TWINS

When my gold medal disappeared recently, I went into a kind of shock whose callous calm told me the thief had known exactly what he was doing and would surely find a safe home for it. And this response sounded suspiciously like Stockholm syndrome, at least a vicarious version on behalf of an inanimate object.

This was after my wife and I ruled out any chance of having mislaid it. It had rested in the same room at our swim school for twenty years, entombed like Lenin in its own acrylic see-through crypt within a box of old documents. The odd moment I glimpsed it in all that time, its condition spoke not an anthropomorphic murmur of decline or abandonment. The room also housed some paintings I’d collected as part of a superannuation portfolio — the only part — and apart from a regular airing when I ventured no more than a few metres from the door, it was always locked. This was within a dwelling that was always locked. My only regular ‘looking in’ on the medal was in fact during those airings, but only as a knowing nod to its buried proximity. Immutable physics did the rest. I knew it had to be theft when I found the chain, and the chain alone, at the bottom of that box when I’d gone fishing for an old contract.

The abhorrent peace that impaled me at that moment denied me the curiosity of even pretending to search further, a denial that was to justify two more months of not looking. What was the point? The room was full of boxes and I wasn’t going to go through the lot. And if I began there, why not the pool area downstairs instead, or the car park? Or Sydney and Melbourne, within whose myriad suburban walls it might have already rested in fraudulent state for years? Besides, the chain was the giveaway. It was where the medal should have been, always had been; I imagined the culprit leaving it behind as a taunt. (Was there someone I knew who would enjoy this?) My wife was good at searching, but when even she didn’t volunteer, I resigned myself — steeled myself — further. Instead, she rounded on me with a charge of carelessness, to which I responded with mild bluster: I told her to mind her own business, and that if I couldn’t care less, neither should she. Because it was my medal, not ours. And how could confining an object to the same secure room for two decades be carelessness? Benign neglect perhaps, but not carelessness.

Whenever I dared ponder those who might have known the medal was up there, in a tentative stab at sleuthing, a mild nausea chided me: these were all decent people — patrons, relatives, close friends. But perhaps their confidants were not so honourable, was my inner Sherlock’s rejoinder. Where was the sign of forced entry? came another line of inquiry. Locks could be picked, was the obvious answer. More queasiness. What about the dog? Experts could distract dogs. It wasn’t as if I’d ever gone out of my way to tell people where the medal was kept, but if anyone had asked with innocent fascination or courteous condescension, I couldn’t see myself misleading them.

When my wife and I eventually got around to discussing things calmly some time later, we agreed there might have been just one occasion in the past decade when the medal had left the room. We both had a vague memory of swimming-club parents begging me to let their children see it. It had to have been at least three years back — perhaps as many as five, for the memory to be so fuzzy — but this detail hardly mattered now. We had obviously been in the middle of something busy — likely our annual club championships. It must have been a hectic evening downstairs, full of racing, awards, speeches; and I’d have seemed mean-spirited not to inspire the kids (I at least remembered my keenness to dispel this impression, and then of relenting). I would have been anxious to rush the medal back upstairs once the kids had had a turn of holding it, yet the act of returning it now completely escaped me. What if it had stayed downstairs? I wondered. And then what? The doubt and regret of this incomplete recollection made it preferable to go with the theft.

In the meantime, I kept up my charade of indifference, reminding myself my name would forever be in the Olympic records, often near an image of the medal. And whatever savings and assets were to have sustained me in looming retirement, the medal was not among them — at least, not one I’d ever factored in. Unless, of course, I was forced to sell it, as I’d seen Olympians do over the years when they fell on hard times. Yet now even this option was closed forever.

With this thought in mind, I googled the subject and was astonished to find that my medal’s sole historic bedfellow, the Munich 400-metre medley gold won by the Swede Gunnar Larsson, was at this very moment listed for auction with Feldman’s of Switzerland, with an estimate of 40,000 euros. Bedfellows — because ours were the first two Olympic swimming gold medals to require the full specification of the then-new electronic timing; at all previous Games, first and second place in our respective events would have tied, requiring two golds apiece. So now Larsson and I might both be relieved of our medals forever, though he at least would be compensated. The irony could not have been more timely or mocking. It momentarily crossed my mind to put in a bid for his, adding a whacky provenance some future bidder might appreciate.

Not long before this manuscript was ready for publication I decided my former medal room looked tired, and surely some of those old papers were merely fire hazards waiting to be thrown out. With the quiet determination of someone rearranging a deceased person’s room, I emptied ‘the medal box’ first, took fifteen minutes to separate disposable papers from keepers, and pocketed the orphaned chain, and that was that. Then I tackled an adjacent box containing a slurry of merchandising carry bags — relics from past club presentation nights.

Tipping the box upside down, I heard a clunk from within those spilling carry bags hit the floorboards. I didn’t dare hope, but, in the third bag I inspected, there was the medal, still in its crypt. Holding it, I stared and stared: this was as much face time as we’d accumulated in years.

Obviously I’d dropped it in the wrong box in my rush to get back to the championships on that night several years ago — I would also have been the official starter. Or perhaps it’d missed its intended target by millimetres. And maybe I’d noticed this and intended to correct things later, only to forget after the inevitable round of post-club socialising. And what about the chain? I’d likely left it behind deliberately, worried that children would catch their fingers when the medal was passed around, and I hadn’t wanted it dropped.

Having my recent capitulation so suddenly reversed was invigorating; invigorating is a scarce descriptor after sixty. I displayed the medal beside my desktop computer, where I worked on this book for the next few hours (the intention of tidying the room was put aside for later). The stoic resignation that had sustained me for those months was now replaced by a genuinely surreal experience: belief teased by near-disbelief, keened by an almost unhinged happiness. I now wondered how my medal’s Swedish counterpart had fared in its Swiss auction, and discovered it had been passed in. Wow — two medals in another tight finish, was how I saw it.

But mine now loomed as a kind of mystery toy, almost a talisman, as I gazed and typed and gazed. The last time objects held this power over me — to toss me between the real and unreal — was in Rocky: and there were two. The first was fire. Was fire an object? When my toy wagon trains, fittingly made from matchboxes with pins for axles, were circled by toy Indians who shot flame-tipped arrows (my mother’s cigarette lighters sufficed), it struck me one day that those toy flames now reducing the wagons to carbon could also burn a real house down, not that I entertained this prospect. Soon after, when I inadvertently expanded my fire-toy adventures to the confined space between our trucker-neighbours’ 1000-gallon diesel tank and its diesel-smelling dirt beneath, I found myself spontaneously launched yards away: Mr Cox had furiously grabbed my collar to wrench us both from the threat of a life-sized doom.

The other intersection of symbol and reality had been my Rockhampton God medal. For most of my life, the episode had been a religious mystery I was happy to entertain, having been raised Catholic (though by a lapsed mother, daughter of a churchgoing one). For decades I agnostically entertained this suspension of disbelief because I had no other answer, and always so vividly recalled the medal in its flip box on our neighbours’ lawn, along with their daughters’ unhinged insistence on its divinity. It was oval and silver, likely a St Christopher. Only when I talked the incident over with my mother shortly before her death in 2013 would I fully rationalise it. ‘Ah yes,’ she recalled, ‘those neighbours did have a reputation for throwing little white “God medal” boxes down for local kids; I think their own children fell for it too, but your father put you straight.’

When I couldn’t bring myself to return my Olympic medal to its old storage room — I had the ridiculous sense I’d let it down — I took it back to our farm and placed it in a bathroom drawer, where it stayed for several days. Again I wondered about its safe keeping, though here we had two guard dogs, not one: large box-headed mutts that made their presence known at the gate when cars or strangers loitered. So I drove the medal to work and back for several days while it stayed under my seat. I locked the car if I pulled up even for a minute, but still experienced an anxious moment when I returned to reach down into that well. And now of course I saw the idiocy of all this and regained my trust in its old hiding place at the pool. And that’s where it is now, back with its Newtonian minder. Finally, I knew all this concern had come not just from a shock of personal dispossession, but also from a sense of archival failure: I had misplaced a cornerstone of recent Olympic history.

The only other time I felt my gold medal might have been lost was in 1992 when I took a phone call from a man wanting to be its next owner. It was Rick DeMont, my disqualified Munich nemesis. Two decades on, he was calling to say he’d just successfully sued the US Olympic Committee for ‘its part’ in his disqualification, and would now take his long-simmering grievance to the IOC. His tone was cheerful, with its solicitously musical West Coast lilt. ‘Well, hi, Brad,’ he’d started. I’d been forewarned about the call by my old friend Peter Montgomery from the Australian Olympic Committee, so I wasn’t surprised. In fact, DeMont had twice previously sought redress from the IOC, only to be knocked back, partly because his ephedrine positive had been deemed too high to cast even the most optimistic doubt on the original ruling. But his recently successful suit against the USOC did not rest on the margin of his positive. (A defence witness, former IOC vice-president and US Olympic delegate Anita DeFrantz, had testified that DeMont’s ephedrine reading had been ‘off the scale’, only to be robustly accused of libel by his new legal team.) Instead, his USOC case centred on the claim that his team management in Munich had failed its duty of care by not declaring his use of an ephedrine-based medicine. It now seemed this same lawyered-up angle was DeMont’s best chance yet of twisting the IOC’s arm.

By the end of his phone call, DeMont had clarified that it wasn’t my medal he was after, after all. ‘You would keep yours,’ he forecast, while he himself would receive ‘a twin’ (a worryingly portentous choice of words, since the reverse side of Munich medals was a relief image of the mythological twins Castor and Pollux, famously sired by different fathers, one of them Zeus). This might have seemed a just outcome to some, but not to me. I was mean-spirited enough to still resent some of the press treatment I’d received after our race, though this of course was no fault of DeMont’s. I didn’t see him as a twin winner, but as the legitimate winner of a category that didn’t yet exist, the problematic category of fit, elite sportsmen unwell enough to require dubious medicines. The reported one-million-dollar-plus payout from his USOC suit was compensation enough, surely, I thought, if that’s what he felt he deserved. Sporting officialdom had made the rules allowing stimulants, so it seemed proper for the system to bear that cost too.

Our conversation couldn’t have been more stilted if we’d suspected we were being taped. The frequent pauses made me wonder if DeMont’s team was hoping I’d fill them in by endorsing his quest; maybe they felt my blessings would be a good closer when they fronted the IOC board. But then, my mind was in overdrive.

Oddly, it was another eight years before his case reached the IOC, when, as in the past, there proved no basis for review and it was rejected.

At this point in my life, my wife and I were experiencing that ‘happy valley’ time with our family — the decade or so when you are so busy with life and your young children’s promise that the world seems eternally at your collective feet. DeMont’s challenge didn’t cost me any sleep; it was a time when I couldn’t have been further from my medal, in figurative terms. When a reporter rang for my response to the IOC rebuff, I was so disengaged that I was shocked to hear myself commenting on something novel I’d noticed in DeMont’s response (‘Dang, I’m sure disappointed,’ he’d told AAP): I’d found myself more interested in noting that Americans still actually used ‘dang’, which I’d last heard in my childhood Huckleberry Finn–cartoon days.

Shortly after my editor asked me to write this post-Munich section from my present circumstance, I wondered about my ability to do it. It seemed that soon after Munich, my retention of key conversations — the spark which had ignited so much prior material — began to fade. It took me a while to work out the reason, until I remembered how leisurely I’d suddenly felt back then. Disengaged might be another word; sluggish yet another — it was a process, perhaps of self-debriefing. Before Munich, life seemed an act of constant desperation. I hung on people’s words, was desperate to please Ashley, my coaches, myself. Every conversation, every exchange, seemed for life-changing stakes. I hadn’t been the most pious of athletes, but there wasn’t a week when I didn’t experience some fillip or crisis to remind me of the stakes I was training for. But after Munich I’d felt so relieved that I seemed no longer obliged to ‘take notes’, was no longer on the lookout. Even eventual employment, marriage, and raising children came with this new complacency, though none of it without consideration or effort. From that point on, even songs began to lose their spell, songs which had once been my measure of passing events. (Could you be exposed to too much music? I wondered.) New artists emerged ever more frequently — or seemed to — along with a seeming cascade of new genre variants like glam, progressive, new romantic, punk, rockabilly, and eventually a dozen others. I even lost whatever sentiment had made me support certain footy teams. There no longer seemed any clear geographical or demographic link between a club’s ‘playing staff’ and parochial pride.

I told my editor that writing about my post-Munich life fatigued me more quickly than the earlier material. Would I have the temperament to write with the kind of adult reflection she wanted? The truth was also that I’d never been one for reflection, unless you counted nostalgia, and what I had learned was that I was a fairly impressionable, impulsive, and at times facile person. It had been relatively simple to write the voice of an adolescent — often the carping of teen recalcitrance. I told her that the story of my adult life would be essentially the same as every other Australian married with children, and readers could get enough of that at home: hardly fire-breathing stuff!

‘That’s okay,’ she replied. ‘But still, any reflection would be great,’ came the laconic reassurance.

Something I felt might answer her request was to find what DeMont was up to these days. Surely this would be expected of me, though I had little personal motivation to do so. Knowing he was a coach, I googled away and was soon viewing a US university coaching website which provided brief bios on staff, with a page or so for DeMont. Therein was the expected reference to his Munich drama, yet it was only the last line that should have sent a slight chill up my spine: ‘I will never stop trying to get my Gold medal back.’ But really, I didn’t care, and I didn’t blame him. (I was far more interested in whether the plastic farm animals I interred at a Gold Coast caravan park half a century ago were still there — the caravan park was — and I’d never done anything about that!)

I’d long since satisfied myself that under all the jingoistic media sabre-rattling associated with our Olympic history, DeMont could be extraordinarily gracious. Yes, he’d hung on to his Munich gold until its surrender was made a precondition for his attendance at the following year’s inaugural world swimming championships in Yugoslavia, but this was also where I would find him a real sportsman. I’d been shocked in the days before those championships to discover the press writing up a storm for our anticipated clash, billing it as an Olympic rematch. American media had apparently never let up on the ‘we wuz robbed’ angle of DeMont’s Munich experience, and Belgrade was to be justice served. Even DeMont’s coach joined the fray, with the quotes, ‘I’ve never seen anyone train as hard these past six months,’ then, evidently for colour, ‘It was the first time I’d seen a swimmer throw up in training and keep going.’ DeMont had obviously dropped the ephedrine-based Marax he’d used in Munich for another medication based on ‘caffeine metabolites’. I wasn’t sure what they were, but the bottom line was that they forced the bronchi to stay wide open.

The 400-metre final itself was another close thing, but in the final lap DeMont had more in the tank and won by half a second; we’d both beaten our Munich times and gone comfortably under the then-fabled four-minute mark. On the victory dais when American photographers were falling over themselves to capture their redemption cliches, one kept barking at me to raise DeMont’s arm. Instructions heeded, I fished for the victor’s wrist but he wrenched it away, muttering, ‘Don’t do it, Brad, they just want a Munich revenge shot.’

And suddenly it seemed an honour to have come second.

Three years later, the swimmer who’d come off second-best in Munich’s other electronic timing controversy, the American Tim McKee, would also have a redemption of sorts.

After he’d lost the Munich 400-metre medley final to Gunnar Larsson by two thousandths of a second, the IOC voted to alter the future minimum timing increment to one hundredth. In other words, McKee had lost the only Olympic swimming gold medal able to be decided by mere thousandths; surely an argument, if ever there was one, to revise an Olympic outcome, though to my knowledge this has never been mooted. (My mere one-hundredth-of-a-second margin, on the other hand, continues its pesky Olympic duties — the most recent notable example being Australian James Magnussen’s one-hundredth-of-a-second loss to American Nathan Adrian for the 2012 London 100-metre freestyle gold.)

McKee’s experience was sufficiently crushing for him to briefly retire after Munich, but he rallied and fought his way back into the US team for another crack at gold in Montreal. He finished second again, this time by the arguably less-problematic margin of almost an entire second, despite having bettered his Munich time by some six seconds.