Forget the gold medals – Australians are not very good at swimming

I’ve spent the past two weeks reading about how our Olympic athletes, especially our swimmers, are role models. Sure, role models for a small bunch of folks who want to train upwards of a zillion hours a week and can work brilliantly under pressure.

But if they were role models, we wouldn’t have hundreds of drownings a year (and many near misses). We wouldn’t have millions of adults who describe themselves as poor swimmers or as non-swimmers.

Australia’s gold medal-winning women’s 4x200m relay team: Lani Pallister, Ariarne Titmus, Brianna Throssell and Mollie O’Callaghan.Credit: Digitally altered Getty Image

Our sport spending priorities are borked, and I’m writing this as a person who LOVES the Olympics. I’m as much a fan of winning as the next couch vegetable. But we need athletes to do more than win.

Kevin Norton, professor of sport and exercise science at UNSW, first wrote about the cost of gold medals in 2000. Back then, we were spending about $37 million for each gold. He estimates it’s double that now.

Sure, Norton says, the Olympics are about national pride. Makes everyone feel jolly. And athletes do go to schools to do a bit of meet and greet. But does athletic success in the Olympics inspire us to learn to swim, to participate? Short answer: “It does nothing. It is not going to get people off the couch.”

So athletes need to do what the rest of us do. We need athletes to perform an entirely different service. Sure, we love to watch them win. But they could also create a nation of people who can survive in a rip or in a river or in the deep end.

So I have a modest proposal, especially for the Dolphins, our national swimming team. For every million dollars Australians spent on you getting your medal, you become ambassadors for swimming.

Who is pouring the many millions of dollars into making sure we don’t drown?Credit: Peter Morris

I’m not the only one who thinks this way. Daryl Adair, associate professor of sport management at the University of Technology Sydney, says swimming is a vital part of Australian culture. It’s a shame so many of us can’t do it.

“The sport role model narrative is really about accomplishments, but role models need to be broader than that,” he says.

We know Gina Rinehart pours millions of dollars into funding elite swimmers. But who is pouring the many millions of dollars into making sure we don’t drown? “It’s one thing to cheer on our swimmers, but we need to do something about the drowning rates in this country,” says Adair.

Shane Gould (the one true queen of Australian swimming) estimates we spend about nine bucks on each kid learning to swim. “What’s that paying for?” she asks. “The bus to take them to the pool?”

The Gina Rinehart boat party for Australia’s Olympic swimming team.Credit: Fairfax

So you Titmuses and McKeowns and McKeons and McEvoys and O’Callaghans and Harrises – get out there and tell kids how important it is. Every single athlete who benefits from our elite programs should give back to the grassroots.

Go to their swimming lessons and splash around with them. Play with them. Pop your head underwater and encourage them to do the same. Blow bubbles. Let their swimming instructors be your equal in the pool. Let the kids touch your gold medal if you think that helps.

But I’m not interested in them swimming like Dolphins. I’m looking for plain, mutt-ugly dog paddle. A bit of treading water. Some floating. The ability to keep going and keep on going. The ability to survive.

We are a nation girt by sea but most of us can’t swim effectively. Or we can swim effectively only in a 50-metre swimming pool patrolled by lifeguards with eagle eyes. We can’t do the things which make us safe in the water. On average, 279 people drown each year in this country. And about one-quarter of us say we can’t swim at all.

I’ve written before about how I only learnt to swim when I turned 60. That was partly because I hate failure, partly because I loathe putting my nose in the water. And partly because my parents didn’t think it was important. Sure, I watched Shane Gould, who is the same age as me and also a late onset PhD, absolutely nail it at the 1972 Games when she was just 15. I would have loved to have been her, except for my fear of swimming.

Gould and her husband, Milton Nelms, interrupt each other and finish each other’s sentences, all in the cause of getting Australians to be better swimmers. It is completely delightful.

He’s all about knowing the environment of water and understanding it can be pleasurable (I’m not at this stage yet). Gould says the way we teach swimming can be traumatising. That whole dunking kids in the water is not the right way to go about it.

She says that even when you get your proficiency certificate at the end of primary school, don’t trust it. You have to keep practising. Gould says there is a lot of pressure on swimming teachers by parents who can’t afford those expensive swimming lessons.

We could and should have free grassroots swimming classes for every kid in the country (and the adults who can’t swim, too). I don’t want to hand back all those gold medals. But for every Dolphin, we could have an entire school of swimmers.

Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist for this masthead.

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