Heading into these Commonwealth Games, the Australian swim team had no Kaylee McKeown (absent through illness), no Ariarne Titmus (following her shock retirement last year) and Mollie O’Callaghan battered by injury (a spinal stress fracture and a shoulder complaint). The Dolphins would have been forgiven for nursing some concern. It turns out they needn’t have worried.
On Wednesday evening in Glasgow, Australia rounded out the swim program in historic style. Having levelled the record for most gold medals won at the competition on the penultimate night (28 – equal with the 2018 home Games on the Gold Coast), the Dolphins obliterated that mark with one final night of triumph at the Tollcross Swimming Centre. A run of individual wins and success in both medley relays saw the team end the six-day meet with 37 gold, 16 silver and 23 bronze medals across the able-bodied and para-swimming disciplines.
There are numerous ways to spin the statistics. Australia won more gold medals than every other nation combined, while some Australian states would have topped the medal tally themselves. If Lani Pallister or Sam Short were countries, their four gold medals (three individual and one relay respectively) would put them fifth on the medal tally, ahead of New Zealand and Canada. Australia won all eight relay events, and set Commonwealth Games records in five of them. Whichever way one looks, it was an impressive outing in the pool for the Dolphins.
Australia’s unparalleled dominance in Glasgow comes with a caveat, and some deeper meaning. With the road to the Los Angeles Olympics now ahead, both deserve interrogation.
The caveat first: the Commonwealth Games are not the same test as an Olympic Games or world championships. Australia has topped the Games medal tally every four years since before the current swim team was born. It has been four decades since Australia faced a real test in the pool; Canada drew level with Australia at the 1986 Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals apiece, even if Australia still finished top with more silver and bronze medals.
Great Britain’s division into its constituent parts at the Games significantly limits the relay challenge faced, too (for Australia, the omission of Norfolk Island only hurts medal prospects in the lawn bowls). For example, in Glasgow Australia won gold in the men’s 4x200m freestyle relay, comfortably seeing off England and Wales – whereas at last year’s world championships, a combined Great Britain team was atop the podium with Australia in third. That Canadian swim star Summer McIntosh opted to skip the Games has also limited the competition faced by the Dolphins.
Instead, the forthcoming Pan Pacific Swimming Championships, to be held in California in August, will offer a sterner test, with the formidable Americans and a stronger Canadian team standing between Australia and the medals. The Pan Pacs, and next year’s world championships in Budapest, will perhaps be a more accurate gauge of Australia’s swim stocks in the lead up to Los Angeles 2028.
Caveat aside, the blaze of gold does mask a subtle but significant changing of the guard in Australian swimming. While the colour of the medal remains the same, those on the top step of the podium have evolved. An emerging generation of Dolphins is stepping up.
Take Flynn Southam’s win over compatriot Kyle Chalmers in the men’s 100m freestyle. King Kyle, for so long the alpha member of the team, had never previously lost at an international meet to a fellow Australian. But 21-year-old Southam upstaged his relay teammate leaving Chalmers questioning whether he would make it to LA. Dean Boxall-trained Kai Taylor, 22, beat British stars James Guy and Matt Richards to gold in the men’s 200m freestyle on the final night.
Short and Pallister were both dominant across the freestyle middle-distance disciplines; the pair are no strangers to the Dolphins squad, but are still only 22 and 24 respectively. Pallister, in particular, has progressed immensely over the past year and shown herself a worthy successor to Titmus’s crown. Twenty-year-old Iona Anderson impressed in the backstroke following McKeown’s withdrawal, while 17-year-old breaststroke prodigy Sienna Toohey was twice on the podium in individual events.
The two years until the Olympics is a long time in swimming. Much can change in that time, and the Dolphins know that the major target is Los Angeles, not Glasgow. But the Commonwealth Games have provided good competition experience to a new generation of Australian swim stars, not to mention a healthy cash injection – with patron Gina Rinehart to pay out over $1.3 million in medal bonuses to individual swimmers.
Glasgow 2026 was not a revolution for the Dolphins, but an evolution. With McKeown to return to the team, and O’Callaghan likely to take time off before hopefully returning to full health, the Australians will head to Los Angeles with a formidable blend of established superstars and superstars in waiting. For a team that has gone from strength to strength over two Olympics now, that momentum does not appear to be slowing down.
