OLYMPIC MOMENTS:IN THE 1960s, she was Australia's favourite larrikin and a peerless swimming champion and even now, it is hard to believe her career ended as it did: the door slammed closed on her swimming life with a 10-year suspension imposed by her own sporting body.
Why? The popular reason was that, in a moment of high spirits, she tried to snatch a flag from outside the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. The official reason was she had taken part in the Opening Ceremony march along with Marlene Dayman, a 15-year-old debutante, against the wishes of the Australian federation. But the real reason was the Australian authorities were terrified of her flagrant disregard for their authority.
Fraser had dominated the 100 metre freestyle for almost 10 years by the time of the Tokyo Olympics. She was 27 years old then and her younger team-mate jokingly referred to her as “granny” even though they were in awe of both her free-spiritedness and her swimming prowess.
Fraser said and did as she pleased from the word go, breaking Willy den Ouden’s two-decade-old record and eclipsing the favourite, Lorraine Crapp, to win the Australian championship in February 1956.
Afterwards, she took people aback by announcing she could do better. Then, in Melbourne, she proved it, when the Olympic final was reduced to a sprint between herself and Crapp. It was desperately close: Fraser’s time of 1:02.0 was a world record.
Crapp was .3 of a second behind. Afterwards, an overjoyed Fraser broke with decorum by asking a nearby television crew for a ladder so she could climb the railings and greet her parents in the crowd.
She was the record holder in that discipline for the next 15 years. At the Rome Olympics in 1960, she defended her title and set an Olympic record but again rubbed officials up the wrong way, refusing to take part – at last-minute notice – in the butterfly leg of the medley relay.
She spent the remainder of the Olympics in “Coventry” as her team-mates treated her to a cold silence. Four years later, Fraser was still indomitable, beating an entirely new field of finalists in Tokyo. By now, she had lowered her world record to 58.9 seconds. Fraser’s presence at those games was remarkable given the year she had endured.
That March, she was driving her mother and sister home from a social event when the car skidded and slammed into a parked bus. Her mother and her sister were left unconscious. Fraser suffered chipped vertebrae in her neck but the psychological trauma took longer to heal.
It wasn’t the first family tragedy. When she was a teenager, Fraser’s brother Don died: she was the baby in a household of seven kids and he was her hero.
In a 2004 interview, she describes him as “probably the most perfect man I ever met in my life.
“Yeah, he was just gorgeous,” she said. ” You know, he was . . . just everybody’s dream. He helped people, he did odd jobs around the place, he never charged anybody for it. In those days, I mean, you used to take money for little jobs you did. But Donny was the iceman. He used to, you know, sort of give some of the pensioners that couldn’t afford it . . . a block of ice. And when he’d get back to the iceworks, the manager would say, “But, Donny, you haven’t got enough money here.
“He’d say, ‘Oh, well, three blocks melted on the way around’. And that was the type of man he was and he was just so beautiful. He took a lot of knocks for me too, from dad. He’d always take the blame, saying, ‘No, dad, she wasn’t smoking. I was smoking’. Phew!”
Fraser was rambunctious, outgoing and a born swimmer: every Saturday, she would swim in the harbour when they let the water out at the power station, stroking into the powerful currents. Her progression from there to Olympic pools was quick.
By 1960, she was an Olympic celebrity, dining on a yacht with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip – who, she said, offered discreet advice on how to use the cutlery.
But the streak of youthful mischief never left her. As well as ignoring the rules about participating in the Opening Ceremony in Tokyo, she helped some other Australian Olympians to snatch a flag just for japes one night towards the end of the Tokyo Games. They were caught, questioned and then given the flag anyway. Reports circulating afterwards that she had tried to swim a moat, spraining her ankle in the process, proved untrue.
But her insolence was too much for the authorities to stomach. News of their punishment travelled around the world, mainly because it ended Fraser’s career with a total of four gold and four silver Olympic medals.
“Miss Fraser, a gold medallist at three Olympics and acknowledged as the greatest swimmer the world has seen, was recently named Australian of the Year,” stated a report in The Irish Times under the headline “Shock Suspension of Dawn Fraser”.
The Australian Swimming Union statement was terse: “The Union is very jealous of its good name and the reputation of its members, its teams both in and out of the water, and is conscious of its responsibility to parents who entrust their children to its care.”
Malcolm McGill, a police sergeant and the father of Linda McGill, one of three other swimmers suspended for three years, said: “My daughter has been convicted without a trial.”
The suspension was lifted just before the 1968 Games in Mexico but by then Fraser had quit her training regime.
If Fraser was bitter, she never said so. However, she continued to attend subsequent Olympics as a guest, famously appearing as one of the torch bearers at the Sydney Games.
Her outspokenness continued after she was elected to parliament of New South Wales in 1988 and after she spoke out about the issue of athletes and drug abuse prior to the Athens Games, she was not invited to travel.
She continues to make the news into her 70s. Just three years ago, she tackled a burglar outside her daughter’s house in Queensland one night by kneeing him in the groin.
“I’ve a titanium knee so it must have hurt him,” she said, indomitable as ever.
