The Greatest Upset of All Time: Business Lessons From a 61 Year-old Potato Farmer

The greatest upset in sporting history has been debated countless times, but in my opinion, the 1983 Sydney to Melbourne Foot Race marks one of the most remarkable astonishments of all time. The 544 mile super marathon from Sydney to Melbourne is one of the most difficult challenges of human athleticism and endurance. It’s no wonder that when 61 year old potato farmer, Cliff Young showed up for the race dressed in overalls and gumboots, spectators and competitors alike thought it was a big joke. When he submitted his racing dues, event organizers pleaded for him to opt-out; such a race could kill a man 30 years younger. The other racers represented some of the world’s finest athletes, fully sponsored, and supported by teams of professional trainers and coaches. In Cliff’s corner? His 81 year-old mother, who planned to follow him in a beat-up pickup truck.

When the race began, the professional runners took off quickly. However, Cliff Young took his time, making spectators giggle as he awkwardly shuffled his boots against the pavement. His running style was unconventional; he was old, haggard, and quickly becoming the race’s humorous sideshow. The well-trained runners, coached by their staff of professional trainers, knew that if they were to finish the race within 6 days they would have to run for 18 hours a day and sleep the rest. But no one told Cliff this. In true Forest Gump style, he kept running and running and running through day and night. After 5 days, 15 hours and 4 minutes, Cliff stunned the world by completing the race in first place–beating the record by 9 hours!

This ultimate Tortoise vs. the Hare story teaches us a valuable business lesson. Cliff’s inspiring tale represents an example of the little guy wining out over bigger, better funded, and longer established competitors. The professional runners, like many industry leading companies, believed they had figured out the best way to run the race. Cliff, with his lack of experience and limited support, did not seem to be a threat. Although everyone told Cliff that he had no chance to win, he chose not to listen. He ran his race his way; and despite the mocking and his unconventional strategy, Cliff finished in first place by many long miles.

When I first heard this story as told by productivity consultant CJ Coolidge of Administaff, I immediately thought of examples where small business were cautioned and warned that it was crazy to enter a race they could NEVER win. WordPress, a blogging platform co-founded by Matt Mullenweg in 2003, represents such a case. At the time of its launch, WordPress entered a market dominated by Google’s Blogger (originally created by Evan Williams of Pyra Labs in 1999), as well as other players like MovableType, GreyMatter, TypePad, and LiveJournal. But WordPress offered a solution and business model different from its better-funded and longer-established competitors. WordPress started off as an open-source solution free to any capable programmer willing to help build a better blogging platform. Before Mark Zuckerberg opened Facebook to outside developers, Matt and the WordPress team invested unprecedented time and energy to develop a solid community. WordPress Made Community Matter. The end result was a more intuitive and easy-to-use CMS solution and blogging platform. WordPress gave its users the ability to easily customize their blogs, create reusable categories, block spammy comments, and easily deploy blogs to external servers. Through the cultivation of a loyal community of outside developers and by providing a service that even non-technical bloggers could use, WordPress defied the odds and established itself as a major player in an already crowded industry. WordPress is now considered one of the top personal publishing platforms in the world, and in 2007, was awarded with the much-coveted TechCruch Most-Likely-To-Succeed Award.

The story of Cliff Young (and WordPress) teaches us that following the road most traveled doesn’t always make sense. Cliff represents the ultimate entrepreneur: innovative, unconventional, free-spirited. While it doesn’t always pay to march at your own beat, most successful entrepreneurs have succeeded by going against the grain. Cliff Young serves as an inspiration to all and provides living proof that the little guy can change how things are done. In the years following Cliff’s ultimate upset, the Sydney to Melbourne race changed forever. Professional runners abandoned their established strategies. Now many competitors run all day and all night, rarely stopping to rest. Many have gone as far as to adopt Cliff’s running style (dubbed the “Young Shuffle”) after experts concluded that it is, in fact, a more aerodynamic and energy efficient way to run long races.

We should all remember that sometimes the turtle can win. But we should never forget that the race is never easy and almost always requires innovative and stubborn resolve.

Thank you to Erica O’Grady and CJ Coolidge for their input into this post.

For more information on Cliff Young’s remarkable feat, check out the following: EliteFeet, My-Inspirational-Quotes, TheAge, Coolrunning, and AustraliaHistory.