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Travels From:
Sydney
Fee Range: E
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In front of 120,000 spectators on a stifling hot day on the Gold Coast in 1984 an unknown Manly teenager rose against the odds & cemented his name in Australia's sporting history by winning the inaugural Coolangatta Gold.
The first professional ironman race in the world that was borne out of a movie with the same name, the race covered the Gold Coast coastline from Surfers Paradise to Coolangatta & back spanning 46km. One hundred of the fittest surf athletes from around the world competed for the chance to make history & pick up $20,000 worth of gold bullion.
It took Guy Leech 4hrs 30min to create history & overnight become a household name in Australia. The race created a professional sport that saw names like Grant Kenny, Trevor Hendy & the Mercer brothers: Darren & Dean - beamed into the lounge-rooms of Australians over summer for decades to come.
Guy dominated the longer ironman races over his 15-year career, never being beaten in any event lasting more than 2 hrs. A feat that no other ironman has replicated. During Guy's professional athletic career, he won the title of Aust fittest athlete defeating sportsmen from a wide range of sports over a 10-event competition that was shown on CH9's 60 Minutes.
He also won the World Ocean Paddling Championship in Hawaii at his first attempt; a race from Molokai to Oahu covering 55km, the channel is the third most dangerous stretch of water in the world.
Over the years Guy has been asked to compete in most of the celebrity TV shows: dancing, singing, cooking & Big Brother to name a few.
There was only one that he had any interest in - Survivor and he got his chance, when asked to compete in the second Australian season of Survivor in 2007, that was held in Vanuatu.
As he has always done during his sporting career, he set himself a training program to give himself the edge over the competition.
It ended up being one of his most memorable times in his life and in the end he outwitted, outplayed & outlasted the competition to be the sole Survivor!
in 2003 Guy launched another fitness innovation, an aquatic boot camp on the shores of Sydney Harbour. The classes were a combination of paddling, running & dry land exercises and quickly attracted hundreds of participants every week.
Some 13 years into these classes, an event changed Guy's life forever. An event so tragic that it made Guy rethink his entire life's purpose and question everything that he was doing both personally and professionally.
On the 5th September 2016, one of Guy's best mates, former Channel nine sport commentator Charles Stewart (known as 'Chucky') suffered a heart incident at the end of a class. Guy instinctively began CPR while others called 000. It took ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive and they quickly took over, transporting Chucky to the hospital.
Chucky fought for life in hospital before passing away 3 days later. In the weeks following, Guy learned that had he had a life-saving defibrillator on hand, Chucky would have had more than a 70% chance of surviving.
Once he came to grips with losing one of his closest friends, he made the decision to dedicate his life to heart health and saving lives. He launched Heart180 in 2017 a national based defibrillator company that educates & distributes the world's leading defibrillators.
Heart180 is now the no.1 distributor in Aust supplying thousands of these life-saving devices to the community. One of their devices saves a life every 6 weeks.
Now age 59, Guy is married with two daughters living at Collaroy Beach on the northern beaches of Sydney. He remains fit & healthy with his mission: to get a defibrillators within 180 seconds of any Australian at any given time. If he reaches this goal it will save 70 Aussies a day!
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