OSLO’S BEST BAD

April 1971. After my wins in the 100-metre and 200-metre backstroke at Nationals in Hobart in February — no dye bombs to contend with this time — I’m on a small team for a one-month European tour. My first trip. Apart from a pair of Victorians, our dozen members are all Talbot and Carlile swimmers; Talbot’s the coach.

Four hours into the flight, we bank sharply right; through the window, there’s no trace of sky, cloud, or horizon, just a carpet of glowing ochre. Are planes supposed to tilt this sharply? I wonder. And is the desert meant to be so astonishingly vast, featureless, and without texture that it loses all scale, and looks to be barely an office block down? Maybe we’re in trouble, I think, before I feel the world correct itself, the darkening horizon sliding back down my window like a blind.

I settle back, close my eyes, and soon dream about flying, where I’m persuaded against my better judgement to board a particular plane. Very soon, my worst fears come true when the right engine catches fire and we’re spiralling down to crash. I’m bracing for the inevitable when I’m inexplicably excused from a big chunk of the dream, and once I’m back inside it I find, to my elation, that the pilot has us parked safely on some tarmac. When a calm, petrified voice orders us to relax and stay put while workmen replace the charred engine, my brain is suddenly the world’s biggest prefrontal neon billboard, pulsing, ‘No. Fucking. Way.’ I activate the emergency exit and dive-bounce-flip-roll-cartwheel down the inflated ramp, then sprint for the terminal, where I leap turnstiles, brush aside passport demands and security guards, and stride across screeching car bonnets until I’m lost in the safety of the dark alleyways of whatever city I’m in, where I collapse and hug the ground. Then I’m up and walking, just because my feet are meant to walk, not fly, and because I’ll never give another incompetent fool the chance to mess with the one life I’ve been given on this earth.

Stepping out into the sauna blast of Singapore from the cabin chill, we’re soon strolling the airport’s cool duty-free stores and coveting seductive new gadgets during our first stopover. Only a few hours later, we’re all aghast-but-chuckling to find ourselves squashed together on clapped-out floral lounges our grandmothers would have discarded years ago, but in this case they’re the only comfort Karachi Airport can offer.

From Heathrow, we’re bussed to a weird-but-wonderful timber-panelled skyscraper dorm adjoining the sprawling Crystal Palace sports complex. Well, maybe not quite a skyscraper, though the brooding sky seems low enough to be impaled by our twelve-storey vertical hobbit shaft. Down in the dining area, aluminium urns dispense endless cups of milk-based coffee, a real treat when you’re about to head out at midday across the car park, where we’re told it’ll be six degrees, the coldest daytime temperature I’ll have experienced — exciting though!

I win my 100-metre backstroke race at the Crystal Palace pool in midafternoon, but it’s Shane who stuns everyone by equalling Dawn Fraser’s 100-metre freestyle world record — and this was supposed to be our warm-up meet! Almost as if to answer Shane’s arrival on the world stage, Karen Moras then breaks the world 400-metre freestyle record.

When you thought the day couldn’t hold any more surprises, in walks Rolf Harris, and I instantly wonder if he’s been hired as some kind of zany novelty motivator. I’m flabbergasted to think our little team has this kind of clout, and wonder why his presence hasn’t been formally announced, though it seems he’s happy enough to float among us for a casual chinwag. Maybe someone told him world records were in the air today. Soon he’s telling me that he too was a backstroker ‘back in the day’, apparently winning a Junior National 100-metre backstroke title in the 1940s, and it’s suddenly like I’m just chewing the fat with another teammate. When he wanders off after barely an hour among us, I’m still stunned to think he had the time to share his modest boast and take in a nostalgic whiff of chlorine.

After the swimming, there’s a disco, where my usual excuses for not dancing are interrupted by the chaperone, Mrs D, who wonders if there’s been ‘a falling-out, or something, maybe nothing at all’ among the girls, because a few, including Shane, have gone to their rooms early. Several of us are delegated to ‘go and knock on a few doors’, and, since I’m an old training mate of Shane’s, I’m allocated hers. Confident she’s retired early to rest after the excitement of joining the ranks of Dawn Fraser, I wince to make myself knock once on her door before asking haltingly, ‘Everything … okay?’ When I think I hear the faint reply, ‘Just scribbling in my diary,’ I decide it makes perfect sense because all the Carlile girls seem maniacal diary-keepers, on top of the special training logbooks they’re meant to fill out and submit for weekly perusal by the Carliles. ‘Make sure you scribble this in,’ I joke back, but silence tells me I’m unheard. When the door swings open a moment later, Shane looks tired but is keen to head back to the celebrations, so off we go.

The pace continues and soon after we hit Rome we’re all over the Spanish Steps. ‘Come and see the steps-a,’ proclaims the butterflier, Hiccup, as if he’s our tour guide. ‘Step up, step up-a,’ he bawls in a mock accent, doubling over. ‘Which a-step you like to see? So beautiful, a-step-a number three. Touch if you like-a, watch the ant-a crawl-a.’ And now I think he’s probably lucky Talbot’s not here right now to touch him. I’ve read somewhere that the poet John Keats had a pad adjoining these famous steps, but I can’t go off searching. Next, it’s a brief stop at the Colosseum, where people played sport to the death, its encircling wall like a richly textured biscuit chomped on by gargoyles every other century.

On our third night in Rome, I’m momentarily nodding off in the stands of a cramped indoor pool in my new Australian tracksuit with its flashy, jagged-cut yellow stripes along the arms, when someone calls from above, ‘Hey, Bradford.’ I look up in amused, sleepy irritation, half-blinded by a flash. ‘This photo make you famous,’ the voice from the black continues, and I think back, I don’t-a think so-a.

On our last day in Rome, we’re sharing a bus with the Italian team, and I’ve never met more talkative girls. Their English is so good that it’s almost impossible to keep up with the flow of words and gestures, but if you miss a beat they lose interest and head for the nearest fun. One comments sharply that I ‘look German’, suggestive of some undecipherable overtone. Confused, I stammer, ‘W-what? No good?’ and for some reason they find this hilarious and at last I’ve something in the bank.

The pools in Marseilles are the filthiest in the world, we all joke, or else why would we be heading off in a bus for a Piscine. The bus driver calls over his shoulder that the annual cost of swim-club membership at this spectacular headland piscine we’re competing in tonight is well over a thousand dollars. No one swims well; it’s almost as if the shocking price of being a swimmer here has overwhelmed our amateur ethos into a passivity that even Talbot understands — no one cops the dressing-down you’d expect. The additional fact of there being so few spectators makes it the most unsatisfying racing of the tour.

The following day in Aix-en-Provence, I’m halfway through a warm-down when I start itching. Not just itching for a scratch here and there, but absolutely all over, and I jump from the pool barely able to believe an itch could send you crazy, though that’s where I’m headed if the manager can’t find a doctor. Luckily one soon arrives with his black bag of tricks and I receive an injection, making me settle within minutes. ‘Bed bugs,’ the manager tells me. Luckily too, we’ll be in new beds in Paris tonight.

Another day, and we’re up on the Eiffel Tower, a few girls nudging up against boys on each platform because it’s cold and they must think they have to — Paris being the city of love — but down there in the arrondissements, banks, and quarters, it all looks oddly uninspiring. Yet on the way back to the motel, our minibus wends through a charming little cobblestone loop, and the flower shop that swings around to fill the dappled screen is the prettiest I’ve ever seen.

At lunch, Mrs D is the centre of attention at the far end of the motel dining table. She’s just returned from a trim at the hairdresser, where her sympathetic snip-snip gesticulations to show she wanted only a tiny bit cut off were somehow misinterpreted to mean only a tiny bit left on. She makes no bones about how upset she is, tugging at her remaining hair and rolling her eyes while searching for the right words. ‘I am so. I am so. Absolutely. Distraught. I’m just devastated. By this.’ Tears welling. Anybody — anybody but the manager, that is — could see that the last thing she wants to hear is, ‘It’ll grow back,’ to which she sniffs, ‘So will the Sahara one day,’ before heading briskly for her room, pulling her neck scarf over that sorry lawn.

We visit every Scandinavian capital except Helsinki. Are Finns Scandinavian? I’ve heard they’re in a different language group, but they look similar in photos. I love Stockholm. Volvos everywhere, even the taxis. I’m in the very back of a station-wagon cab with three Swedish girls and we can’t stop laughing. Maybe it’s because the driver takes the corners hard enough to make us roll together as one big lump. Or is it that we just happen to be the planet’s four funniest people at this moment? We haven’t even been drinking — not since we’ve been in the cab, anyway. I’m not sure when we’re getting out, but I want it to be the longest not-yet ever.

All the pools in Norway are Bad. At least, that’s what it says over each entry — Bad being Norwegian for Baths. By far the best Bad is in the woods outside Oslo: this towering Euclidean riff of glass triangles, leaning in then out, the odd nip and tuck of aluminium, and red plastic for calculated Bauhaus rhythm. You look through the glass sections and see even more wedges of bright colours in the massive stands. We dive in for the warm-up and suddenly I could be back at Auburn, the black line pulling me down from our Bauhaus bubble like I’m some soldier being woken for exercise drill.

We’re here today not for aqua-boot-camp, but for a friendly session with Oslo’s best, and we soon discover an unforgivable deficiency in the Norwegian swimming program: they are all squirt-illiterate. Every Australian swimmer knows at least three of the five hand squirts we’re always doing to annoy each other at the end of the pool between sets. There’s the front and reverse double-hand pray squirt, the cross-hand forward, and the single-hand front and reverse. A few of us chip in to help our new Norwegian friends — Anja, Lisbet, Erik, and Alex — correct this personal failing by positioning their fingers and palms as they clumsily compress their squirt-less hands. Lisbet suddenly cracks it for a single-hand front, then reverse — a full metre of squirt, getting Erik square in the eye. She’s quickly chaired on the shoulders of teammates like a new national hero, and Talbot hasn’t a clue what’s going on when he looks over, but doesn’t want to cause an international incident by ripping into us in front of the local coaches.

Last of all, Bonn: the embassy, with its manicured grounds, minor topiary, and hedge-enclosed pool, where we strip to our togs to see who can go the most consecutive laps underwater. My best is six — it’s only a 12-metre pool, and the push-offs alone get you halfway. The winner, Hiccup, hits ten, pushes off for the eleventh, and nearly blacks out as he lunges up through the surface like some purple sky-busting marlin. We all laugh. He spends thirty stationary seconds groaning on the side of the pool. We laugh harder. ‘No. Fucken. Really!’ he sputters. We laugh again and finally he does too. And coughs.

Three weeks after our return, there’s a rumour that several girls from the tour are set to quit. One already has. Reportedly they had such a good time that they’re having trouble settling down, already sick of the twice-daily slog and nothing new on the horizon. But when Talbot overhears the names we’re throwing around in the Kombi, he’s all over it, scoffing over his shoulder that this is the usual post-tour ‘scuttlebutt’ and he ‘frankly doubts’ any of the girls will be permanently ‘lost to swimming’.

Lost to swimming? I ponder. Swimming: a gerund describing the efforts of animals (in this case, humans) to move through water? And the movement of the word itself, swimming — just a vibration of the vocal cords, sculpted to meaning by lips and tongue, its momentary puff of air leaving no trace in the atmosphere?

But who knows what Talbot’s thinking when he says swimming with that definitive look and tone, like swimming’s the animal itself, navigating itself through his thought processes. If anything’s lost, it won’t be these girls to swimming, but swimming to them — that’s if they care.