The comic-book hero Alf Tupper - 'The Tough of the Track' - dominated the fictional world of international middle-distance running from the 1950s to the 1990s. He was a true amateur who divided his life between running and his job as a welder. To a largely working-class readership of teenage boys in the Rover and the Victor, his stories spoke of an athletics tradition that had little in common with the upper-class gentlemanly amateurism to be found in cricket, rugby or the dominant stratum of athletics itself. Alf's sport gloried in the physical pleasure and competition of running but offered a stinging critique of the social conditions in which the sport existed.