On 2 September 1979, the Gold Coast suburb of Evandale hosted the inaugural Gold Coast International Marathon. The event was initiated by the Rotary Club of Gold Coast (formerly Rotary Club of Surfers Paradise Central) as part of a Health Awareness Campaign for the Gold Coast.
Led by a Rotarian and prominent local baker and pastry cook, John Goldstein, 18 months of planning went into the first event and included a series of lead-up Marathon Clinics to educate the community about health and fitness.
We sat down and asked him to recall how the Gold Coast’s largest community participation sporting event all came about.
Why did the club start an international marathon?
For the first time ever, an Australian was the Rotary World President. His name was Sir Clem Renouf AM, and he came from Nambour, Queensland.
Every World President creates a theme that he spreads around the world’s Rotary Clubs. His was a 3H Programme that asked all Rotarians in their Clubs to think up projects within a Health, Hunger and Humanity theme.
Our Club agreed to a project that I had envisaged – having a Marathon Clinic, styled on a similar clinic operated by Doctor Scaff Jnr MD within the Honolulu Marathon.
I’ll talk about the important role he and his medical philosophy played further on.
What sort of corporate and community backing did you get?
There was a friend who was the Manager of The Gold Coast Sun newspaper, Rogin Taylor.
We often had coffee at his desk as my bakery was just around the corner. He had an enlarged photo of Sydney’s City to Surf on the wall, showing the heads of all the runners.
As we had just started our Rotary Club, I commented to Rogin; “Wouldn’t it be great to have something like that here?”
The Marathon health awareness campaign was just in its infancy and the Gold Coast City Council had approved the use of the band shell building on Macintosh Island as ours for each Sunday morning clinic session.
Rogin, helped spread the word of our activities in The Sun and the Gold Coast Bulletin. The local radio station 4GG was also onside announcing our events every Sunday.
It was really a fun thing; we drew a course up around Macintosh Island and even had an aerial photograph of the track for all to see. Rogin subsequently joined our Rotary Club and was an excellent public relations person.
Was there a personal motivation?
Yes. I collapsed in the Bakery at the Sundale Shopping Centre, Southport, in 1975. Long story short, I saw a special doctor who said, “Look John, I’m going to fix you up with a steel brace from top to bottom to support your back. Bending over all the time has created a great weakness with your back and it would be best if you got out of the bakery business.”
The pain was so bad at times, that when I took my back brace off, I was worried I was not going to be able to walk properly. In the evenings I would take the brace off and put my dressing gown on, and walk to the end of the street and back; I just had to keep moving. It helped me sleep at night and get some relief from the pain. It wasn’t long after that that I improved to such an extent that I was walking and jogging up to 10 kilometres, four times a week and feeling good with no pain. It was so great that I thought, “Why can’t others do the same thing for pain management. If I can do it, anyone can.”
Another family that influenced my passion was the Lucy’s. They ran the Lucy’s Malted Milk Bar in Surfers’ and used to shut the shop in the off season and go to Honolulu. Jim and Shirley came back with stories from Honolulu of Doctor Scaff and his Marathon Clinic and the Honolulu Marathon. It didn’t take long for the inspiration to turn into reality and we contacted Doctor Scaff who sent over all the necessary information to start up a similar project here.
So you might say that the Gold Coast International Marathon was dreamed up over a malted milk in the heart of Surfers Paradise. Jim and Shirley would be proud. Also as the local community had supported me and my late father in the start of our business here, it would be nice to return to the community the same effort.
Tell us more about Dr Scaff
Dr Scaff implemented the health philosophy within the Honolulu Marathon. He had a program for people with a heart condition that involved proper medical supervision/observation and created an exercise programme called the Honolulu Marathon Clinic which could see participants complete a marathon within nine months.
Completing a full marathon is different to running it. A normal marathon runner will try to break the three hours, but six hours plus was an accepted format for Dr Scaff. He didn’t want people to push themselves in a way that they could hurt themselves. With the training that they had, they were able to develop a stronger heart through regular and prolonged supervised exercise.
Was it hard getting people involved?
The relationship between exercise and health was quickly realised by the public, yet getting people involved still had its challenges. Rotarians in our club were very enthusiastic and more than 50% of our 65 members were themselves participating in the suggested Doctor Scaff programme and 100% of the members participated in the project. Club members came from all walks of business life and some in sedentary lifestyles.
It was not very hard to get the Rotarians to get on board as we were a young club filled with enthusiasm – lots of new members of all ages looking to get their teeth into something, and this was the project they wanted.
We were very fortunate to have two key people involved that of Des Todd from the National Fitness, Queensland and Leigh Tickle from the Junior Athletics Association who was a teacher at TSS. Both these gentlemen had an enormous input into the Marathon Clinic training and supervision.
We coined the name Gold Coast International Marathon and registered it as we had people interested in participating from overseas.
When I was President of the Rotary Club a few years later, the Gold Coast International Marathon and Marathon Clinic was highly honoured at the Rotary Zone Conference as the Best Project in our area. It was such a good thing that everybody got involved. The Government Armed Forces from Canungra and Amberley were actually participating in running the Marathon as well as helping setting up their tents at Evandale.
We started setting up the tents and presentation trailer early in the afternoon before and had a small break between 10pm at night and starting again at 2am the next morning was a little strange for a lot of people in the Club, but we did it and had fun doing it. There was a very popular news presenter called Mike Higgins from Channel 7 who was happy to come and be the announcer and prize presenter at the event.
Tell us about the original course
We first applied to the Gold Coast City Council for closure of the Esplanade roads so we could have the best marathon course in Australia, but that was not acceptable and the Council in turn suggested that it could be run around Isle of Capri and Chevron Island as the beachfront course would interfere with the traffic and upset the beachgoers. The six loop course even helped with the organisation. We wanted to put a banner across the main road in Surfers Paradise, but Council wouldn’t allow it and they said six times around the Island is all you’re going to get, you can’t run on the beach roads or anything like that – it’s out of the question, just around the island.
They didn’t have the big picture. At that point in time, it was growing, but the big picture wasn’t there.
It cost $1000 to stage the first one. The first $500, we went door-to-door to get sponsorships and donations for it. The other $500 came out of my pocket because I had all the confidence in it. There wasn’t a lot of money in a club that just started. All we had was the confidence to get it (the Marathon) started.
There was a lot of excitement about as drink stations, course supervisors and finishing gates were planned. We started on 28th February 1979 to form a committee to handle the Marathon and had regular meetings to plan the first event.
Was there any chance it wasn’t going to happen?
We started planning early and set the date of 2nd September 1979 and as we had always spoken about, the Marathon Clinic training plan was to hold a Marathon for all those that were interested to participate. This was the pinnacle of the success of the project. All the hard work that everyone had put into the project was to crystallise in this event.
At one of our training sessions we were fortunate to have a runner called Dusty Lewis who was grateful to have been reconnected with running again and was to be of great help on the committee and subsequently became a member of our Rotary Club. We became co-chair of the newly-formed Gold Coast Runners Clinic as Rotary had planned to hand over the day-to-day activities of planning the weekly runs and activities.
The long hard road of organising guest speakers every Sunday morning and rosters of supervision would soon be over. We went door-to-door in Surfers’ to collect donations and even had to tip in personally to cover the initial costs.
One of my suppliers, Defiance Flour Mill from Toowoomba, donated the costs for the winners, first female and first male, to go to the Honolulu Marathon later in that year.
What happened after those first few years?
We created the Gold Coast Runners Club and Rotary was to continue running the Marathon, The Runners Club consisted of more than 50% Rotarians – Rotary was always going to organise the first marathon and then second and then the third, and after that there was a group of enterprising runners that planned to carry on the organising of further marathons and registered business names to do this. This left Rotarians to only assist in the operating of help and drink stations etc.
So in 1983-84 the Marathon became a fully fledged private enterprise of Dusty and Sheila Lewis and family and associates. This saw some serious planning and put the Marathon into overdrive. The Rotarians assisted in many small ways in the years thereafter – a great relief to the long hard road to success for the Rotary families.
Editor’s note:
After many successful years, the ownership and management of the Gold Coast International Marathon changed several times from 1998-2000, falling into debt with a considerable amount of money owned including athlete prize money. With a poor financial position and loss of reputation, combined with major sponsor JAL withdrawing from the event, the marathon looked set to fall apart.
The once successful Marathon event was doomed, and it was only due to a lifeline in the form of a Government rescue package via Queensland Events that the event was salvaged. Taken over in 2001 by Gold Coast Events Management, which managed the highly successful Pan Pacific Masters Games, the marathon event has been sponsored by Gold Coast Airport since 2003, the 2015 event attracted over 27,500 participants with an international TV audience in 150 countries.
I know where we started and how the thing eventuated, but it would not have got to the stage it is today had Gold Coast Events (now Events Management Queensland) not taken it over from private ownership.
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