Leisel Jones backs Rohan Taylor to take Dolphins to new heights

Olympic gold medallist Leisel Jones has been pushing Rohan Taylor to step up as Australia’s head swim coach for some time.

Swimming Australia’s new head coach Rohan Taylor. Picture: Aaron Francis

When Rohan Taylor was announced as the Australian swim team’s new Olympic head coach on Wednesday, replacing Jacco Verhaeren, there was almost an “I told you so” to be heard from triple Olympic gold medallist Leisel Jones.

Jones, to be sure, had been mightily impressed with Verhaeren, describing his seven years in the head coaching role as “brilliant”. But when he was caught between a rock and a hard place following the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics from this year until July 2021, having already made plans with his family to move back to his native Holland after completing his stint with Australia, it seemed to Jones that Swimming Australia chose the ideal person as his replacement.

“I’ve told him for a long time that he would be the perfect person for the position and he has always brushed it off but he’s got all the attributes of a great head coach,” Jones told The Australian.

“He is really knowledgeable, he’s really personable, he loves the athletes, he knows what makes a great athlete and he thinks outside the box. I couldn’t think of a better person to be honest.”

It is a little difficult for Jones to be entirely independent where Taylor is concerned, given that he coached her to the only individual Olympic gold medal of her career, in the 100m breaststroke at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. But in a way, that has given her insight into the way Taylor brings out the best from his swimmers.

“With Rohan, I don’t know how he does it but he just knows the right buttons to push for every person,” she said.

“What is going to work for one person may not work for the next person but he knows that and understands that, he can see that in people and he uses that in a way that motivates those people. That’s a real skill, that’s very hard and it takes a long time to develop.”

Taylor had 18 months to work with Jones following her surprise decision to quit Stephan Widmer’s squad, based at the Valley Pool in Brisbane, and move down to Melbourne.

Leisel Jones pictured with her coach Rohan Taylor at Aqua Arena in Doncaster in 2007.

Disappointed as she had been with her performances at the 2004 Athens Games, Jones still had won her first Olympic gold as a member of the medley relay team so there were raised eyebrows across the Australian sporting landscape at her decision to head to Melbourne, not for purely swimming reasons but to spend more time with her boyfriend at the time, an AFL footballer.

Jones doesn’t have any stirring tales of her new coach coming up with some masterstroke piece of motivation on the day that swept her to the 100m breaststroke gold in the Chinese capital. Indeed, Taylor’s gift to her that day was to have full faith in her own ability to execute the race plan they had refined. But where he worked his real magic was in that training lead-up.

“Before Beijing, Rohan and I only had 18 months so it was a very limited time to develop a working relationship, to develop trust, to develop all those things that are required between an athlete and a coach. ”

Through her career, Jones competed under some brilliant head coaches and some utter tyrants. Sometimes they were one and the same. Certainly she has nothing but praise for “Ming the Merciless”, Don Talbot, and was with him in Fukuoka when he achieved his life’s ambition of beating the United States at the 2001 world championships.

Like Talbot, Taylor is also heavily influenced by the US college system and all the more determined to beat them as a result. Despite being born in Melbourne, he still retains the twang of a childhood spent in San Jose, where he spent four years training under the legendary Jonty Skinner, coach of the US national team.

“Don Talbot, he had a very different style of leadership,” said Jones. “Full respect to him. He was a brilliant head coach but Rohan brings a very unique style because he has grown up in that US college system and learned how to be a great coach. I think that is a great attribute to have.”