Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Swimming Australia – Gina Rinehart’s sheltered workshop
Top-level competition swimming in Australia lately is a gift that keeps on giving. In May, Swimming Queensland CEO Kevin Hasemann – who admits to never having been inside an art gallery – plus some of Australia’s top swimmers put on their other experts’ caps: as (self-appointed) art critics. By intervening personally, hoping to persuade the National Gallery of Australia to remove from display two portraits of Gina Rinehart – a mega-donor to Swimming Australia – painted by the celebrated portraitist Vincent Namatjira, the posse not only broke the first law of swimming – stay in your f***ing lane, guys – but left a distinct burning smell as to their credibility as rounded human beings. As opposed to addict desperados who will do anything – anything – to keep the tens-of-millions of cash flowing in from their Chief Sugar Momma, look-at-me-with-all-my-friends, Regina Nohart.
But while May’s dumpster-bin fire blew itself out after a week or two, a Paris Olympics-eve gaffe by Swimming Australia coach Michael Palfrey is set to be a cataclysmic bushfire; a scorched-earth reckoning that will – or certainly should – decimate the sport’s current administration, and so hopefully allow for a fresh start. Any such sustainable green-shoots will obviously have to start by sending packing Gina Rinehart and her poisonous, suffocating largesse.
Perhaps I should explain the casual link between Michael Palfrey – now famous for his newly-minted “Korea, Korea, Korea; Oi, Oi, Oi” chant – and Gina Rinehart. How a very busy (to which point I will return) Swimming Australia coach can have time to “mentor” a top-level Korean swimmer is one mystery – but just how Palfrey could have the motivation to do this is a thing certainly worth pondering. Two factors apparently are at work here.
One is, of course, the do-anything – anything – Last Days of the Roman Empire vibe at Swimming Australia. Blatantly sell-out your own country? Sure, baby. And do so without sanction from your bosses, other than unspecified future “consequences”? Whatev’s, let’s just keep the good-times a’rolling! And did we mention that we’re busy, busy, busy at the moment, what with the Olympics, an’ all? Party, party, party; coach, coach, coach!
The second factor is more nebulous and speculative. A revealing truth lies within the official explanation as to Palfrey being too busy right now with his important day-job – coaching his charges (at THE OLYMPICs!!!) – to face any immediate employment consequences. With Palfrey being just one of eight coaches, Swimming Australia is actually hugely over-staffed. The four or five swimmers on Team Palfrey – a group small and boutique enough, thanks to Gina Rinehart’s money, to allow for about two hours of one-on-one coaching every single day – are accordingly over-coached. There is probably absolutely nothing more they can learn from Palfrey.
And this feeling is also presumably mutual. Palfrey, fed-up with his gilded cage existence in the over-funded sheltered workshop that is Swimming Australia instinctively launched himself to freedom, Willy-like, the only way he could. He illicitly coached a talented swimmer, not from Australia, who was hungry (!) for some technical swimming advice, and – perhaps most shockingly – apparently did this for free, and in doing so was able to breath the sweet air, if only briefly, that exists outside the toxic, cloying fumes of Gina Rinehart’s aquarium.
