Controversial swimmer Nick D’Arcy is an albatross around the neck of the Australian Olympic Committee and will derail any chance they have of enjoying a happy, good news London Olympics.
Have you been reading about the Olympics in the past few weeks? Great! Then you would have heard some terrific news!
Was it tall, tanned, well spoken, good looking and impossibly talented young sailor Tom Slingsby? Last weekend he dominated a key pre-Olympic lead up race in his event, the Laser Radial. No?
Was it Sam Willoughby. This tall, tanned, well spoken, good looking and astonishingly talented young BMX rider crushed the competition to win a thrilling World Championships, a key pre-Olympic lead up event. No?
Then it must have been Sally Pearson. Tall, Tanned, well spoken, good looking and amazingly talented, she has barely lost a race since her shock silver medal in Beijing and is as close to a sure thing as Australia has.
Let’s not kid ourselves, you have been reading and talking about Nick D’Arcy and the huge blow up over his gun photos with teammate Kenrick Monk. You may have thought it was disgusting, or you may have felt it was just a couple of young blokes having a photo and nothing to get worked up about.
Regardless of what you thought, you will get many, many more chances to make judgements about Mr D’Arcy in the next two months.
There is an enormous block of Australians who are sickened that this sneaky, unrepentant criminal will be wearing green and gold in August and possibly winning a medal, while our anthem is played.
At the same time, there is decent block who feel he just stood up against a pest who is now crying like a wuss and should toughen up.
Just like the incessant blathering on this website about the NRL and AFL, neither side is interested in listening to the other and masochistically seeks every opportunity to screech at each other.
Any time there is a story on him, people read it or watch it. And if there is one thing the print and TV media want to do, it is to get more eyeballs on their product. The more eyeballs, the more they can charge to advertise to them.
For the AOC, this is a nightmare. Any good news stories they have about talented, young athletes preparing for the games, or even doing well at the games, will be completely drowned out by the outcry when D’Arcy appears in a tracksuit with the pants too low.
Not that you feel too sorry for them, they have had four years to work out what to do with Nick D’Arcy and have ended up sticking their head in the sand and hoping he would go away.
This situation is also a result of the change in conditions for elite Olympic athletes
A generation ago, Olympic athletes could not afford to train full time. Dean Lukin was a fisherman/weightlifting gold medallist. Steve Moneghetti would teach maths at a Ballarat High School before thundering around the local bush trails.
D’Arcy has a job too. He gets up, trains, eats, visits LA gun shops and goes to bed.
Previously, there was a real sense of appreciation for the sacrifice these athletes were making. They were working, cooking, commuting, living a life just like us, but while we collapsed on the couch with ice cream watching rubbish TV at the end of the day, that was the point they started training.
While there will be many athletes in London still in this same boat, we now have a new class of professional Olympic athletes. We pay them to attend elite sporting academies where they train. Train incredibly hard mind you, but it changes the dynamic in our minds.
They are winning more gold medals then we did back then, but the public has less admiration for their sacrifice and has started to place upon them more expectations.
Regardless, the Australian Olympic Committee spends three and half years out of every four in virtual anonymity, with one brief glorious period of enormous public interest to capitalise on.
Unfortunately for them, most of this will now be Nick D’Arcy, crooked weightlifters, mutinous rowers and (as usual) ridiculously harsh athletics and triathlon selections.
The big losers? Our quiet, uncontroversial and quite brilliant champions like Tom Slingsby, Sam Willougby and Sally Person.
Christo
Guest
Questions must surely arise as to whether the IOC and the AOC have tarnished their own reputations and history by failing to uphold olympic values. The Olympic Charter, Chapter 5. II Eligibility Code, states that to be eligible a competitor must "respect the spirit of fair play and non violence, and behave accordingly.” Nick D’Arcy was convicted in a criminal court for assault and given a 14-month suspended jail sentence, i.e. a criminal court found D’Arcy violated ‘the spirit of...non violence’ through his violent actions. He was rightly taken off the Beijing Olympic team. In 2011, D’Arcy was ordered by a civil court to pay Simon Cowley $180,000 in compensation plus costs ($350k+). Later in October D’Arcy filed for bankruptcy; in effect, he brutally assaulted Simon Cowley then sent him back all his bills to nurse his life-long injuries. By any accounts this shows complete disregard for the notion of ‘fair play’. Some might wonder whether the IOC, the AOC, and Swimming Australia have lost sight of the true spirit of the Olympics by allowing this criminal to compete?
Mark Young
Roar Guru
And that's why I will never make it in Journalism Sue! What sort of attention to detail is that!! Thanks for reading!
Brendon
Guest
If D'Arcy wins a gold medal it will be the greatest upset in history of sport. 200 fly is Phelps pet event - the event he swam as a 15 year old at Sydney 2000. Its his baby.
Sue
Guest
Tom does not sail in the Laser Radial ! That is th girls event! He sails a full rig!
Jimbo
Guest
I wouldn't have a problem with forgiving him, if he showed at least some repentance for what he did. Instead of paying Cowley any of the settlement, he declared bankruptcy, and to the best of my knowledge has never apologised for what happened.
bennalong
Guest
I'm with you Big! We now seem to have lost something that Australian's took pride in. .........the ability to forgive a teenager for a transgression, to give him a go. The press is no longer impartial in the way it reports things and it now targets people for special attention and dramatises the situation to promote a constructed reality when the truth is far more mundane, People were slower to judge and more sceptical before 'facebook' and 'twitter' reduced critical faculties and made gossip the currency of the day I hope he causes his critics indigestion by winning gold
KNACKERS
Guest
Australia has all sorts and so should it's sporting teams Maybe it was different where you went to school
Mark Young
Roar Guru
Anytime Eazy E gets mentioned the Day gets better.
Mark Young
Roar Guru
Thanks K77! I think it will be really awkward if Nick wins Gold and he may very well do so. The damage to our Olympic movement will be considerable.
Mark Young
Roar Guru
Thanks Shag, nice website, I enjoyed the names article! Although you are very right, every time I see Cowley's face it scares me. How annoying did he need to be for people to justify that??
Mark Young
Roar Guru
Thanks Peeeko! I mentioned Sam, Sally and Tom being so good looking, because they could all step straight into Home and Away! There isn't a single thing about them which should damage their PR value. Solid Gold. Although it raises an interesting point, does the quality of the personality influence a persons looks? I have always found relatively plain looking Olympians far more attractive then listless social page clingers purely by the quality of their character.
Big Ramifications
Guest
Sneaky? He flipped the twin birds and said "I ain't payin'." I wouldn't even call it scheming. It was straight up, two bullet points, in your face arrangement. "Three hundred and eighty grand, eh? Bankrupt! Thanks for playing." Let's not start using random nasty-sounding adjectives that don't fit. It's becoming a lynch mob. Just a minor quibble, I actually got a chuckle out of that description. I imagined Eazy-E describing his sneaky self in the song Straight Outta Compton. Post 2008 assault, some stories emerged in the mainstream media from ex school mates that he might have had some prior form in the crazy stakes, but what has Nick D'Arcy been like these last four years? Posed with some guns. It was clownshoes who thought it would be a good idea to put the photo on Facebook. • The amped euphoria of just qualifying for the Olympics. • Having a skinful – likely after a period of abstinence[?] so it can really creep up before you know it. • Our hero Cowley, a bigger man, whacks him in the face. • This might have caused D'Arcy to, I dunno, see red. Maybe? • He hits Cowley once in return. • First offence [that made it to court, heh]. • It was four years ago. Clean record since. My reaction is mostly "there but for the grace of God, go youse." Previously, http://www.theroar.com.au/2012/06/11/darcy-dickhead-aoc-surprised/ Dickhead is what dickhead does. Dickheads in team situations get tolerated. They don't become popular. To quote the ass end of a recent story highlighting Cowley's current gripes: "Bohl noted that D'Arcy is very popular with teammates, hard-working and singularly focussed on getting the best out of himself in the pool. The coach also said: "But my view is that he has been punished by Swimming Australia, by the Australian Olympic Committee and the courts. How long do you keep punishing him?" http://www.swimnews.com/news/view/9420 And think of what a tough unit he must be upstairs. He got omitted from an Olympics and a World Champs even though he qualified. Somehow he stuck with it and here he is, four years later, top of the caper. I think of the lengthy roll call of bad boy sportsmen who have squandered second chances, and I know I'm on a hiding to nothing, but to hell with it! I'm on the Nick D'Arcy bandwagon.
k77sujith
Guest
Quite a fun read. Wonder what the response would be if at all Nick wins a gold medal! Thanks.
Purple Shag
Roar Guru
Nice article. This is a pretty amusing spin on the whole thing. Those two gun wielding intellectuals I mean http://therestijustsquandered.com/2012/06/11/youre-looking-at-the-wrong-photo/
peeeko
Roar Guru
one of my favourite paragraphs ever on the roar "Just like the incessant blathering....... yes its a shame that others arent getting coverage but they will as we get closer, still i found it strange that the people that you mentioned had to be good looking, surely that should not be a requirement to get coverage?