Athletic icon Percy Cerutty’s life (1895—1975) is a fascinating story of an unusual and determined individual.
Cerutty was Australia’s most enigmatic, pioneering and controversial athletics coach. He is best remembered as the exhibitionist eccentric of the Portsea sandhills who controversially trained the likes of John Landy and Herb Elliott in the Golden Age of Australian athletics in the 1950s and ’60s.
But his interests and ambitions transcended mere sport. After a complete breakdown at the age of 43 (1938), Cerutty set about reconstructing himself through natural diet and violent exercise. On the way, he not only performed extraordinary feats of endurance but developed an entirely original theory of human movement (based on the movements of wild animals) and "Stotan" philosophy that placed him completely outside of the square of conventional running theory – indeed outside all convention. He was an outrageous personality, but Cerutty’s exhibitionist ways in public were just one manifestation of an extraordinarily complex and passionate man.
His legendary camp in the sandhills of Portsea, on the tip of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, was effectively Australia’s first institute of sport, grandly branded the International Athletics Centre. Thousands were drawn there from around the world to hear his captivating lectures, eat their raw oats, lift heavy weights, and run.
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