Mark Stockwell wants skin in Olympic Games

Swimming great Mark Stockwell will call for a ‘participation revolution’ in Australian sport as he bids to fill the supersized shoes of outgoing AOC boss John Coates.

Olympic swimming great Mark Stockwell, in Brisbane on Friday, is launching an ‘outsider’ bid for the AOC leadership. Picture: Glenn Hunt

Swimming great Mark Stockwell will call for a “participation revolution” in Australian sport in an audacious bid to fill the supersized shoes of outgoing Australian Olympic Committee boss John Coates.

In a quieter but no less willing sideline to the federal election contest between Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, the three-time Olympic medallist is running for president of the AOC to set the stage for the 2032 Games in his home town of Brisbane.

While he is carrying a few extra kilos on his prime in the pool anchoring the famed Mean Machine relay team, Stockwell, 58, wants to leverage his experience as an Olympian and sports administrator with a proven track record in business to “reimagine” sport in Australia.

His opponent, Ian Chesterman, is Mr Coates’s long-serving deputy and well-credentialled chef de mission of the Australian team that tasted success at last year’s Tokyo Olympics. He represents the establishment choice.

Stockwell is the professed outsider who will shake things up if he is elected on April 30 to succeed the legendary Mr Coates, 71, whose three decades at the helm delivered the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and now the prize of the Brisbane Games.

The campaign to win over the 97 voting delegates is in full swing, with Stockwell on Saturday launching an online manifesto of his plans for the AOC.

He warned that “green and gold” Olympic pursuits were losing ground and talent to the cashed-up professional sports headed by AFL, rugby league and cricket.

“We are becoming a country of consumers and watchers of sport as opposed to a country of participants in sport and that’s why I say we need a participation revolution,” Stockwell told The Weekend Australian.

“What I want to do is use the Olympic brand, the Olympic rings, to market to mums and dads our suite of 52 Olympic sports and say: ‘This is what we stand for, this is our aspiration for a better person, a better country, a better world – something that is worth more than money’.”

The Olympics should be a vehicle to “heal the nation” and promote Indigenous reconciliation, he said. And the AOC had to learn from the past to ensure the legacy of the Brisbane Olympics was “widespread and long-lasting”.

“I want us to better use our influence to lead the reimagining of how sport is delivered in this country – not just for greater Olympic success, but for better health, education, social inclusion, productivity and economic outcomes,” Stockwell said.

If elected, he would lift the level of the AOC’s engagement with the individual Olympic sports federations, ranging from swimming, athletics and cycling to the minnows such as taekwondo.

Stockwell, second from right, in the Mean Machine in 1984.

Would he be more collegiate than the commanding Mr Coates? “You might make that conclusion,” Stockwell said carefully. “John’s been there for a long time. I am not necessarily critical, I am just saying I would provide new and different leadership.”

After winning his three Olympic medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Games – an achingly close silver in the 100m men’s freestyle and runner-up again in the 4x100m freestyle with Mean Machine members Greg Fasala, Neil Brooks and Michael Delany, rounded out by bronze in the 4x100m medley relay – Stockwell married champion US swimmer Tracy Caulkins, who moved to Brisbane to raise five children with him.

He went into the business established by his parents and helped build it into a multimillion-dollar property development concern. In between, he held board positions on the Australian Sports Commission and Australian Institute of Sport, headed the Property Council of Australia and was founding chair of Trade and Investment Queensland, the state’s international business agency.

Caulkins, a triple Olympic gold medallist, is president of Swimming Australia and has been nominated by the Prime Minister to join the board of the Brisbane Olympic Games Organising Committee. Stockwell is already facing questions about a potential conflict of interest if he beats Mr Chesterman for the AOC job.

“Depending on the outcome of the election, I will need to sit down with Tracy and have a real good think about that one,” he said.

One of his few career disappointments was to be sacked in 2012 as chair of the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games organising committee by newly elected Queensland premier Campbell Newman, having led the bid for the 2018 event.

Stockwell had backed a purpose-built aquatic centre on the Broadwater at Southport, not the temporary venue that ended up hosting the swimming. He is unrepentant. Had the permanent facility been built, it would have been an asset to the sport and local community as well as HQ for the Olympic swimming in 2032, he insisted. “Sometimes you can sit there thinking that having a temporary option is a lot cheaper, when in actual fact you would save money by putting in something long term,” he said.

Instead, the plan is to stage the Olympic swimming in a new, $2bn Brisbane Live multiuse entertainment centre above the existing Roma St railway station downtown, a project that fails to convince the developer in Stockwell.

“I’m saying let’s have Brisbane Live but let’s not necessarily build it over four sets of railway lines. We’ve got to have a discussion about this … there are other options that we haven’t looked at yet and I want to make sure we review what are the best options.”

As for the challenge of taking over from Mr Coates, Stockwell said: “I’ve got big feet.”