‘He’s done nothing wrong’: Chinese prodigy’s Aussie coach tells doubters to take a closer look

Denis Cotterell has simple advice for anyone who doesn’t believe what they are seeing from Pan Zhanle, China’s freestyle prodigy who left the world’s best 100m swimmers floundering in his wake:“Look and listen.”

Cotterell also has a message for Brett Hawke, a former Australian Olympic swimmer and US college coach who claimed Pan’s world record time and winning margin in last week’s final were “not humanly possible” – a not-so-subtle inference that Pan’s swim was fuelled by something other than pride in the People’s Republic.

Denis Cotterell and Bronwyn Henderson have spent the last 18 months building China’s Pan Zhanle into the world’s dominant 100m freestyle swimmer.Credit: Eddie Jim

“Brett’s specialty is the 50m, this is the 100m,” Cotterell told this masthead in his first public comments since a furore erupted around Pan’s extraordinary, gold medal-winning swim.

“Biochemists, real researchers, will analyse Pan, like they do every Olympic champion, because they want to see what the best are doing. And they will see that he is doing something different.

“It is unique to him. It is idiosyncratic. But Brett can’t see it.”

Cotterell and his partner Bronwyn Henderson ended their professional association with Pan on Sunday, having accepted late in 2022 a contract to help a teenager whose talents were previously thought to be in distance swimming become world and Olympic champion, and world record holder, over 100m.

It took five days, but Pan Zhanle has the first swimming world record of Paris 2024.Credit: AP

For Cotterell, former coach of Grant Hackett, and Henderson, a retired phys-ed teacher who shares his life and affection for his swimmers, it meant shifting to Beijing and working out of the national training centre, where resident athletes live in high-performance confinement.

The Chinese method of chasing sporting success, adopted from the old Soviet sports systems and maintained under President-for-Life Xi Jinping, is draconian compared to the training environment of Australian athletes.

Swimmers cannot leave the centre without a chaperone, other than to see their families one week a year. They train, sleep and eat at the centre, and endure random searches of their rooms. When they travelled to France for the Olympics, they surrendered their bags for inspections and were not served any food prepared by the airline.

All of this, says Cotterell, is done with the aim of preventing them from coming into contact with the kinds of substances that scandalised Chinese swimming in the lead-up to these Games.

“What they have been subjected to, in their efforts to be clean, Australians wouldn’t tolerate it,” he said.

Cotterell was in Beijing when an unauthorised Mars Bar wrapper was discovered in the room of a swimmer. The swimmer, whom Cotterell chose not to name to avoid embarrassing her, was docked a third of her annual pay.

In another instance, two young swimmers who’d struck up a secret romance, Tang Muhan and He Junyi, snuck out of the centre one night to share a meal at a popular Beijing burger joint.

You might have heard of them. The New York Times last month revealed both tested positive to tiny traces of a banned anabolic agent which, according to an investigation by China’s anti-doping agency CHINADA, came from eating contaminated burgers.

The New York Times story and a broader investigation it conducted with German broadcaster ARD produced confirmation from the World Anti-Doping Agency that since the start of 2021, more than two dozen Chinese swimmers have failed drug tests without public disclosure, adverse finding or sanction.

In both instances – the episode involving our starch-crossed lovers and an earlier case involved 23 swimmers testing positive to a banned metabolic modulator in the lead-up to the Tokyo Games – WADA accepted contamination rather than doping as the most likely explanation.

Cotterell is dismayed at doping aspersions now being cast at Pan, a swimmer who as far as Cotterell knows has never failed a drug test, and every other Chinese swimmer in Paris.

He has been here before. In Rio eight years ago, he was coaching China’s star swimmer Sun Yang when Australia’s Mack Horton publicly called him a drug cheat. Sun has never been found to have deliberately taken a prohibited substance but a 2018 altercation with drug testers at his Zhejiang province villa landed him four-year ban.

China’s Sun Yang hugs Australian coach Denis Cotterell after winning gold in London.Credit: AFP

“It is disappointing for them,” Cotterell said of the Chinese swimmers in Paris. “They wonder whether people are against them, whether they are going to hate them. The biggest thing was how it was handled. The kids are totally damned innocent. Most of them never knew about it.

“The reality is, Pan has not broken any rules and done nothing wrong.

“He was the world record holder and he improved in what may be a slow pool. After his last training session, I thought he would go 46.6 [seconds]. It was a regular test set and the best he had ever done. If you are capable of that time you are going to be a little clear of the opposition unless someone has improved equally.”

Pan’s winning time of 46.4 seconds was scintillating and, arguably, the swim of this meet. While it raised eyebrows throughout the swimming world, the men standing on either side of him on the medal dais understood he had raised the bar.

Bronze medallist David Popivici does the honours for Pan Zhanle and silver medallist Kyle Chalmers.Credit: AP

Australian Kyle Chalmers marvelled at seeing someone swim so fast. “I have got to train harder than ever if I want to be competitive in that event,” he said. David Popovici, the Romanian who held the world record before Pan, described his swim as amazing. “He smashed it. And I’m sure that is only an opportunity for me, Kyle and all the other guys to try and beat it in the future.”

If there was any animosity or mistrust between the three swimmers, there was no evidence of it in the immediate, post-race celebrations. When Pan, in a subsequent interview with Chinese television, accused Chalmers of giving him the cold shoulder on the Paris pool deck earlier in the meet, Chalmers sounded genuinely confused.

“I find it a bit weird, I gave him a fist pump before the relays … and then my focus went to my teammates and my own racing. We had a laugh together at warm down last night. No issues from my end.”

Kyle Chalmers congratulates Pan Zhanle on his record-breaking swim.Credit: Getty Images

Chalmers and Pan have since exchanged cordial messages and Cotterell and Henderson expressed their appreciation to Chalmers for helping to defuse the issue. Pan idolised Chalmers and has previously said that watching him win the 100m freestyle as a 17-year-old in Rio inspired him to become an Olympic swimmer.

Henderson says she bonded with Pan over their shared love of cats. Before this meet, she gave him a stuffed kangaroo which he affixed to his swimming bag. “He is a beautiful person,” she says. “He loves his grandfather and his family and is really close to Denis and me. He is just a really nice kid.”

Cotterell won’t go into the details of what makes Pan such a fast swimmer, saying only that “his body structure allows him to express the stroke the way he does.” The most notable things about watching Pan swim is the absence of splash when his hands enter the water, the way he barely lifts his head to breathe and the languid cadence of his stroke.

He has a powerful kick but the way he uses his arms, pausing momentarily at the point of full extension as a distance swimmer might, gives a clue to the energy he conserves while covering extraordinary distance with each stroke.

Cotterell says that, although Pan had developed into a good distance swimmer under his full-time coach Zheng Kunliang, his stroke is best suited to the 100m. Despite racing shorter distances, he still embraces the monster training loads that come with elite 400m, 800m and 1500m swimming.

Pan under Henderson’s guidance was careful not to compromise his most important goal in Paris – a gold medal and world record in the 100m – by committing to too many events. He won the 400m freestyle at the national trials but chose not to swim it in Paris. He entered the 200m freestyle but deliberately tanked his heat race to focus on the 100m.

When Pan flies home to Zhejiang province after these Games, his likely reward for winning gold will be two weeks at home with this family instead of one. In the meantime, Cotterell and Henderson will return to the Gold Coast on a promise to resume retirement and, perhaps, marry after aborting wedding dates during the COVID years.

Those who know Cotterell doubt he will stay retired for long. As it happens, he already has his eye on a 17 year-old here in Paris who swims a faster 400m individual medley than Michael Phelps did at the same age. His name is Zhang Zhanshuo and according to Cotterell, he is every bit as good as Pan.

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