Commonwealth Games Flashback: ‘Superfish’ Stephen Holland lucky to make the start in 1974
NINE weeks out from the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, Australia’s star swimmer Stephen Holland couldn’t break an egg let alone a world record.
Comm Games
Don't miss out on the headlines from Comm Games. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Flashback: Kurt Fearnley treasures wheelchair debut in Delhi
- Flashback: Tracey Wickham’s emotional final swim in Brisbane
NINE weeks out from the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, Australia’s star swimmer Stephen Holland couldn’t break an egg let alone a world record.
Holland, who at 15 had revolutionised 1500m distance swimming, cooled down after a training session and discovered his elbow locked at a 90 degree angle.
“It was just one of those things,” he says. “I overtrained, lay down for a snooze before my next session and when I got up my elbow was so stiff I couldn’t bend it.”
Holland and his coach Laurie Lawrence consulted Brisbane doctor Kevin Hobbs who was then a pioneer in the fledgling field of sports medicine.
“He was ahead of his time. Everyone is doing it now but back then sports medicine was a new thing. He treated me so that gradually I could get back in the water just before the Games but in the meantime Laurie had me on the stationary bike every day to keep my fitness up.
“Laurie is not known for his gentle side. He flogged me on that bike. I had blisters on my backside by the time I got to New Zealand.”
The partnership between the Brisbane schoolboy and the eccentric Townsville teacher-swim coach had begun in May 1973, on Holland’s 15th birthday.
It was school holidays and Lawrence was driving through Brisbane on his way to take over Don Talbot’s old swim school in Sydney.
Lawrence had seen Holland in action in races against his own swimmers and spotted his enormous potential. He dropped into the swim school run by Holland’s father Roy, and changed the history of swimming forever.
‘He just told me he’d make me world champion before I was 16 and that I’d be moving with him to Sydney the next day,” Holland recalled. “And that’s exactly what happened.”
Holland trained with Lawrence’s squad throughout the school holidays and made enormous strides under his unorthodox methods.
“He was breaking world records at training,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence had made a study of the training schedules and racing techniques of the world’s best 1500m swimmers and came to the conclusion that they were doing it wrong.
Rather than go out slow and sprint for a short distance at the end, or go out fast and try to hang on, he believed the best way to swim a 1500m was to go out at a fast, steady pace and maintain it for all 30 laps.
In Steve Holland, he found a swimmer capable of doing it — even if the rest of the swimming world thought he was mad.
When he told delegates at a swimming conference in the US that he had a 15-year-old swimmer who would break 15 minutes for the 1500m they laughed at him. Some warned Lawrence he would kill the boy trying.
He set Holland training sets that were considered impossible for the time, and the teenager not only achieved them, but surpassed them.
“Say I’d give him 10x400m sets with a five-minute break in between, he wouldn’t take the five minutes, he’d only rest 4:45 and take off again,” Lawrence said. “I would never call anyone a freak but he had an amazing capacity for endurance work.”
The first-ever World Swimming Championships were scheduled for September 1973 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. The Australian team trials were held at Brisbane’s Valley Pool on August 5.
In front of around 300 people Holland went out and swam 15min 37.8sec, smashing the world record by 14sec, earning world fame and the nickname “Superfish”.
A month later in Belgrade he did it again, this time beating the top Americans, setting another world record and breaking the 800m record along the way.
Unwilling to trust the newfangled underwater buzzer system being used in a major meet for the first time, he even swam an extra two laps for good measure.
Holland returned to Australia a national celebrity. In the days before sports managers and Swimming Australia media departments, it put tremendous pressure on the young schoolboy.
Every time he swam he was expected to break a world record, and gold in the 1500m at the Commonwealth Games was seen as a formality. In fact, Holland was lucky to get there at all.
“If it wasn’t for Dr Hobbs I wouldn’t have been on the plane,” he said. “I was fit from all the cycling, but I hadn’t been able to do the swimming I needed to be in top shape.”
Even so, Holland proved far too strong for the opposition, breaking his own 800m world record but falling short of the 1500m mark.
“It was a good time,” he says. “The Kiwis were very excited. They had a New Zealand swimmer (Mark Treffers) who they said was going to beat me. He was a lap behind me at the end. Maybe he was planning a big finish but he didn’t get the chance to use it.”
Christchurch would be Holland’s last meet with Laurie Lawrence who, with a young family and no money coming in from coaching, was forced to step down.
Weighed down by public expectation and sent out with a different race plan by new coach Bill Sweetenham, Holland finished third at the 1976 Montreal Olympics and retired soon afterwards at the age of 18.
He now runs his own successful oil distribution business (“everything from whipper-snippers to oil tankers”) servicing 1500 clients, and working with his son Joshua and daughters Cate and Nerise.
He and wife Janine also have a beautiful reminder of those 1974 Commonwealth Games in the shape of grandson Alvie.
“About four years ago Joshua brought home his new girlfriend to meet us,” he says. “Her name was Michaeli Hobbs. She said, ‘I think you know my grandfather’.
“I said, ‘not Dr Hobbs?’ She said yes. I couldn’t believe it. Six months ago they had Alvie and they’re getting married in September.
“Small world isn’t it?”
Originally published as Commonwealth Games Flashback: ‘Superfish’ Stephen Holland lucky to make the start in 1974