The Murray Cods: Battler spirit powered an Olympics dream

When it comes to sport’s folklore, the Cods did the equivalent of a country town team winning the AFL flag.

Faye Eaton with Wayne Groom and Carolyn Bilsborow. Picture: Kelly Barnes

When it comes to underdog sporting folklore, the Cods did what would be the equivalent of a country town team entering the AFL and winning the flag.

A new documentary, Paris or the Bush: The Story of the Cods, tells of nine working-class men from riverside Murray Bridge, 75km east of Ade­l­aide, their domination of Australian rowing from 1913 to 1924 and their journey to the Paris Olympics.

It will air this week at the spirit­ual home of rowing in London — the Leander Club on the Thames — and on Foxtel’s History Channel on Anzac Day.

Faye Eaton, the grand-daught­er of the crew’s stroke, Bill Sladden­, said her pa rarely spoke about the Olympics and the lengths taken to get to Paris.

“We knew but we didn’t make a big deal of it — he wasn’t a bragging sort of a person,” she said.

“He kept an interest in the local rowing team and he continued to row until his 70s.”

The team of Murray Bridge railway and riverboat men came to national prominence in 1913, when they qualified for the nat­ional championships by beating local rivals by more than 200m.

The crew then beat their more fancied interstate private club rivals­ to win the national championships, but split when most went to fight in World War I.

Filmmaker Wayne Groom, who spent years working on the documentary with University of South Australia researcher Carolyn Bilsborow, said one crew member was killed in the war and another injured at Gallipoli.

The crew reformed in 1920 with two new members and won national titles that year and in 1922 and 1923, with crew members aged between 39 and 41.

“They were working-class champions in an elite, private-school sport,” Groom said. “What they did was (like) Murray Bridge entering a team in the AFL and winning the premiership.”

After the men earned the right to compete in Paris, the Australian Olympic Committee did not think they should represent their country and tried to prevent their selection by holding a test run in Adelaide’s Port River.

They won that easily but the AOC then refused to fund their travel to Paris.

Within a month, the state ­rallied to their cause and raised £4000 to get them to France.

Groom said the ship took eight weeks to arrive and, after a trial race on one side of Paris, the men could not afford to send their boat across the city to the Olympic course. Instead, they rowed it 30km across the city.

Exhausted from their efforts, and after a bout of dysentery, the crew lost their first Olympic heat to Italy and bowed out to eventual silver medallists Canada in the repechage.

“It was Murray Bridge versus Italy, France, the US and Canada — it was an extraordinary event,” Groom said.

“They didn’t win a gold medal but they won the Olympic spirit.”

The documentary also shows footage unearthed during research of the crew rowing in ­Ireland after the Olympics.