FAMOUS EASTER CLASSIC

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 636, 12 April 1929, Page 7

FAMOUS EASTER CLASSIC

Flashing past the finishing post less than a foot to the good in a blanket finish, Cliff Hearn, 23-year-old newspaper compositor, won the Stawell Gift, the world’s richest foot race, on Easter Monday, from a field of 97 acceptors. Hearn collected £250 in cash as his share of the £4OO stake, and his connections cleared £3,000 in bets. Over a period of years the Stawell Gift has become the world’s greatest foot race. Even the Powderhall Handicap, run at Edinburgh every year, takes second place to the famous Australian sprint classic. Some of the greatest sprinters who ever pulled on a shoe have tried to win the gift. Some have sacrificed themselves for years to clinch the gift; others have come halfway round the world with i nternational reputations to win it; but in the 52 years it has been held, the great race has seen as many sensational failures as it has spectacular victories. The gift finds them all out at the finish! There is no second chance. Either a mun wins his heat and semi-final outright, or he is out of the race for good. With huge sums at stake, a man must not only be a great runner, tuned up to concert pitch, but he must have nerves of steel to withstand the fiercest test of mind and muscle the sprinting game knows. Even this year a hot favourite crashed in the opening heat. Backed as he was to win over £5,000, he was a bundle of nerves at the starting post, and the mental strain was too much for him. The winner himself experienced the biggest knock-back of his career year, when he was rubbed out in his heat by the ultimate winner, Miles Cooper. who afterwards became world's sprint champion. That is the luck of the game—the two best men in the race may be drawn in the same heat, and it is “sudden death” to one or the other. This year it was Hearn who put Cooper out in his heat —a remarkable coincidence. The erstwhile “printer’s devil,” who has ailed out into a fine upstanding

athlete, six feet in his stockinged feet went on to win his semi-final, and thei the final, off lOJyds in 11 15-16, th< fastest time for the 130yds dash regis tered for years. Off scratch, Heari would be running roughly at “evens.” No New Zealanders appear in th< placings this year, but there is tall in Christchurch of Don Maclennan, tin brilliant Canterburdy sprinter, at tempting a “come-back” next season with an Australian trip in prospect Maclennan “startled the natives” ir Dunedin a few years ago by running the New Zealand sprint championshii yards under “evens,” and defeatinj such a good sprinter as E. Cook by th< staggering margin of eight yards Probably the only two men in the Auckland Province who would have any real chance in such select company as parades in the great Austraand Harry Hudson, both of whom were lian classic are F. B. Toms, of Otahuhu in the limelight at Easter. Toms winning the New Zealand 440yds championship at Otorohanga the same da> the gift was decided, and Hudson cleaning up a nice little sum in stakes at different meetings.