that this was simply an indication that Landy hadn’t been
putting in enough effort in the lead-up to Helsinki. And suggested as much that
he had wasted the fare going over there, which was about as tough an insult as
Landy could possibly hope to withstand. He always believed that Gentleman John
Landy had to lose the Gentleman for him to become a first-class runner. Well he
always was a first-class runner, but to convert that talent into actual results
at international level. Percy believed running was not a gentlemanly pursuit, he
believed it was a primitive act, it was basically a violence one committed
against one’s self. When John Landy stopped mid-race to return to pick up Ron
Clark, this indicated to Percy that Landy was not actually out there running
with the requisite amount of primitive killer instinct which he liked to arouse
in his own runners. So Percy offered a very alternative view of Landy’s great
display of sportsmanship.
RACE COMMENTARY
Warwick Hadfield: Looking elsewhere, there was a similar, well
off-the-cuff remark, who knows, things that were said to Ron Clark and that
relationship was never patched up right up until the time of Percy Cerutty’s
death.
Graem Sims: In 1964 in Tokyo, Ron Clark was resting before his
5,000-metre race, he’d already just recorded a Bronze Medal in the 10,000 metres
when he was the clear favourite to win. He was a world record holder in both
events at the time. Prior to heading out for the 5,000 metres he was the
Australian team captain for the Australian Olympic team; just prior to the
event, resting in the dressing rooms, when he hears this voice across the other
side of the dressing room, ‘Ah, you’ve got no hope Clark, you always were a weak
bastard.’ And this was Percy’s tactic. He used it often amongst athletes, that
the goad prior to an event would help arouse that sense of outrage and primitive
killer instinct, and it had certainly worked on other runners in their time.
They’ve thought, ‘I’ll show the old bastard’, but in Ron Clark’s case here, it
just completely unsettled him, and he headed out for one of the races of his
life with an incredible knot in his stomach, and subsequently ran what he admits
was the worst race of his career to finish floundering in 9th place.
‘NESSUN DORMA’
Percy Cerutty: I got a good dictionary up there, and the words ‘fail’ and
‘failure’ has been ruled out for years. I don’t know what people are talking
about who use that word. All I do know is temporary non-success, even if I’ve
got to wait another 20 years for what I’m after, and I try to put that into
people, no matter what their object in life. Athletics, I always say, is only a
start, but you prove on the track something, beating others and getting
somewhere, that you can use as an experience in after life, as I told Elliot.
‘Beat ‘em on the track and you’ll beat ‘em in business’, and he’s getting on,
see?
Warwick Hadfield: Now Herb Elliot seemed to respond to this probably
better than any other athlete that Cerutty had under his charge; would that be a
fair assessment, given the success that Elliot did, and the level of support
that he still has for his old coach?
Graem Sims: Oh it’s certainly the case, although Elliot was not the only
one. I’ve interviewed dozens of runners who still think so highly of the man.
Many of them have not necessarily gone on to athletics pursuits but have now
spread far and wide around the country pursuing business or medical careers.
Percy’s levels of inspiration worked with many different men, and women at many
different times. But in purely athletic terms there were never greater champions
than Herb Elliot, undefeated in his career. He first met Percy in 1955 on one of
Percy’s trips to Western Australia where he proudly proclaimed that this young
man would be running the 4-minute mile in under two years, which at the time was
deemed to be an outrageous statement. Invited Elliot to join him at his Portsea
camp after the Melbourne Olympics and yes, something really clicked between
them. Percy introduced him to weight training, it’s actually little understood
that Percy was one of the first great pioneers of weight training in athletics
in the early ‘40s when he first started to proclaim its merits, he was deemed to
be quite a lunatic in this regard as well; people thought it would add
unnecessary baggage to a runner. But with Elliot, underneath the iron, he
developed this fantastically strong physique, he had already a large heart, and
he and Percy absolutely clicked as a two-man act that basically stormed the
world, first of all beginning in 1958 at the Cardiff Empire Games, then heading
on to Rome in 1960 where Elliot won the 1500 metres in such fabulous style, the
greatest winning margin of any 1500 metres at the Olympics in history.
‘NESSUN DORMA’
Warwick Hadfield: Cerutty’s first marriage foundered around the time of
his first breakdown. His second marriage, to Nancy, lasted right up until his
death. What was the nature of that relationship?
Graem Sims: I write in the book that when he married Nancy he got the
Stoic of his dreams. They certainly clashed very often … they could have
terrible arguments. Nancy at one stage in answer to one of Percy’s barbs,
actually broke a milk bottle over his head as they sat having a cup of tea out
the front gate at Portsea. Percy didn’t wash the blood off for a week, proudly
wandering the streets showing this caked matt of blood in his hair.
Percy Cerutty: I was only shocked today, I’ve got a young 19-year-old big
6-foot or so American here, and he went up to help somebody at Sorrento to do a
bit of a job this morning, two miles away and he rang up and said he was waiting
for somebody to pick him up. And he has two big strong legs that are supposed to
be used in running. I nearly dropped dead and if there’s too much of that, he
will drop dead!
Graem Sims: His legacy is very much alive in his writings. This is a man
who didn’t so much just address the spirit of sport which he talk so much about,
but he spoke about its spirituality. His legacy is the limitless frontier that
is mental preparation for sporting events. It’s the combination of sport and
life, how active, violent exercise is an absolute prerequisite for a healthy
lifestyle.
Warwick Hadfield: Graem Sims on the Remarkable Percy Cerutty,
maker of champions.
Earlier this week I learned all about hut hoeing, when I went outrigger
canoeing.
The Hawaiian outrigger canoe is part of the cultural heritage of America’s only
Island State. It, and along with the cry of ‘Hut, ho’ is also becoming an
unmistakable part of the Australian sporting scene, first in Queensland and New
South Wales and now, far removed from swaying tropical palms, on the waterways
of Victoria.
Gina Kenny is the founder of the Geelong Outrigger Canoeing Club, and I
asked Gina what inspired her to bring these most graceful of seagoing vessels
here to the chilly brown waters of the Barwon River, west of Melbourne.
Gina Kenny: I used to paddle outrigger canoes in California, and when I
migrated over here to Australia, I really missed outrigger canoeing, and they do
the sport and have done the sport in Queensland for over 20 years, they also
paddle in Sydney, and I thought why can’t we do it here in Victoria? So seven
years ago through talking to people at gyms and different places around Geelong,
I persuaded a group of people to help out with forming the first Victorian
Outrigger Canoe Club.
We have 30 members paddling at Hamilton Island in 10 weeks.
Warwick Hadfield: And Hamilton Island seems to be a big attraction, it
would seem that a lot of people are here to keep fit, and others are here to be
involved in a team, and others are just looking forward to a lot of Queensland
sun.
Gina Kenny: Yes we have a bit of a combination of everything here. You
can take this sport to any level, whether it be as an elite athlete or as a
social paddler.
Warwick Hadfield: And what about the Hawaiian part of it, because it’s a
part of their culture; is there a spiritual side to paddling an outrigger canoe
on the Barwon River?
Gina Kenny: Yes, most definitely. Like you don’t have the same feel as
you do when you go to the ocean, you get more of a sense of being where you’re
meant to be when you’re at the ocean, but on the river we keep that spiritual,
cultural side of outrigger canoeing nice and strongly going with our ‘Hut ho’s’
and we keep with the traditional customs. For instance some of the customs are
you’re not allowed to step over the canoe, you have to walk around the canoe,
and you always face your canoes facing towards the water at night when they’re
sleeping, so we take our canoes and although they’re here on the Barwon River,
they’re facing the water, we don’t step over them, you’re not meant to swear in
the canoes either, so we stick to that. And standing up in a canoe whilst
paddling is also not a real good thing to do.
Warwick Hadfield: Now we talked about ‘Hut ho’; tell us what Hut ho
means.
Gina Kenny: Well Hut is a signal that was developed many, many years ago
with Canadian paddlers, they worked out that Hut was the easiest thing to say
when you’re really short of breath and working really hard, so it’s quite easy
to when you’re puffing along, and your lungs are expanding, to just call out
‘Hut!’ and the ‘Ho’ is the traditional Hawaiian word for ‘paddle’. So we like
our paddlers to really be strong with ‘Hut ho’ and really get that ‘ho’ out
there and just imagine that as you’re saying ‘ho’, they’re thinking about
paddling in Hawaii.
Warwick Hadfield: Now you’ve got some races that are 72 kilometres long;
how fit do you have to be to do one of those?
Gina Kenny: You have to be very fit, and you have to be mentally prepared
as well as physically prepared.
Warwick Hadfield: Is the mental part as much a part of it as the physical
fitness?
Gina Kenny: Yes, it definitely is. And you see it in different people
that come along. Some people mentally they’re just not satisfied unless they’re
working beyond what’s comfortable, beyond the comfort zone, and others are happy
to just keep it at more of a leisurely pace within their comfort zone sort of a
place. But the ones that aren’t happy unless they’re really challenging
themselves, they’re the type that you want to take over to race the Molokai
Crossing, which is 70 kilometres.
Warwick Hadfield: Whereabouts is that?
Gina Kenny: That’s from Molokai to Oahu, and the way it works is you fly
into Molokai and you stay on the island on that night with hundreds of paddlers
from all over the world, mainly Hawaii, but they come from all over. The Molokai
Crossing is sort of like the World Championship of Outrigger Canoeing, and the
next morning you wake up and no matter how big the seas are, you have to paddle
your way back to Oahu, there’s no other way home. So if it’s a 20-metre swell,
you’re paddling in it.
Warwick Hadfield: What’s the original Hawaiian canoe made out of?
Gina Kenny: The original outrigger is made out of a one-timber tree,
which is called the koa, and the koa was generally trees that belonged to
families that would spend hundreds of years waiting for their tree to ripen to
the right length, size, height etc., and then they take that and they cut it
down and then they bless it with some water from the sea and some water from the
land, and then they carve it into an outrigger canoe, and then they race that.
Warwick Hadfield: How do you normally compete, are they men against men,
women against women, or are there now mixed competitions?
Gina Kenny: Most races are men versus men and women versus women, but
Hamilton Island is very unique in that this will be the first year that they
have a mixed with men and women, 42-kilometre marathon.
Warwick Hadfield: And does that create challenges when you get the
balance right in the boat?
Gina Kenny: It does, in that women tend to rate a lot faster than men. So
with mixing the guys –
Warwick Hadfield: Did you say rate or race?
Gina Kenny: Rate.
Warwick Hadfield: What does that mean?
Gina Kenny: Sorry. Your rating is the amount of strokes per minute that
you take. Most women’s crews rate about 64 to 68, even up to 70 strokes per
minute, and most men’s crews rate around 60 to 64, so they have a slower stroke
rating because they’re stronger, and they can really anchor their blade and go
for more power, whereas the women want to try and have a little bit more speed
and a bit faster stroke rate to accommodate for not as much power.
Warwick Hadfield: Tell us about the thrill of catching well the perfect
wave.
Gina Kenny: That’s fantastic. We have wave-catching days, and they’re
fantastic. Everyone gets really motivated after those days, because you get on a
wave, you see it coming behind you, you power up your rating, you feel the back
of the canoe lift, and then if you get on the right wave, you don’t even paddle,
you just enjoy the ride, and you just go so fast, it’s great.
Warwick Hadfield: Gina Kenny, and she’s the founder of the Geelong
Outrigger Canoe Club, and that club will be competing in the Australian
Championships in Queensland a little later this year.
And now to someone else with a passion for ‘messing about in boats’, kayaks this
time. Richard Flanagan is an award-winning author and film maker. He’s
also won the Archibald Prize, well Jeffrey Dyer did for his painting of Richard.
And he’s also got another decoration, that of a university Blue for kayaking.
Now Richard, what is it about the sport that fascinates you so much?
Richard Flanagan: I suppose for me it was just something that revealed to
me how extraordinary my own world and the people within it were, and that’s what
I’ve always loved about it. It just took me far, far beyond what I ever knew
about the natural world and about people. And it’s a constant source of wonder
for me.
Warwick Hadfield: Well let’s talk for a little bit about the competitive
side. You won a university Blue; what sort of kayaking were you doing then?
Richard Flanagan: I was a wild water kayaker, and I competed as a
slalomist. That was a big sport back in the ‘70s and ‘80s. It’s sort of declined
a bit through the ‘90s, and I suppose I simply loved it for the way in which you
were able to achieve a union of the body and the boat and when you’re actually
paddling well, you became a creature of the water and you were able to feel
every feature of the rapid through your legs, through your hips, through your
arms, and slalom really taught you how to very precisely tune yourself to the
water, and how to use every feature of the rapid to position a boat precisely. I
was probably always more interested in those aspects of it than I was in
competition. I think I lacked a certain dominating competitive instinct that
some of my friends had, who went on to be national champions. I was always more
bewitched by this union of a paddler with the water.
Warwick Hadfield: And what sort of kayaking do you do these days?
Richard Flanagan: I still do white water kayaking, although I don’t
paddle the sort of rapids I once did, I don’t paddle much above Grade 4 now, and
even that not so often. And I do quite a bit of sea kayaking. I was lucky enough
to come into the sport when there’d been this explosion of fibreglass boats and
there was this new awakening sense of curiosity about the wild lands of
Tasmania, so I was in parties that made first descents of many of the south west
rivers. I was amongst probably the first 50 people to go down the Franklin
River, and back in those days these rivers were very much unknown, and you may
well have been the first white man in some of these river gorges. But these
days, it’s not so much the sense of adventure or physical joy, it is probably
the communion I have with other people when I do it that I enjoy most.
Warwick Hadfield: That’s what I was going to ask you. When you went down
the Franklin with those other paddlers, was it a silent thing, that all of you
keep quiet, or did you talk to each other as you felt these wonderful new things
for the first time?
Richard Flanagan: I think it’s both. At times it’s a shocking incessant
babble of stories, jokes, I always thought in paddling you saw the very best of
people. I think it was Camus who said you learnt everything he knew about life
on the soccer field, well I learnt pretty much all I know about life on rivers
with my friends. Kayaking, back in its early hears here, was a lower
middle-class, working class sport, I think it’s more a middle-upper-middle class
sport now. But I met a great deal of people and got to know them very well and
they became lifetime friends, people who it would have been impossible to get to
know, whose experiences I could never have shared in any other way.
Warwick Hadfield: Now your prizewinning novel ‘Death of the River Guide’
features people who are actually going down a river in inflatables, but are your
experiences from kayaking included in that book?
Richard Flanagan: Well it drew a lot upon my experiences in kayaking.
Because of kayaking I got work as a river guide on the Franklin River for
several years, so it drew very much in its detail from both my own experience
and the stories I’d heard from other kayakers and other river guides. River
guiding though, you’re running big white water rafts and it’s more a physical
craft than an actual physical skill in the way kayaking is. And you have a very
different sense of the rapid. I mean you work out a line at the top of the rapid
and you sort of strategic down, you don’t pick a very beautiful and fine line
down the rapid in the way you do in a kayak, and nor can you do the playing
around in a rapid that you can in a kayak.
Warwick Hadfield: There are dangers in white water rafting, no matter
where you do it. When you do it in such an isolated place, those are probably
magnified many times; did you feel that extra urgency when you were kayaking in
a place like the Franklin?
Richard Flanagan: I did have cause to ponder my mortality once or twice
down the Franklin, Warwick, but you know, I don’t normally talk about that
publicly, but I think that too was part of its attraction. It is that old thing
that for a young man life only seems to make sense and have flavour when you get
close to the edges of it. That sense that you’re wildly fused with this
monstrous, extraordinary part of the natural world, I mean you become part of
that rapid, willingly or unwillingly, and you know you only have yourself to
call upon to survive it. That is an extraordinary feeling of both terror and
utter liberation.
Warwick Hadfield: Thanks Richard, and I’ll see you out on the Derwent a
little later, well, next month in fact.
Thanks also to our other guests this week, Graem Sims, and Gina Kenny
and that’s The Sport Factor for this week. Also special thanks to those two
other most energetic of paddlers: producer Maria Tickle and technical
producer Carey Dell.
Following my Dad’s advice to ‘Love many, trust a few and always paddle your own
canoe,’ I’m Warwick Hadfield.
Guests on this program:
Graem Sims Author of the biography of Percy Cerutty |
Gena Kelly Out-rigger canoeist,founer of the Geelong Out-Rigger Canoeing Club |
Richard Flanagan Novellist, movie-maker and kayaker |
Presenter:
Warwick Hadfield
Producer:
Maria Tickle
© 2005 Australian Broadcasting Corporation
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This is an archive copy of a document originally located at
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/sportsf/stories/s823522.htm
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