New coach in at deep end for race to Tokyo

Rohan Taylor has big shoes to fill after taking over as Australian head swimming coach from Jacco Verhaeren.

Rohan Taylor will take over as Swimming Australia's head coach after Jacco Verhaeren announced he was stepping down. Picture: Aaron Francis

Rohan Taylor has big shoes to fill after taking over as Australian head swimming coach from Jacco Verhaeren just 13 months out from the delayed Tokyo Olympics, team leader Cate Campbell assessed. But then again, she said, Taylor does have big feet.

From the moment in March when the Tokyo Games were postponed until July 2021, Verhaeren had a vexing problem. His contract as the first foreigner ever to hold down the head coaching role on the Dolphins, historically the powerhouse team of the Australian Olympic movement, expires in November.

But instead of the Tokyo Games having been run and won by that stage, allowing him to take his leave of Australian swimming and then wend his way back to The Netherlands with his family, they still would be eight months off into the future.

He and Swimming Australia’s chief strategist Alex Baumann batted scenarios back and forth. But Baumann is a dual Olympic champion from Canada and Verhaeren is the multiple Olympic gold medal-winning coach of Dutch aces Pieter van den Hoogenband, Inge de Bruijn and Ranomi Kromowidjojo and the more they explored his options, the more confining they appeared.

“I would have loved to stay but not making compromises in high-performance is very important,” Verhaeren said on Wednesday. “It would have been a selfish choice to double up and travel back and forth. That is not the way it works here.”

From there events moved quickly. Taylor, himself a coach of an Olympic champion — he coached Leisel Jones to the 100m breaststroke gold in Beijing in 2008 — was approached by

Jacco Verhaeren will move back to his home in the Netherlands. Picture: Brendan Radke

Swimming Australia last Friday and was given the weekend to think it over. From his perspective, there wasn’t much to consider. He has been the Victorian and Tasmanian state coach and a veritable second-in-command to Verhaeren on the Australian team in recent years. It was a natural progression.

“When asked, I was happy to take up the role,” Taylor said. “I am a familiar face within the team, I do have some leadership responsibilities already with the coaches …. Jacco and I have worked extremely well together so it really wasn’t much of a thought for me as to taking the role up for this particular campaign, not at all.

“I was really looking at it and saying ‘yeah, this is clearly the best thing to do’. It was a couple of days and we finalised it earlier this week with Swimming Australia.”

Campbell believes it is an easy fit. “Rohan has been part of the team for a really long time as a coach and more as a coach mentor, so they have almost been working towards a bit of a transition for Jacco’s leaving for a few years now. I think Rohan will fill in the role and he’ll bring something unique to him, something that is a little bit different.”

Still, it is fair to say Taylor these days sticks within acceptable boundaries. In 2005, he took a group of swimmers to a naval base for a training exercise where things got out of hand. Images emerged of a navy physical trainer holding a faux 9mm pistol to the heads of kneeling swimmers in mock executions. The then chief executive of Swimming Australia, Glenn Tasker, conceded tough training regimes were part of swimming “but there is a line you don’t cross”. Taylor apologised.

He now finds himself following in the footsteps of some of the most famous and sometimes controversial figures in Australian swimming history, men such as Don Talbot, Terry Gathercole and one of his earliest mentors Bill Sweetenham. “I’m standing on the shoulders of those who went before me,” he said.

Current Swimming Australia boss Leigh Russell said the arrangement with Taylor would last until after the Olympics, at which point the position would be reviewed. That suits him perfectly.

The Dolphins have not always been swimming in clear water during Verhaeren’s reign, but there is no question he has restored the trust with the Australian public that was lost after the Stilnox breach at the 2012 London Olympics, which saw six male sprinters put on final warnings.

There have been some extraordinary performances along the way, but it was the world championships in Gwangju, South Korea last year, that convinced Verhaeren that a new golden age might be launched next year in Tokyo. Sadly, he will watch it only as an outsider.