Former Moree old boy strikes Olympic gold

By Bill Poulos

Moree old boy Max Hitchins has done it again.

The man known widely as the Hospitality Doctor and Melbourne Cup expert has written another book – and his latest work of historical non-fiction is a ground-breaking, world-first.
Chasing Gold is a collection of short stories about the incredible athletes who have experienced the highs and lows of competing on the world sporting stage.

The release of Chasing Gold, dedicated to all summer and winter Olympians and Paralympians from around the word, is timely – the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad in Paris are only weeks away.

But what makes Chasing Gold a book of Olympic proportions are the QR-codes woven into the pages.

“The idea just jumped out,” Max said.

Chasing Gold is the first book written about the Olympic Games, packed with QR-codes so the reader can “meet the athlete”.

“After finishing a story, the reader can scan the QR-code and be taken to a YouTube clip about that Olympian,” Max explained.

“It might be an interview that was done, or a newsreel. In fact, there are some wonderful old newsreels from more than 50 years ago that are amazing.

“This type of thing has never been done before, and I’m proud to say, it’s been done by a guy from Moree,” he smiled.

“QR-codes have been around since 1992, but it wasn’t until Covid that they really started to take off.

“Now, more than ever, everyone is using QR-codes for a million different reasons.”

Max, a proud devotee of the Australian Olympic movement, has for many years been collecting and documenting stirring stories about Olympians from around the world.

Now he’s put those stories together into the revolutionary book, Chasing Gold.

“There are stories about Olympians from the first games in 1896, the first Winter Olympics in 1924 at Chamonix, the first Paralympic Games in 1960 in Rome, and the games right through to the present,” Max said.

At 81, Max’s bio is vast. He’s a poet, pilot, pianist, publican, memory magician, Melbourne Cup raconteur and author of several books including Fact, Fiction & Fables of The Melbourne Cup, How to Develop a Memory Like an Elephant and Post-Pandemic Thinking.