RETIREMENT? THERE’S NO BEATING IT : At a Distance, Australia’s Elliott Was One of Best Ever

The list of renowned, world-class athletes who completed their careers undefeated is a short one.

Rocky Marciano, a heavyweight boxing champion of the 1950s, comes to mind. He went 49-0 and called it a career. Bob Mathias, the 1948 and 1952 Olympic decathlon champion, was 11-0.

If you’re going to put decathletes on the list, then you need Jim Thorpe, who was 1-0. And the flying Scot of the 1920s, Eric Liddell, of “Chariots of Fire” fame, was 14-0 in 400-meter and 440-yard races.

Then there’s the interesting case of Herb Elliott, the Australian who won 44 consecutive 1,500-meter and mile races, including a sensational performance in the 1960 Olympic Games, then retired unbeaten.

Many didn’t believe it at the time, when Cambridge University student Elliott, 23, announced in 1962 that he was retiring from track because he had decided to place his “family and academic life ahead of sports.”

But he made it stick, and Herb Elliott today is an almost mythical Olympic Games figure. He is also a trim 48-year-old who at 165 pounds is only 15 pounds over his running weight.

He does only light jogging now, and has recently taken up golf with his wife, Anne. He’s the managing director of Puma Australia, a subsidiary of the West German sportswear company. His office is in front of a Puma clothing and sport shoe factory here in Moorabinn, a Melbourne suburb.

Elliott popped back into the news in Australia recently. In an interview with a Melbourne newspaper, he blasted Australia’s amateur sports governing bodies and education institutions for being responsible for what he called Australia’s decline in high-profile amateur sports.

“In the 1950s and 1960s, Australia produced a lot of dominant athletes in track and field and swimming,” he said again, in a recent Times interview.

“The problem, I think, is that generally speaking, Australians are happy at being low-achievers in high-profile sports. I worry about our competitiveness, our drive. Even in business.

“I read a magazine survey recently in which hundreds of overseas businessmen were asked to rate countries on reliability, product quality, competitiveness and management efficiency, and Australia’s placing was between 19th and 25th.

“In sports, it’s the same. I’m sure a lot of Americans wonder why Australia doesn’t produce the great athletes it used to in the 1950s and 1960s, the runners and swimmers. A lot of us are wondering, too.”

Elliott talked about some of his contemporaries, Australian runners such as John Landy, Merv Lincoln, Betty Cuthbert and Ron Clarke, and swimmers Murray Rose, John Devitt, John and Ilsa Konrads and Dawn Fraser.

Elliott, seated behind his large desk and signing business letters while he talked, blamed part of the decline on Australia’s school system.

“We’re not producing those kinds of athletes anymore,” he said. “It’s partly due, I think, to our educational institutions. There’s been a gradual socialization of Australian society, particularly in education. There’s an emphasis today on making everything equal for everyone, education concepts that discourage competition.

“That spark, that drive I remember when I competed. . . . I just don’t see it in our kids today.”

Elliott, on Sept. 6, 1960, in Stadio Olympico in Rome, redefined spark, drive and competitiveness. His race in the 1,500-meter final that day remains one of the indelible performances in Olympic history.

Elliott entered the Games that year as a 22-year-old phenom, a kid from Australia’s west coast who had run some hot mile and 1,500 times, including a world-record 3:36.0 in the 1,500. But this was the Olympics. And young Elliott was up against older, more experienced athletes.

There were the veteran Hungarian, Istvan Rozsavolgyi, a former world record-holder, and Michel Jazy, a Frenchman toughened by stiff European competition. Some also liked the chances of two Americans in the final, Dyrol Burleson and Jim Grelle.

But Elliott just didn’t beat the field, he buried it. He ran away from everyone at the midway mark and won by 20 yards, in a world-record 3:35.6. The record stood for seven years, until Jim Ryun broke it in the Coliseum.

One who saw the Rome final was Dick Bank, longtime Los Angeles track and field historian.

“The finish of that race looked like the finish of a 10,000 meters,” Bank said. “It was absurd. It was a world-class field, and he made those guys look like small boys running against a man.

“Coming into the Olympics, everyone underestimated Elliott’s mental toughness. He was thought of as a young kid with a lot of talent and not much else.

“But he just ran that field right into the ground. He was fearless. Big races like that, with a world-class field, usually wind up as slow-time, tactical races where everyone sticks together and some sprinter emerges from the pack to win it at the tape. Really, beating those guys like he did that day--it was overwhelming.

“I’ve always wondered how much faster he’d have run, if he’d come along today. The differences between running shoes of 1960 and today aren’t significant, I don’t think. But the tracks today are so much faster, I’m sure Elliott would be the dominant middle-distance man in the world today.”

Elliott disputes the idea that he ran without fear in Rome. In fact, after the race, he told reporters he’d run “like a scared bunny.”

“I actually set that pace because I was very uncertain of my condition that day,” he told The Times.

“Six weeks before the Games, I’d been ill. I ran a mile in 4:12 and vomited afterward. Two days before the final, I had a sore throat and swollen glands.

“Really, I ran with a lot of fear that day. I just thought my best chance was to get out in front and try to hold on. I always ran with fear. I feared losing.”

Several years ago, Elliott told Olympic historian-film maker Bud Greenspan: “If I ever thought I would lose, I would quit racing.

“It was absolutely vital to me to win, always,” he told Greenspan. “I suppose I was probably as frightened of being beaten as any, perhaps more frightened than most other people because I enjoyed winning so much more.”

Elliott broke away from a bunched pack at 600 meters and had a 15-yard lead going into the final turn, which he expanded in the home stretch.

Far behind were Jazy at 3:38.4 and Rozsavolgyi at 3:39.2. Burleson and Grelle finished sixth and eighth. Elliott’s time, 3:35.6, was eye-popping at the time and since 1960, it has been bettered in the Olympics only twice.

Elliott had made a few U.S. appearances before his Olympic victory. One occurred in 1958, when he won the mile in 3:57.8 on a soft, lumpy Coliseum grass track, part of which ran over the Dodgers’ outfield.

Bank, who watched that night, too, said that few there that night were especially impressed with Elliott.

“I didn’t fully appreciate what a wonderful athlete I was seeing that night,” Bank said. “He had such a short career, just three years, really. Decades later, his place in the history of the sport and the Olympics has grown considerably.”

Elliott doesn’t talk much about his running days, preferring instead to be a constructive critic of Australian amateur sports governing bodies. For example, he all but bristled when asked if he’d have beaten New Zealand’s Peter Snell, who succeeded him as the world’s dominant middle-distance runner.

“Oh, who knows? No one cares about that anymore,” he said. “It’s not important to anyone. My time in the limelight was before Snell’s. That’s just how it worked out.”

One of the Olympics’ greatest performers remains one of the Games’ great proponents. He talked about his life turning in the 110,000-seat Melbourne Cricket Grounds, main stadium for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

Elliott was a 17-year-old hotshot high schooler from Perth at the time, nursing an injured foot.

“I went to the Melbourne Olympics as a spectator, specifically to watch England’s Gordon Pirie in the 10,000 meters,” he said. “I admired him greatly in those days. And I was amazed at how Vladimir Kuts (of the Soviet Union) beat him. I’d never seen a runner like Kuts--he absolutely ran Pirie right into the dirt.

“That performance by Kuts inspired me to get my foot healed and to see just what limits I could reach as a runner. Until I watched Kuts that day, I was sort of ambivalent about running. In fact, before that day, I wasn’t greatly motivated to get my foot healed and resume my track career.

“I love the Olympic Games. The great thing about the Olympics is how it can inspire kids, like it did for me. The Olympics are fantastic. I’ve always felt their potential for promoting peace and good in the world is greatly underestimated today.”

After the ’56 Olympics, Elliott moved to Portsea, a beach city south of Melbourne, to train under Australia’s best known coach of the day, a whiskered philosopher named Percy Cerutty.

“Percy coached running as a way of life, rather than just as tactics and conditioning,” Elliott said. “He taught runners how to enjoy pain.”

Elliott told Greenspan: “Percy used to say, ‘Thrust against pain. Pain is the purifier.’ ”

Under Cerutty, who died in 1975, much of Elliott’s training consisted of barefoot runs up 100-foot sand dunes.

Elliott’s breakthrough year as a world-class athlete was 1958. At a time when only a few men had broken four minutes in the mile, he ran a world-record 3:54.5.

“I improved my time in almost every race I ran that year,” he said. “I became aware that I was capable of great races, and that I wanted to explore my ultimate. I also knew that I hadn’t yet even approached my full potential, and that in itself was very exciting to me. It inspired me to work even harder to reach it.”

In 1959, Elliott knew he wouldn’t have a long running career.

He married, and decided he wanted to study at Cambridge. While training under Cerutty, Elliott had worked as a stock clerk for Shell of Australia. Later, Shell awarded him a scholarship to Cambridge.

“By 1959, my only focus in track was on doing well at the Rome Olympics,” he said. “I didn’t intend to compete much beyond those Olympics.”

His 1962 retirement dashed hopes of those yearning for a “mile of the century,” between Elliott and Snell, who had lowered Elliott’s mile world record to 3:54.4 that year.

“The only pressure I felt to make a comeback and run against Snell in the mid-1960s was from Cerutty, but I never considered it,” he said.

Elliott talked about the money available in track and field today, with some athletes earning incomes in the high six figures.

“When I competed, I wasn’t allowed to even accept a trophy that was worth more than $45,” he said. “The Australian track and field federation people watched me like a hawk. I never made any money running, zero.”

He did, however, earn an Olympic gold medal.

“I think it’s in a drawer, in my nightstand,” he said.

“I’ve promised some people who run a sports museum in my hometown, Perth, that they’ll get it, one day.”