Percy Cerutty was an Australian athletics coach in the 1960s who revolutionised running training in Australia, most famously by making his athletes run up and down the sand dunes and over ravines at Portsea, Victoria. Cerutty was also a health food nut; he developed a philosophy around running which he called 'Stotanism', and he was notoriously outspoken. 

But for all his idiosyncrasies, Percy Cerutty was a highly motivational and successful coach, with Herb Elliott his great protégé who won the 1,500m at the 1960 Rome Olympic Games by the largest margin that had been recorded in Olympic history.

Cerutty greatly admired the Grecian army, the Spartans, for withstanding enormous pain without showing it, and their Stoic manner of not showing emotion. Cerutty put those two attributes together to come up with 'Stotanism', and so you were supposed to, as the great 'If' poem says from Rudyard Kipling: 'To treat triumph and disaster as the same', and realise there was something bigger behind it all anyway, so it's not worth getting excited about or depressed about. So that was basically what the Stotan stuff was.

According to Herb Elliott, his controversial, idiosyncratic, charismatic coach never received the recognition he deserves. Herb Elliott now on the Australian Olympic Committee.   Elliot has described Cerutty as the "...greatest athletics coach that Australia has ever produced.....Percy didn't read books, he studied books. He would often stop when an interesting point was raised, and write a two page essay on that particular point, just so he could think through his own views that had been provoked. So he was a highly, very widely read guy and he had a very sound philosophy.. Underneath it all there was a sort of sound philosophy based on 'Let's improve ourselves as human beings, let's become more compassionate, let's become bigger, let's become stronger, let's become nicer people."

Percy Cerutty: Fail, it's not in my dictionary. 'You only ever grow as a human being if you're outside your comfort zone.'

Herb Elliott: My approach to training was that you've got to be outside your comfort zone, so I was an intense, high quality trainer, and there was a lot of pain in my training sessions as a consequence of that. But I think it was one of the reasons why I just never got beaten, because every training session, four out of six, were nominated as quality, and I was used to sort of doing the hard yards at quality.

Percy Cerutty: Athletics, I always say, is only a start, but you prove on the track something, beating others and getting somewhere, but you can use as an experience in after life, as I told Elliott, 'Beat them on the track and you'll beat them in business', and he's getting on, see?

Herb Elliott: Normally we'd just go down on Friday night, and we'd meet at Percy's place in South Yarra after work, perhaps 6.30 or something like that, hop into his old Oldsmobile and off we'd head off down to Portsea. Sometimes we would get out of the car about Dromana and run the rest of the way, but it was just idyllic. I mean running, in fact pretty well anything we do in life, has a spiritual component to it, and so I always found, and probably most people find, that they run better and easier in beautiful surroundings. And of course Portsea, with the magnificent cliffs, the reefs, the pounding surf, the beach, the tracks through the tea -tree, was just a wonderful environment to run in. And it was spiritually uplifting. So when you got down there you just sniffed in the salt air and you felt your chest expand and you could feel your muscles in your legs tingle. It just made you want to run.

Amanda Smith: Well part of Cerutty's philosophy was a kind of thing about naturalism, wasn't it, about training outside of the city, about not doing interval training or circuit training.

Herb Elliott: Yes, I mean he was a great believer in yoga, it was one of the many subjects that he discovered, and anybody whose read yoga knows that essentially it's about the battle between the ego and having the ability to be connected with the spirit some way or another. Now I had absolutely no desire to find God particularly at that stage of my life, but certainly the transferability of that sort of idea into a sporting program, where you have to master all your weaknesses, was one which was enormously appealing.

Percy Cerutty: I admit that, speaking for myself in philosophic terms, the only God I worship or know, is success. And I try to put that into the minds and personalities of others, you see. 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.

Amanda Smith: The late Percy Cerutty, Australian athletics coach of the 1950s and'60s, whose runners included the great Herb Elliott.

Herb Elliott: Well it really just goes to show that there are any number of ways to get to the top, doesn't it. There is no secret formula that once I've got that secret formula I'm unstoppable, I've got to get there. I mean that's just not true. I guess it probably gets back to the fact that you need to have an attitude which is right, and you need to have a process to apply that attitude day by day, which is logical and sensible. And so I mean, he had a totally different approach to Percy, you're quite right. But they both had probably as much in common as they had different. They were both very inspiring people, they were both able to impart inspiration through speaking, and they were both very, very dedicated and devoted. Percy claimed that Stampfl was an impostor because Stampfl claimed that he was in the Austrian Olympic Team or something, and Percy went through the records and couldn't find his name, so that started a feud between them, which of course the press, being what they are, God bless their little hearts, they just loved that; it was fantastic: conflict? you beauty, headlines, let's go for it. So they fanned it up, and whenever his protégé, who was Merv Lincoln ran against myself, it was always the battle of the coaches rather than the battle of the athletes. And I do remember on one occasion a very well-meaning Lord Mayor of Perth at the time, I think his name was Sir Thomas Meagher both Merv and I had run at Leederville Oval in Perth, and Sir Thomas, doing the right thing, invited his interstate guests down to his home for a meal, and that was the first time I ever saw Cerutty and Stampfl in the same room, it was just like two dogs with their hair bristling on the back of the neck, circling around, and you were never quite sure whether one was going to go and attack the other or what, but it just stayed at the bristling hair stage, thank goodness, but it was a very unpleasant afternoon.

Amanda Smith: Do you think you would have achieved what you did in running, Herb, without Percy Cerutty?

Herb Elliott: I have no doubt that I would not have, no. I think we were a genuine partnership, and there was a synergistic thing. If you add the two parts up together and put them together, it ends up being more than the sum of the two, that's the way we were. So yes, I have no hesitation answering that question; I couldn't have done what I did without Percy.

Amanda Smith: What about if it had been Franz Stampfl, rather than Percy Cerutty who'd invited you to train with him?

Herb Elliott: I don't think I could have stood it. One of the reasons that Percy's and my partnership worked was that the chemistry was right. The sorts of things that he talked about, believed in, did, and wanted me to do, all fitted me. And he would be halfway through saying some new insight to me, and I would know instantly what he was going to say, because it was an insight that I knew was the truth for me. I don't think I could ever have tolerated the training sessions, the running round and round and round the track with interval training, I don't think I would have survived. So there could be somebody say that Merv Lincoln was a far greater athlete than I because he withstood the training sessions. I looked at training sessions that were just beautiful; they were painful, but they were beautiful. And I never found running around and around a track against a stopwatch had any beauty associated with it.

Amanda Smith: Did you always have total faith in Cerutty? Even in the knowledge that others thought he was pretty kooky, did you ever doubt his methods or find fault with his personal behaviour?

Herb Elliott: I never had doubt about him, no. But I used to ignore some of the things that he said to me. There would be times where he would say something that was insightful for me, and it seemed to me to be genius. Then there'd be other times where he would say something, which I would think was ridiculous. But that never bothered me, I just ignored it. And so I was fortunate I guess, that I was able to select those things that he had to give me which helped me, and I was able to reject those things which I didn't think would help me. And so our relationship went on and on and on for years. Some of his other athletes found that sometimes he would say something one day that was in conflict with what he might have said a week ago, and they found that disturbing and lost faith and moved on. But we worked because I sieved what he told me and took what I wanted and didn't take the rest.

Amanda Smith: And you could wear the contradictions in him?

Herb Elliott: Yes, I loved the contradictions in him. You just never knew what was going to happen next. There was an atmosphere of tension, of excitement, fun, that was part of our relationship.

Amanda Smith: Well probably the event that best sums up how exuberant and unorthodox Percy Cerutty was, was his behaviour during the running of the 1500 metres race in Rome in 1960, the yellow towel. Can I beg your indulgence, Herb, to tell that story?

Herb Elliott: Well I've got to start before Rome: on every occasion where I was running in a major race, Percy, the day before, would just absolutely belt hell out of himself running around four laps of a track somewhere, and he'd finish, and he'd stick his face that far from mine with froth-flecked lips, and exhausted. And he'd just sort of eyeball me, and he'd say, 'You might be able to run faster Elliott, but you'll never be able to run harder!' and then he'd go and collapse somewhere. So I mean, that was the way he dealt with the tensions of my race the next day, it was a genuine sharing of that tension. But it was also a challenge to me, you know, just run, 'Try and run as hard as me mate, you've got no hope. I can run harder than you can.'

And so when we got to Rome of course, he needed to participate in my run, he participated in all the runs up to that particular point. So we had a little scheme that we worked out beforehand that he would sit up in the back straight it was, in the stadium in Rome, and in the last lap, if it looked as if I could win, or it looked as if I could break the world record, no it wasn't that. If it looked as if I could break the world record and it looked as if somebody was on my hammer, he'd wave the towel. So when we talked about this, I was in that vague zone area that you are when you're sort of nervous before an event, you only half listen to people. Anyway the event started of course, and as it happened in the last lap, I was in front down the back straight, and all of a sudden I saw Percy waving this towel and I couldn't remember what it was supposed to mean, except I had to run faster. So there he was.

But it's an extraordinary thing, and it's an illustration of how focused you are. I perceived that he was in the crowd when he waved the towel, which is where he said he would be. In fact he was standing on the edge of the track, and there were police converging on him, because this old man had somehow or other got over this incredibly formidable moat to share the event with me, and it was very fitting that he did. Fortunately he stayed out of jail.

Amanda Smith: Well Herb, tell me what legacy to coaching and training did Cerutty leave? Because it seems to me that Franz Stampfl's scientific approach is the one that won the day in the sense that sport these days is very 'scientised'.

Herb Elliott: Yes, I'm not too sure that's the advantage of sport these days. I think science can be used by an athlete as an excuse for not training the way in which they should. But what legacy did he leave? Well, he's left a huge legacy in me personally, but what legacy has he left in the land? I think that talking to today's athletes, I find that there are two things which all champions have in common, maybe more than two, but two I can talk about straight off. One is that every champion is a person who accepts responsibility totally for their own sporting destiny; and the other one is the quality versus quantity issue. Athletes are constantly confronted with the decision, maybe they don't realise it quite as clearly as it being a decision, but it is, between quantity of training and quality of training, particularly today when athletes are getting paid more money and it's easier for them to not work, so they can extend their training sessions out for much longer periods of time. The area that suffers then is quality. And I guess the message that Cerutty always gave was 'When you're out on the track, there is nobody there but you. God is not with you, I am not with you, your Mum and Dad are not with you, you've just got that show to yourself. You have to be utterly and totally independent and you must accept total responsibility for what it is that you're going to do on that day and all of the processes that we're going to get you there.' So that's a message he gave fifty years ago. And the other message of quality versus quantity, he was always one who believed in intensity, in training, the pain was the way to go forward, and today, science doesn't necessarily preach that, and I think science is wrong.

Amanda Smith: Finally then, you mentioned the word 'genius' earlier. Was Percy Cerutty a genius?

Herb Elliott: Well if you describe a genius as somebody who is able to pluck some concept or some idea which nobody else has been able to grasp, and that works, and that people can see the logic and the sense of it as soon as it is applied and wonder why the hell they didn't think of it themselves, yes, Percy was a genius.

Percy Cerutty: Once you've tried and done your best, you can look back and feel satisfied. I tried a hundred different things, little businesses, all sorts, see? And I don't feel any regrets about anything. 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.

Amanda Smith: The charismatic, controversial, eccentric Percy Cerutty, the 25th anniversary of whose death falls on the 14th of next month. And with that remembrance of his life and times, Cerutty's most famous and successful runner, Herb Elliott, who's now the Director of Athlete and Corporate Relations with the Australian Olympic Committee