SPEED

The 20th Olympic Games,
Munich, West Germany, September 1972

‘Obviously you can’t accept the gold under those circumstances,’ insists the Sydney Sun’s Ernie Christensen from the edge of my dorm bed; I’m still off balance from finding his baggy-suited form in my room after dropping by to collect gear for tonight’s 1500-metre final. Hunched keenly at the foot of my bed with notebook at the ready, his hack reporter cliche lacks only a fedora with a press pass in the band. ‘The gold’ is the medal which might soon replace my day-old silver for the 400-metre freestyle, on reports that its first owner returned a doping positive.

My first news of Rick DeMont’s pending disqualification had come an hour ago at the briefest of briefings with our team sub-manager, Stuart Alldritt. ‘Keep mum about it or we’re both in strife,’ he’d winked roguishly, leaving me to suspect it was not yet a done deal. His only attempt at elaboration had been to mutter ‘ephedrine positive’. My reaction — I was still shell-shocked with a sense of injustice at my 1/100th-second loss — had been a messy thrill of shock, elation, and redress. Alldritt’s news flipped my world from Olympic heartbreak to a farce of firsts: the first electronic timing to make you lose by inhuman margins, the first swim doping disqualification, and then, presto! — my first gold. Except that I was suddenly the one getting a fraction ahead of myself: Alldritt had raised only the likelihood of a medal reallocation.

And now the brashness of Christensen’s twin presumptions — that I must reject a gold medal already mine — plunges me back into confusion. ‘Can’t accept?’ I silently fret. ‘Obviously?’ Is this a new sporting etiquette known to all but me? At barely eighteen, after a decade of waterlogged obedience, I need to add ‘silver-tongued QC’ to my CV to succeed; ditto the still-sixteen DeMont. My old craving to be both glorious and agreeable is suddenly a pathetic conceit. Pressed for the reply, I remind myself that Christensen’s a tabloid journo fishing for a headline, and the jerk who’d just baited me with the line, ‘The poor kid was DQ’d for taking his asthma medicine.’

‘Of course I won’t,’ I scoff, ‘until I get the full story,’ relieved to have defused his dodgy ploy for now. After he springs for the door with a parting tap on my shoulder, I stay on the bedside chair to let the interview sink in; his neat impression’s still on the bedclothes, but I’m left in turmoil. Why couldn’t I have tartly answered, ‘I don’t make the rules, I just swim under them.’ I’d been interviewed by scores of journalists in the past and had never felt steamrolled like this; even when the odd paraphrasing appeared in the stories, I hadn’t minded, because I knew it simplified longwinded answers.

I dig for other slights too. Had he chosen his time knowing teammates and officials had already left for the finals? How had he known I’d be dropping in? Who’d given him permission to wait alone here, and pointed out my bed? And what was that about an asthma medication?

Soon I’m trying to forget him as I hurry off with my gear to the warm-up for my 1500-metre final, thankful only that I never use its full time allocation. And I needn’t concern myself about a frosty reception from my coach, Don Talbot. We’ve been on near-mute terms for weeks anyway, from the day I impulsively jerked my arm free of his trademark custodial wrist clasp in a poolside pep talk. (I’m not sure who got the bigger shock, but he was spectacularly speechless for ten seconds.) I’m also over the ‘novelty’ of his chest-poking rebukes. It’s strongly rumoured he’ll be based in Canada after the Games, so those presumptuous handcuffs and savage pokes will soon be out of my life forever.

Yet Christensen isn’t entirely to blame for my lateness. He kept a promise that he’d only be five minutes, but earlier in the Olympic Village I’d been unable to resist a chance introduction to Betty Cuthbert. I was immediately shocked and saddened to find running’s former Golden Girl in a wheelchair with MS, though her own impish charm and easy banter showed not a trace of self-pity. Because just one Olympics separated the end of her career from mine, I’d anticipated the same vital figure of legendary press photos — lunging at tapes with neck thrust, mouth ecstatically open, short curls flying. Soon finding her as inspiring in adversity as in health, and relaxing in her humbling aura, I chatted longer than I’d allowed for. Leaving her for the dorm, I soon recalled that people of my father’s generation called MS ‘the athlete’s disease’, and wondered if a similar spectre stalked swimmers’ futures. (I’d long been primed for such torments by an old schoolmate’s serial ribbing that all repetitive exercise ‘fried motor neurons’, but had never thought this more than a geeky taunt until now.) Was it possible that humans, with our highly symbolic drive for identity, could push our bodies harder than nature intended?

But I’m jerked back to a more immediate concern as I follow the colour-coded overhead guide rails to the pool: the 1500-metre final itself. In a couple of hours, I’ll dive in with the world’s best time after DeMont’s, yet with my fitness suddenly in doubt after experiencing an all-too-familiar breathing tightness in the heats. I’m hoping there won’t be a repeat of the respiratory arrhythmia that left me clinging breathlessly to lane ropes in January’s NSW 1500-metre championship.

But even before it’s underway, my 1500-metre final seems caught up in a new Olympic controversy. There’s a ruckus while we’re still in the call-up room: DeMont won’t be swimming! Cursing and gesturing in disbelief, the world record holder and pre-race favourite looks set to defy a flustered steward ushering him away, while two security guards approach as a precaution. Watching in near disbelief, I’m struck how little DeMont’s hooded eyes have altered in expression, their usual whimsical detachment leaving his mouth to etch the limits of exasperation on his ashen face; how far he seems at this moment from any cliche of youthful athleticism.

Trying to get to grips with an odd sense of a kidnapping having taken place, I can only wonder if his removal is a late upshot from the 400-metre doping positive, the newly vacant seat beside me no help. A minute later, whatever remains of my full attention is glued to an in-house monitor screen showing my teammate Gail Neall’s 400-metre medley final. There’s no vision of the race itself, just columns where swimmers’ lap times flash up when they touch for each 100-metre turn. But it’s easy to see those column divisions as lane ropes, and when Gail’s numbers take the opening butterfly leg, I suspect the excitement has gotten to her: some rate her lucky to be in the final. But when her times keep ‘turning’ first through the backstroke then breaststroke legs, with only freestyle left, a thrill of anticipation gooses through me: a former Carlile swimmer, Gail’s trained all this season in the toughest distance freestyle lanes in the world under Talbot, so her freestyle has to be bombproof. In the still-confused pall of the call-up room, my involuntary half-leap from my chair when Gail’s time ‘touches’ first could pass for rowdiness: it’s one of the most exhilarating sporting triumphs I’ve seen. Not seen. I’d once winced to hear a commentator describe ‘a calm Elizabethan adroitness’ in Gail’s appearance, but in that five minutes or so she reigned with a mastery of race and career timing.

In my own final, I stay with the early leaders, Australia’s Graham Windeatt and the American Mike Burton, until I capitulate to a staccato tugging in my diaphragm at halfway. Though spared the humiliation of another stoppage, I free-fall through the field, sucking half-breaths instead of full ones, to finish a lap behind. After the race, I rediscover top gear to slip anonymously through the change rooms, avoiding Talbot and the press, except for one muffled call on the pool deck, to which I reply, ‘Worst swim ever.’ In the stands, I soon learn from teammates that Windeatt, after surging to a handy midpoint lead in what amounted to the race of his life, faded badly to finish ten metres behind Burton for the silver, though still recording a massive personal best to nearly beat my Olympic Trials time. Battling inexplicably poor form all year, he’d been mostly forgotten as a medal contender after almost a decade of being dubbed the world’s most promising junior distance swimmer. Today’s outcome has been both more, and less, than expected of him, and I’m in awe at his timely turnaround.

I soon learn from our manager, Roger Pegram, that DeMont was pulled from the 1500-metre for his own safety, over health concerns raised by the margin of his 400-metre doping positive. He tells me central-nervous-system stimulants like ephedrine boost aggression and pain tolerance: taken in large quantities, they can be harmful when athletes ignore their bodies’ distress signals.

But for now, the glory is all Burton’s. On top of his two golds from Mexico, he’s also the first to defend an Olympic 1500-metre title, smashing his Mexico winning time by twenty seconds and squeaking under DeMont’s recent world record. Ancient for a swimmer at twenty-five, and short at five foot nine, he’s now touted beyond measure for toughness. The childhood sporting all-rounder was famously run over by a truck at twelve, and poured his heart into swimming only after surgeons told him his contact-sport days were over.

Yet I’m also finding the truck mishap a confusing motif for his achievements. Its usual dredging by eulogists hints he should have achieved far more, while others who say the accident was ‘the making of him’ seem to imply the opposite. Which is it? I wonder. Viewed from the serendipitous angle, his adversity could be a competitive edge rivalling doping. Could there one day be testing for perverse advantage? I muse facetiously, knowing I and others might have been similarly ‘privileged’.

Next morning I’m keen to see what Christensen made of our interview. Passing a news kiosk, my eyes fix with horror on the syndicated heading — I’m too livid to read the rest — blazing ‘Cooper Doesn’t Want Gold’.

‘As if!’ I scoff in embarrassment to puzzled teammates, though privately heartened by the now publishable assumption the gold’s headed my way, in the continued absence of official word. Yet my heart sinks again at the perception created by that headline. Creep, I hiss at the memory of Christensen and every other journalist.

On another newsstand, I find pundits already blaming hair for my minuscule losing margin. ‘The long-haired Cooper,’ one paper lectures. Even our normally helpful assistant coach Ursula Carlile, wife of coaching legend Forbes Carlile, has publicly weighed in, adamant my barely-over-the-ear wisps made all the difference. But I’m betting her husband’s bristly crew cut or Talbot’s buzz cut would have caused more resistance. Where are the double-blind trials showing the disadvantage? For someone with an exercise-science background, Mrs Carlile’s preferred personal workout suddenly seems to include a lot of jumping … on the bandwagon.

At lunch in the food hall, the full circumstances of the disqualification are revealed — minus the spin. I’m told by officials that DeMont’s an asthmatic who was taking the ephedrine-based Marax, despite pre-Games warnings about prescription-doping risks. In our 400-metre final, he’d far exceeded the therapeutic exemption level (itself based on prescription norms), but the bigger surprise to me is that the rules allow doping tolerances at all, even on medical grounds.