It’s been quiet down at the Wellington Olympic Swimming Pool today.
The clouds are taunting the sky and manager Mick Austin is preparing for the Nat Barton Carnival on Sunday hoping the sun will shine.
Next to his office the wall of fame showcases Paralympian Ben Austin and Olympic and World Champion Ian O’Brien. It’s a proud showcase. For a small town Wellington can boast champions that match any country town its size.
“That’s right we have some great champions,’’ Mick Austin said.
“We have so many people who enjoy swimming in Wellington and the pool gets high marks from visitors from all over the world.’’
For now Mick and his staff are looking for corkettes to join the corks, these are swimmers who go up and down the pool in the early mornings. Most of these people are seniors.
It’s probably how the remarkable story of Olympian Ian O’Brien started. The 1964 Olympian grew up in Wellington.
Neither of his parents were skilled swimmers. His father Roy knew only one swimming stroke - breaststroke - and his mother Thelma did not take her first swimming lesson until she was 55. O’Brien’s sister Anne was a talented swimmer in her childhood years but she preferred horseback riding.
Wikipedia tells us that “the local pool was an old-style facility that had no pump system and was only manually drained once a week. Aged four, O’Brien got his first swimming lessons from the local learn-to-swim program.
“There were not many non-sporting activities for children in Wellington, and O’Brien played basketball and rugby league, did athletics, swimming and rode horses.
“In 1954 a chlorinated pool was built in the town, leading to the formation of Wellington Swimming Club. At the age of 10 he began competitive swimming under local coach Bert Eslick and raced in regional country swimming carnivals at Dubbo, Bathurst and Orange.
“After winning all the breaststroke events at the country championships, O’Brien was taken by his father to the Ryde pool in Sydney in 1960 to be coached by Forbes Carlile and his assistant, retired world record-breaking breaststroker Terry Gathercole. Carlile was regarded as the leading swimming coach in Australia at the time.
“At age 13, O’Brien was already a large teenager, weighing in at 82.6kg. He only trained with Gathercole during holidays, when his father could take him to Sydney; Jim Wilkins, a Catholic priest in Bathurst, supervised him according to Gathercole’s program while he was in the countryside.
“Within a year, O’Brien rose from being a country carnival champion to a national-level athlete, despite the death of his father in the same year.’’
Soon O’Brien began winning Australia Championships and went to Tokyo for what would become a famous and
infamous Olympic Games.
O’Brien brilliantly won the 200m breastroke to take gold for Australia, at the same games Dawn Fraser was accused and later suspended for stealing a flag which years later was hotly debated and denied.
Fraser said she didn’t steal the flag.
Today, the Wellington pool still holds major events and the Nat Barton Carnival on Sunday might just produce a champion to match Ian O’Brien and Ben Austin.
Email a friend