The billionaire wrestling fan bankrolling an Olympic dream

So what’s a boy from Camden in Sydney’s southwest doing in a five-star Paris hotel at breakfast, while heads of state wander by and America’s first lady, Jill Biden, is upstairs resting after the Olympics opening ceremony?

The answer lies with the man who invited him: Jack Cowin, the 82-year-old Sydney-based billionaire, who is sitting opposite freestyle wrestler Jayden Lawrence is the benefactor of Australia’s two-man wrestling team, which will represent at an Olympics for the first time in eight years.

Cowin, the founder and owner of the Hungry Jack’s restaurant chain, is a former Canadian Universities wrestling champion. He met Lawrence in 2009 after a policeman from Campbelltown PCYC club came into his Sydney office and basically said: “There’s a kid out at Campbelltown wrestling kids 10 years older than him and beating them. You’re a former wrestler and you’re rich. How about sponsoring him?”

Cowin became, in his words, “the bank” for a sport that is seriously under-funded and suffering the vicious cycle of reduced funding leading to lower participation numbers which, in turn, means less funding from the Australian Sports Commission.

“A gold medal will fix it by attracting more kids to the sport,” Cowin says. “Paris is his shot.”

Lawrence, a red-haired 29-year-old, shows no signs of being intimidated by the challenge and his recent form justifies his confidence.

Jayden Lawrence celebrates after winning the bronze medal at the 2022 Commonwealth Games. Credit: Getty Images

A bronze medallist from the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, he qualified via Oceania and then Africa, beating a Nigerian in the final. Only 16 wrestlers will compete for a medal in his 86kg class, with competition beginning in Paris on August 8.

During the Oceania trials, he lost only one point when competing against a former American who is now representing American Samoa.

The ease with which athletes switch nationalities is one of the fascinating changes I have observed since first covering a Summer Olympics in 1988 in Seoul. The margins between nations in terms of competition have, like water colours, become blurred over time.

Australia’s other wrestler is Georgii Okorokov, 28, who was born in an impoverished region in the east of Russia and came to Australia in 2017 as a European junior champion. He will compete in the 65kg class and was also undefeated in Oceania and Africa this year, being ranked 27th in the world.

Jayden Lawrence (blue) competes as an 11-year-old at the national school age championships in 2005.

Their coach is a Ukrainian, Andrey Vorontsov, who fled the country in 2022. Asked how the former Russian and his coach relate given the war between the two countries, Lawrence says: “They get on well, no problems. Politics isn’t a factor in their relationship.”

While Russia is barred at the Paris Olympics, it doesn’t mean there aren’t more like Okorokov competing for other nations.

“There are three former Russians in my 86kg weight division,” Lawrence said.

His preferred competition weight is 79kg but the sport was forced to halve its number of classes when women wrestlers were invited to compete at the Olympics. These Games will be the first at which the total of female athletes will exceed men, another major change I have observed.

Another mini revolution is the end of amateurism and the exploding number of new sports. Lawrence, 29, pays the bills for his family comprised of partner Melissa Twentyman and their two children, Robert 6 and Evelyn 8, by coaching UFC fighters on wrestling techniques. (“I haven’t been invited to coach my team Wests Tigers on wrestling, even though my sport gets blamed for the hip-drop tackle,” he quips.)

Son Robert is named after his father of the same name. “Dad was the one who drove me everywhere to wrestle and funded trips to the US and Canada before Jack [Cowin] jumped on board. Mum [Katrina] and Dad had to take out a second mortgage to fund my trips overseas to Canada, US and Germany.”

Immediately following Lawrence’s breakfast with Cowin, he planned to catch up with his family and then take an eight-hour flight to return to the Australian training camp in Kurdistan where he has spent the last four months.

The fly-in-fly-out nature of modern-day Olympic competition is another significant change over the past 36 years. Okorokov and coach Vorontsov did not make the trip to the Opening Ceremony, given the competition is towards the end of the Games.

Lawrence hopes to meet the Iranian champion, Hassan Yazdani, in a top-eight-versus-bottom-eight competition.

Asked why he would want to meet the favourite first up, he says: “I wrestled him in Serbia and I hesitated when I shouldn’t have. I won’t hesitate the next time. He’s the one I want to meet. We’ve been doing video analysis of him in our training camp and I’ve worked him out.”

Wrestling is so big in Kurdistan, Lawrence explains: “I walk out of the training centre where we do three sessions a day and someone wants to take my photo.”

Cowin adds: “Being a wrestler there is like being a celebrity. Get us medal and you can be a celebrity in Australia. The sport needs a hero.”

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