Hayley Lewis
A five-time gold medalist at Auckland’s 1990 Commonwealth games and world champion in the 200m freestyle a year later, Lewis couldn’t quite live up to the feverish hype in Barcelona, taking out silver and bronze and being supplanted as the golden child of Australian swimming by fresh-faced 1500m champion Kieren Perkins.
To some observers Lewis’ early-career glories came to represent a kind of millstone, but the suggestion that she’d stumbled when the stakes were highest irked Lewis so much that she made an inspirational attempt at qualifying for Sydney, four years on from retirement and after the arrival of her first child.
But that she did, streaking away to the 800m national title in front of a packed house of screaming fans, including her young son Jacob, launching Ray Warren into another brilliantly crap piece of commentary: “I remember in 1990, calling the Comm Games, and on that occasion I dubbed her ‘The Princess of the pool’,” shrieked Rabs. “[Now] she might be ‘The Queen of the pool’, I dunno, it doesn’t matter, but she’s won the 800! Good onya Hayley!”
Good onya indeed. And who could ever forget Lewis’ take on Huey Lewis’ Hip to be square on cult ABC comedy series The Late Show? OK, fair enough then.
Shane Kelly
On the balance of things Shane Kelly’s career was among the greatest in Australian cycling. A five-time Olympian, multiple Commonwealth Games gold medalist and Australia’s best male track cyclist for most of the 1990s, he did however fall agonisingly short of snaring the ultimate prize of Olympic gold. He rode to silver in the 1000m time trial in Barcelona and won bronze at Sydney and Athens, but to many Australians he’s best remembered for a nightmare mishap at Atlanta 1996, when the raging favourite’s foot slipped from his pedal at the start of the kilo race. Bar the Socceroos’ horrific collapse against Iran in 1997, was there there any greater Australian sporting catastrophe in the 90s?
“I think what happened in Atlanta was a major mistake, a major mistake on Shane’s behalf, because in his anticipation to get this race under way, he just went that fraction too early from that machine and that machine just won’t release until the gun goes,” Australian coach Mike Turtur later told the ABC. “And once you commit yourself at the start, you have to go through it – you can’t stop and go again, because the split second that we’re talking about is the difference between winning and losing.”
Worse, Kelly had been in the best physical condition of his career. “Also mentally, everything was going so good,” he explained in 2000. “So that was probably the toughest thing to do with – it was that chance was gone.”
Heartbreakingly and with his countrymen watching on through their fingers after disaster struck, Kelly was left to ride a dispirited but sportsmanlike lap of the track, ruefully raising his fist in the air and waving to the crowd as he began to process his crumbled Olympic dream. There was no dummy spit, no tossing of the bike, no blaming of his team – just polite acceptance that the sporting gods weren’t with him that day.
Propelling himself forward and through three more Olympic campaigns, Kelly might have been the most popular bronze medalist of all at Sydney. But Atlanta always stalked him. “I’m going to be remembered for that moment,” he later admitted, “so I’ve got to live with it”.
Ric Charlesworth
To be absolutely clear, Ric Charlesworth is a born winner. A three-time Sheffield Shield-winning cricketer with Western Australia (he was also a squad member when they won it in 1974-75) and a coaching luminary for his work with Australia’s women’s hockey team (whom he led to gold at Atlanta ‘96 and Sydney 2000), plus a federal MP for an entire decade before taking the reins of the Hockeyroos, Charlesworth won so often they just started naming awards after him. Printing out the honours section of his CV would need a couple of toner cartridges.
The only gap in Charlesworth’s trophy cabinet is a gold medal from his five Olympic campaigns as a Kookaburras player, with his best effort a silver at Montreal. As well as his 47 first-class cricket appearances, Charlesworth managed 227 top flight hockey matches, skippering the Kookaburras Olympic sides in Moscow and Los Angeles and also their World Cup-winning side of 1986, the latter whilst he was holding public office. But honestly, the item on his resume that really stands out to us is the title of his third book, Shakespeare The Coach.
Also staking a claim to the hockey slot in this list is Brian Booth, one of Australia’s most talented all-round sportsmen by virtue of his duel-sport success as both an Olympian and Test cricket captain. He led his country in two Ashes Tests of the 1965-66 summer, among 29 international appearances. A Test batting average of 42.21 came thanks to graceful right-handed strokes and a calm temperament. Sitting out a season of cricket to focus on selection for the ‘56 Games in Melbourne, he was picked as an inside left but didn’t feature in any of the games, soon returning to cricket and greater sporting renown. Booth is also, as far as we’re aware, the only Australian Olympian to write books regarding each of hockey, cricket and christianity, though sadly none on Shakespeare.
Raelene Boyle
It’s no fault of Raelene Boyle’s that there’s not an Olympic gold or two sitting on the mantelpiece alongside her seven Commonwealth Games golds, for Boyle merely had the misfortune of being the best clean female sprinter in an era in which most of her fiercest rivals were, to be blunt, juiced. It wasn’t until 1975 – by which time Boyle had taken out silver in the 200m at Mexico City ‘68 and the 100m/200m double at Munich ‘72 – that the IOC finally banned the use of anabolic steroids, so the Australian not unjustifiably thinks of most who pipped her as cheats, even if they’re allowed to keep their medals.
It’s hard to imagine a single athlete enduring more personal and collective tumult in two Games than Boyle in Mexico City and Munich. Ten days before the ‘68 Games almost 300 demonstrators were killed in Mexico City’s Square of Three Cultures when the military opened fire to disperse protestors. What athletes faced was child’s play in comparison, but the energy sapping high altitudes, the first synthetic athletics track in Olympic history and the introduction of sex testing for female athletes all presented unusual and disruptive breaks from routine. In the 100m, fresh-faced Coburg High School student Boyle was stiffed, finishing in the same recorded time (11.01 seconds) as the silver and bronze medalists but ending up empty handed. An Olympic record time of 22.9 in her 200m semi final and a then-world record of 22.7 also wasn’t enough. She still finished behind Poland’s Irena Szewinska.
Infamy greeted Olympians in ‘72 as well, as the Games was plunged into chaos and crisis by terrorist atrocities against the Israeli team. Boyle would later claim that the tragedy had not affected her preparation for her events but did admit she would have returned home if given the option. Staying put, bad luck stalked her again, though her two silvers were the only track and field medals taken away from that Games by an Australian. In the 200 metres she accounted for Szewinska but not East German Renate Stecher, who also beat her in the 100m sprint.
In eight individual runs across the two events, Boyle had equalled or bettered her best with every single run but still couldn’t claim gold. Through it all, her status as people’s champion was assured.
Rob de Castella
“Deek” was the man every Australian bloke of the 1980s should have been – that dense, bristling, Dennis Lillee moustache; those thick tradesman’s thighs (“Tree” is what competitors called him, for the legs but also for his sense of inner calm); the slightly pained, half-grimacing smile of a man who’d know what to do with a wheelbarrow full of bricks and do it ruggedly, but also the bookish air of a junior professor who could tell you the precise molecular structure of his breakfast. At least that’s what the Kellogg’s adverts led us to believe.
And Robert de Castella could run. Boy could he run. Marathon gold in Brisbane’s Commonwealth Games of 1982 only confirmed what the country had already known: this Aussie hero was a dead set certainty to be highest on the podium in Los Angeles. He was, in fact, the outright favourite for gold. Only it didn’t quite happen.
The Australian led at the 33km mark but stopped for water and soon found the rest of the field overhauling him. He finished a disappointing fifth. “Back then there wasn’t the same understanding about international marathons as there is now and people in Australia thought it was a fait accompli that I’d walk away with gold,” the marathon legend said in 2011. “At the end of it all, I felt as though I let everyone down.”
What he’d most regret though was his approach to the race, and that he hadn’t capitalised on the opportunity while he was at the peak of his powers. “A bit of a lost opportunity,’’ was how de Castella explained it to The Australian in 2012. “I was just so dedicated as an athlete and so committed that I did too much. I think that’s one of the big problems that a lot of athletes, a lot of sportsmen and women face, is you really need to be held back, and in some cases you’re your own worst enemy. It’s the commitment and dedication that bring you undone, and that’s what I did in LA.”
Andrew Gaze
It’s quite remarkable that not even his regular appearances on Fox Footy’s Bounce panel show can dim our admiration and respect for Andrew Gaze, who sits among the select group of Australian basketballers who possess an NBA Championship ring. Sadly, what eluded him was what drove him so fiercely throughout his career – an Olympic medal of any kind, let alone gold.
An undisputed great of the game at US college and Olympic level, Gaze featured in in five Games campaigns for the Boomers after his debut as a skinny 19-year-old at Los Angeles. Flag-bearer for the Sydney team, he was instrumental in the Boomers’ fourth-place finish at Atlanta but it never got better for the Aussies. Only Brazlian Oscar Schmidt matches Gaze for Olympic appearances and the Australian’s estimated figured of in excess of 280 international games is unlikely to be touched again. Grey at the temples by his mid-20s, Gaze might have worn the appearance of a rec leaguer for the last decade of his career but in 20 seasons with the Melbourne Tigers he proved a scoring phenomenon.
If we’re allowed a moment of flippancy to finish, perhaps Gaze’s most valuable act in a Boomers jersey was to save Shane Heal from being murdered in front of millions of TV viewers when the Australian shooting guard clashed with the “round mound of rebound”, Charles Barkley. Gaze: hot hands, cool head.
