A legacy event that didn’t deliver a legacy. On life support after five years. A course you couldn’t run fast on.
Sydney staged Australia’s first marathon back in 1909. The city hosted an Olympic marathon in the year 2000. The course was reckoned to be “a beauty,” crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge – for which the descriptor ‘iconic’ is, for a rare occasion, appropriate – from the start in North Sydney, circling the lush Centennial Parklands before making its way westwards to Homebush and the finish inside Stadium Australia.
Within a few years, however, the race was seriously, perhaps terminally, ill.
You’d never know it now. The Sydney Marathon, conceptualised as a legacy event of the 2000 Olympics, the Olympic blue line stretching on forever, has survived, and now thrived, by ditching the Olympic course, switching icons, mining tourist dollars to such an extent that it has just been added to the list of World Marathon Majors.
Tokyo, Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, New York and now Sydney. The ancient world had seven wonders. The World Marathon Majors were six in number. Sydney is thus the seventh wonder of the marathon world.
It’s a massive achievement and puts Australian marathons into an exclusive world club, one that operates on merit, moreover, not birthright. Congratulations are due all round.
Readers will hardly be shocked to hear that we will now diverge into some history. Thankfully, we will skip the years from 1909 to 2000. Cancel that. We won’t skip right over Olympic year. That was when Steve Moneghetti stood at the finish line of the men’s marathon, the Games’ final event, and pre-empted the closing ceremony with a post-race interview ending with the sign-off – we may be paraphrasing – “That’s it from Steve Moneghetti. Over and out.”
Turns out there was some fine print there. Mr Australian Running is still going. So, to greater surprise, is the Sydney Marathon.
In 2011, Run 4 Your Life magazine (which isn’t still going) commissioned a piece from this writer on the tenth anniversary of the marathon. The course had been all around Sydney, but mostly it seemed to be in/on The Rocks.
“There are more gaps in Sydney marathon history than in a kid’s front teeth,” the concluding paragraph began. This was intended to reference the entire history of Sydney marathons, but several front teeth had been lost in the preceding 10 years.
The legacy event had been pitched on the Olympic course, but the blue line had barely faded before major changes were made. Athletics Australia CEO Simon Allatson, marketing man John Elliott, media executive John Hartigan and athletics journalist Mike Hurst had successfully pitched the idea to the NSW government, but it clearly was not delivering.
The government was considering a proposal to make event organisers pay the cost of road closures and policing, it was reported.
The marathon was looking at a bill of $1million, according to a story in the Sydney Morning Herald. Bad enough in itself, but more sinister was the language in the opening paragraph which spoke of an event which “paralyses large parts of the city and closes the Harbour Bridge”. This hardly suggested a source friendly to the marathon.
Additionally, Athletics Australia’s board was impatiently waiting for some revenue out of the event.
Wayne Larden, now the long-time race director, was asked to do an analysis of the event in 2004. Out went the blue line – most of it anyway. Crossing the bridge was retained as a major selling point but the finish was moved to another iconic Sydney location, the Sydney Opera House.
The other emphasis Larden took out of his 2004 “eye-opening” meeting with the government, was the need to satisfy the government’s objectives in regard to tourism, international broadcast, community participation and to put something back into the community via fundraising.
Over time, the event has become a major contributor to Athletics Australia’s annual budget. almost a quarter of a million dollars going in. It can be said that distance running, through the Sydney Running Festival, has become a major sponsor of athletics in Australia.
Even so, the step to world marathon major seemed an ambition project with participation benchmarks unheard of for an Australian marathon. Sydney has set them and met them with something to spare. Maintaining them will be a challenge, especially as marathons in Melbourne and on the Gold Coast are also experiencing rising participation rates.
Sydney, though, seems to be meeting every challenge thrown at it. This year was the twenty-fourth staging of an event which struggled to get into double figures. And now Sydney strides out onto the world stage, looking every bit like it’s up where it belongs.
