Alastair Lynch

Alastair Lynch will be remembered as one of the all-time greats of AFL football after a career which spanned 17 years and 306 games at the highest level. He was a former captain and key member of the history-making Brisbane Lions team that won an extraordinary premiership hat-trick in 2001-02-03 to be rated arguably the best team of all-time.

But his career, which had its beginnings in Tasmania and was split between Fitzroy and the Brisbane Bears/Lions, went far beyond pure football. He defied a career-threatening illness in 1995, later diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, to become an inspiration to the thousands of CFS sufferers in Australia. And not only did he get back to playing football at the elite level after missing all but one game in 1995 but he took his game to a new level and played some of his best football as the oldest player in the competition in his latter years. An All-Australian selection in 1993, he was Lions co-captain from 1997-2000 and remained a highly regarded leader of the star-studded Lions outfit despite the selfless decision at the end of 2000 to stand down from the captaincy, allowing Michael Voss to do the job solo. He ranks equal 5th in all-time AFL finals goals. In recognition of the high regard in which he is held by the football community, he was chosen in the Fitzroy Team of the Century and the Tasmanian Team of the Century, and was further honored part-way through 2004 when Tasmanian football’s highest individual award, formerly the William Leitch Medal, was re-named the Alastair Lynch Medal. Is also a “Living Legend” of Tasmanian football, was an inaugural member of the Tasmanian Football Hall of Fame in 2005, and was elevated to ‘legend’ status in 2006. A father of three, he is now well settled in Brisbane, enjoying the multitude of business and media opportunities and challenges that present themselves in life after football. In August 2005 he released a best-selling autobiography titled “Taking Nothing For Granted”, which traces his fight against CFS and his football career. In high demand as a corporate motivational speaker, he also writes a newspaper column in Brisbane and Hobart, does radio commentary with Triple M and appears regularly on ‘Fox Footy’. Is a partner and managing director in a new Brisbane-based sports marketing and athlete management company ‘Velocity Sports’.