Stawell's Keith Haymes: a living legend

But this Saturday, the club's venerable founder, will be chauffeured in style in a gleaming Mercedes first to the North Park clubrooms, then to the Ironbarks start (at 10am) until the five kilometre race is run and done, and returned to the clubrooms for presentations over morning tea.

This is why.

Sometime during my tenure as secretary of the Victorian Cross Country League in Melbourne (circa 2005) I noticed that the now ninety-year-old running club, in one season, had honoured up to six of its past members (long passed) with memorial races.

The thought occurred, with the likelihood of further memorials to come, that these loyal supporters, sponsors and servants, should be celebrated while they still lived.

And so, a series of annual "Living Legends" races were established and deeply appreciated by the honourees, knowing that their history of loyalty and commitment did not go unnoticed.

No one is more deserving of a first ever Keith Haymes Living Legend race than the man himself, especially now that the race had to be held over after COVID restrictions last year.

Fifty-seven-years ago, Haymes was told that his club wouldn't survive for more than six weeks; that it couldn't co-exist with the Stawell Athletic club and the Stawell Gift.

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"What that person failed to realise is that The Gift is for just three days of the year, but we planned to race for 52 weeks of the year, cross country and track."

The beginnings of the SAAC in 1966 were truly humble.

"We didn't have club rooms where we could stash our equipment and we didn't have a track," Haymes recalled.

"All we had at North Park was the grass on the inside of the old bike track. Before we raced we had to fill in rabbit holes and chalk out lanes. To make up a mile, we had to run five laps."

In 1968 an old iron shed, the former pump shed at Lake Fyans, was hauled to Stawell and installed at North Park to serve as temporary storage for the club gear.

The "rubberised" bitumen track that preceded the existing track, now named in Keith's honour, was poured in 1972 but was never to his liking.

"From the first day it went down, I thought it was too hard. They said it would soften up when athletes started to use it, but it never did."

That track was a Haymes initiative and so were the clubrooms, formerly an old army building that served as a canteen behind the former technical school in Patrick Street.

Haymes purchased the building and had it lifted in two sections from its old site to where it stands today.

"We used to put sacks over barbed wire fences for cross country runners and we would run a relay from Halls Gap to Stawell. They even erected hurdles when we had cross country races at Flemington racecourse."

Now, by comparison, cross country racing is more family friendly over distance ranging between three and 16 kilometres. The club is thriving with its influx of female runners, mums and dads with kids under 13 that compete in one kilometre Sub-Junior races for sponsored prizes.

Keith Haymes will more than likely drive himself to the Lindsay Kent Memorial Handicap at the rear of Stawell Airport on April 17, and it seems that members should have no concerns about the octogenarian in the "battered" Toyota.

"I didn't do that," he said, in reference to the bent bodywork. "I was having lunch with church people at The Gift Hotel and someone backed into me."

A hit and run, he said.

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