Palfrey backed a rival swimmer. Now he must pack up his goggles and go

When Australian swim coach Michael Palfrey called out “go Korea” at the end of an extracurricular poolside interview on Tuesday, he might have thought he was waving. He wasn’t; he was drowning. Swimming Australia has no choice now but to pull him out of the pool and cut him loose.

It’s perverse that Palfrey has not already been moved on – although he has now been cleared by Australia’s chef de mission Anna Meares to stay in his role for the Games – if for no other reason than to smooth the waters inside the Australian camp. It’s unfathomable that he had the effrontery still to be on the pool deck with the Australians on Wednesday. It’s weird that he is sharing a room with Damien Jones, a coach who on Saturday will be a rival in the first gold medal swimming race of the Paris Olympics.

Michael Palfrey says he hopes South Korean swimmer Kim Woo-min wins gold – even though he is rivalling two Australians on night one.

Historically, the Australian swim team has always been a team within a team, with its own traditions and historiography, almost a cult, and mostly it has worked for the good.

But the thread that keeps them tight could also be their undoing if pinged, like a hamstring.

And Palfrey’s bizarre behaviour twangs. You could hear it in Meares’ carefully chosen words on Thursday as she talked about having a mind only for the wellbeing of the athletes and the paramountcy of not disrupting their preparations.

OK, it’s swimming, not geopolitics. No one’s drowning out there. But the 400m free is a blue riband event, long prized by Australia, and it is reasonable to expect that Australia’s resources at Olympics are directed exclusively at Australians.

The Australian swim team: tightknit. Credit: Eddie Jim

For Palfrey to have charges in it from rival countries is akin to coaching both sides in a grand final, or Australia and England simultaneously in the Ashes. It’s understandable that he coached some of the Koreans in Australia until recently. Such out-of-competition cooperation is not unusual in international sport, which is all the better for it.

But in the precede to an Olympic Games, a line must be drawn and from all accounts was. For Palfrey not only to cross it, but flaunt it by declaring for South Korea was at very least what both the AOC and Meares both called a “serious error of judgement”.

Evidently, Swimming Australia was blindsided both by Palfrey’s ongoing involvement with Korea’s Kim Woo-min and by his exclamation. It leaves Palfrey without a leg with which to tread water.

In the grand scheme of things, Palfrey’s double-dealing does not amount to treason. But it is at very least odd. What is it with swimming people, that it throws up such oddballs? As a keen recreational swimmer, this column asks the question advisedly. Is it the long, odd hours, all those dark early mornings? Is it the single-mindedness? Is it the tyranny of the black line? Is it that chlorine?

Were Palfrey’s ears so blocked that he was tone-deaf?

It won’t do to lump all swimmers and ancillaries in the same, well, pool. In the pantheon of Australian Olympic heroes, swimmers loom large. But never far away from them are eccentric coaches. Think from the last Olympics the most innocent of their type, Dean Boxall, the dervish who coaches Ariarne Titmus.

At least his nuttiness was deployed unambiguously for the greater glory of an Australian swimmer. Palfrey somehow thought he could straddle the lane rope. Don’t try it at your local pool, let alone the Olympics.

Meares said Palfrey was remorseful. That’s the least he should be. The decent thing for SA to do now would be to give him a life vest. But it cannot give him a lifeline.

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