Cliffy’s gone off and done the final shuffle, twenty years after a single achievement made him an everlasting icon.

Some devalue Cliff Young’s achievement that memorable day in 1983 when he entered Westfield Doncaster half a day ahead of his nearest competitor in the inaugural Sydney-Melbourne. People say he won without possessing one attribute of a great runner. But he had a secret weapon: the unquestioning resolve of a Colac spud farmer; an almost heedless naiveté that led him to accept what is without asking what should be. Mistakenly woken to resume running on the first morning at 1:00am instead of 5:00, he just got up and went. His dumbfounded opponents thought it an audacious strategy, and it ultimately broke them.

Cliff was 60 years old.

How they must have cursed the shuffling geriatric whose previous athletic experience consisted of rounding up cows on foot and running 20 miles to post a letter – all in gumboots. Some hero! But Cliffy legitimised our every cheering cliché, seizing the moment; proving it’s never too late; being an ordinary man doing extraordinary things; embodying the slow and steady that wins the race. At the dawn of a worldly internationalist age for Australia, a forgotten, devalued part of our character had shuffled insistently back into our consciousness.  To forget Cliffy is to forget ourselves.

Published in Inside Sport, 2004