My one meeting with former athletics golden girl Betty Cuthbert – at the 1972 Munich Olympics – left me with mixed emotions.
Still only 17 myself, and in the peak of swimming fitness, I was completely taken with her unpretentious charm and impish candour. Yet I was left saddened and unnerved to find her in a wheelchair on that day. She’d recently been diagnosed with MS and was hard pressed to stay on her feet for long.
How could this be, I remember asking myself, when only one Olympics separated the end of her career from mine? Was it possible there was some Faustian price to pay for all that glory and youthful triumphalism? Or was there a scientific clue pointing to years of training grind?
My father’s generation routinely referred to MS as ‘the athlete’s disease’, so I’d also been primed for such maudlin speculation by a science-geek schoolmate’s regular taunting that all highly repetitious exercise ‘fried’ motor neurons – whatever that meant!
As the years went by I came to accept that bad things could indeed happen to good people for no reason at all, and bad health could insidiously strike down seemingly bombproof constitutions. It seemed as if health was as unpredictable as fate’s other franchises like wealth, happiness and longevity.
When it comes to swimming, quite possibly the exemplar of high-repetition training, many catch-phrases have been coined for the downside of the quotidian laps needed for success. One that comes easily to mind is ‘black line fever’. Observers are also quick to point out the stark paradox of swimmers training enough kilometres to circumnavigate the globe, while travelling no further than 50 metres.
It poses the question of a disconnect between swimming’s claims of furthering young people’s lives while chaining life experience to a radius of 25 metres in their most vital decades. I’m not suggesting laps between Australia and New Zealand as an antidote, but does a highly constrained lifestyle have implications on swimmers’ capacity for a more vernacular response to life’s later, more nuanced ‘speed bumps’?
Having said that, I am aware that recluses and hermits can live to a ripe old age in confines considered inhumane for a dog. But those privations are usually the considered choice of an adult mind.
Yet I am also suspicious of easy explanations for the recent spate of maladies afflicting our great and lesser stars of the pool. There have always been examples of post-career swimmers behaving like fish out of water for reasons which may be pathological, rather than environmental.
My own favourite ‘one-size fits all’ explanation however, to account for the current crop, is the relative loss of esteem they must experience whenever it is pointed out that they earn less than many hundreds of professional footy players. Footballers are paid for what they do well, while swimmers on the other hand – and only the very best of them – have a short ‘use-by’ marketable period in which they must convince sponsors they can personify all kinds of inane advertising cliches. Dancing bear syndrome!
The combination of media predation and a frantic search for post-swimming interests to replicate the cocktail of daily hormonal and career highs can be a hard ask. I repeat here my previous assertion that our international ‘premiership grade’ swim team should be tenured with an annual salary equivalent to a premiership footy side.
Even $200,000 per annum for our ten best swimmers should not be considered excessive compensation. They might even extend their careers for such lucre – giving them more time to navigate a post-career existence, or post-existence career as some have caustically quipped.
Imagine the whoops of joy coming from the clutch of on-the-cusp 17 and 18 year olds about to penetrate that stratosphere! The motivation benefits alone would compensate for an axing of any ‘deadwood’ admin jobs to pay for such a scheme – jobs which are currently thought necessary to keep our swimmers on their toes for the next Olympics.
Olympic sport was once all about glory and then the good grace to retire and shut up. But that was when the media hadn’t woken up to its consumers’ insatiable hunger for personality-based news coverage, and was guided by an arcane decency which will never be seen again.
What’s your best bet? For great odds on all your favourite sports check out PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.
It’s a pretty good time to be a Tasmanian sports fan right now. After years in the sporting wilderness with not much to celebrate,…
Olympic swimming legend and Australian Sports Commission boss Kieren Perkins has warned that "someone will die" if a multi-sport event that allows athletes to…
In 2015 when heavyweight boxer Tyson Fury beat Wladimir Klitschko, the fighter regarded by many as the ‘Greatest of all time’ in the sport,…
Join Australia's most vibrant online sports community and you have the chance to win $1000. The Roar is the perfect blend of sports reporting,…
Here is a review of our boxers who made a splash in the world rankings over the past year.
After intense debate at Roar HQ, we’ve selected the 23 most controversial moments for 2023.
