It wasn’t until I moved to the UK from Australia in 2004 that it occurred to me that swimming was not simply acknowledged by all as the number one best Olympic sport; that maybe my love of swimming was not a universal obsession but perhaps something of an Australian quirk.
Being forced to watch the Olympic Games through the lens of a foreign broadcaster tells you a lot about your bias, beliefs and worldview.
Like many Australians, I grew up swimming. I could swim before I could walk, which was necessary since at the time pool fences weren’t mandatory. Memories of my childhood are overwhelmed with views of the beach and backyard swimming pools, birthdays celebrated with pool parties, the swimming carnival being the best day of the school year and getting up too early on Saturday mornings for time trials at the local 50m pool. It was often still cool during the first dive off the blocks but the effort was always rewarded with a sausage roll when all races were done. Swimming really makes you hungry.
Holidays were spent sliding down dunes and digging out massive clumps of sand that were inevitably caught in the crotch of girls’ bathers. Summers were always covered in a dusting of sand that was entirely unbothersome. As early as August we’d be diving into our backyard swimming pool, elbowing each other and grabbing ankles as we chased after the 20 cent coin Dad had tossed in.
It was a sport with more female role models than male. When swimming was your sport, it just didn’t occur to you that boys were in any way better than girls, or somehow more athletic. My sister and I would race in our pool; she was always the Australian Commonwealth Games champion, Tracey Wickham, and I was the American Olympic champion, Janet Evans. I could imitate Evans’ famous windmill stroke even if I could never make it do for me what it did for her – propel her to four Olympic gold medals and one silver. I met her when reporting on the swimming at the Sydney 2000 Games and she loved this story. The greatest female distance swimmer of all time appreciated being mimicked by a 11-year-old freckle-faced girl in a small pool in suburban Sydney, Australia.
I wonder if the British people who didn’t want to watch every single swimming heat, final and medal ceremony in 2004 (coverage was greatly improved by 2008 and I could watch every delightful race) remember Evans in 1988, aged just 16, winning three gold medals and breaking a world record?
Surely they know the name Dawn Fraser (for her swimming prowess rather than her more recent, divisive comments about race)? Fraser is one of the few athletes to have won a gold medal in the same event at three Olympic Games. She was queen of freestyle and a supreme sportswoman. Had she not been banned from the sport for 10 years after being accused of stealing an Olympic flag at the 1964 Tokyo Games, the popular Australian belief is that she would have won the 100m freestyle for a fourth time.
Do they remember the Russian legend, Alexander Popov, the undisputed king of freestyle sprinting? Did they see him blast the pool to win four gold medals and five silver between 1992 and 2000? There was a time when I genuinely believed nobody would ever beat Popov in the men’s 50m freestyle. Or if I could ever love a man in real life as much as I loved him.
Do they even know Ian Thorpe has size 17 feet? Or that he is Australia’s most successful Olympian, with five gold medals, three silver and one bronze, the best swimmer of his era, and was an inspiration to – officially-speaking – the “greatest Olympian of all time”, Michael Phelps?
Surely they remember Phelps? With 22 medals – 18 of them gold – he has won more Olympic medals than any other athlete in the history of the Games. He set out to become “the Tiger Woods of swimming” and then became the Michael Phelps of the world. He not only revolutionised the sport itself by taking the dolphin kick to new limits, he introduced the sport to the mainstream in his native United States and through talent, sure, but also sheer hard work and determination became an international hero, an inspiration and a graceful champion.
I can understand that they might not remember Australia’s other swimming sensations such as Shane Gould, Murray Rose, Susie O’Neill, Kieran Perkins, Grant Hackett, Stephanie Rice or that time when Duncan Armstrong won gold in Seoul and his coach Laurie Lawrence lost his nut by the poolside.
But surely they remember Michael Klim, at the end of the pool in 2000 after the Australians won the 4x100m men’s freestyle relay, ostentatiously playing an air guitar as a middle finger salute to Gary Hall, Jnr who had earlier proclaimed that the US team would “smash the Aussies like guitars”? The Americans had never before lost that event at an Olympic Games, and the Aussies had to break the world record to beat them. British swimming champion Sharron Davies once said the Australian crowd “was going mental” at that event. Well, yes, we were.
But we were not doing that quite so much at the same event 12 years later in London, when Australia failed to even get a medal, despite being the favourites and counting the world record holder among their team. And while we try not to remember when world champion, James “The Missile” Magnussen, missed out on the gold medal in his pet event, the 100m freestyle, by one hundredth of a second at the same Games, that kind of heartbreak is not easily forgotten.
But for every disappointment such as that one, there’s another story of Olympic glory that is best captured by the story of Eric Moussambani at the Sydney Games. “Eric the Eel” was from Equatorial Guinea and after his two competitors false started, he was the sole swimmer in his 100m freestyle heat. I was in the aquatic centre watching the event, and it was clear from his first stroke he was not a serious competitor. But by the time he turned at the 50m mark, it was not clear whether he could even make it to the other end of the pool. With 25m to go, and it looked like he might have to be rescued, the crowd was on its feet. The noise from the stands was incredible as we all willed him to stay afloat and finish that race. It was the first time he’d ever seen a 50m pool but he did finish the race, and later became coach of his national swim team. The fact he was there at all was due to a wildcard, given to developing nations to encourage participation in the Olympics. Isn’t that reason enough to love the sport of swimming?
Then, of course, there is the impossibility of ignoring the swimmer’s physique. It’s a sport that requires grace of movement with terrific strength and watching bodies glide through water in a short burst of extreme energy is like watching a piece of art, an underwater ballet. Imagine a sport full of Roger Federers – that’s Olympic swimming.
I now know the world, and perhaps even many of my Australian compatriots, don’t agree that swimming is the best Olympic event bar none, but the meditative motion of following black lines, doing laps up and down the local pool in summer, will keep me assured that on this notion, I’m not too far off touching home.
