Swimming: Superfish heroes, slip, sliding...

By GREG ANSLEY

CANBERRA - Last week, on the fringes of Canberra, a small drainage pond closed around the heads of the swimmers who have been elevated almost to godhead in the pantheon of Australian sporting heroes.

In that pool, a few days earlier, a woman walking her dog had noticed a battered safe, its door forced open and dumped a few feet into the water.

For the police, this was the breakthrough in the case that had grabbed the headlines - the theft of Olympic medals given to stellar swimming coach Gennadi Touretski by his grateful stars, including butterfly gold medallist Michael Klim and Russian superfish Alexander Popov.

Two local men, apparently well-known to police, have been charged with the theft, carried out at Touretski's apartment in nearby Bruce, the home of the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), where the trainer has worked since migrating from Russia in 1993.

The pair allegedly broke in while Touretski was driving on his swimmers at the national championships in Hobart. The safe was stripped of a clutch of expensive watches and other valuables, but the Commonwealth Games bronze and Atlanta Olympic gold medals presented to the coach by Klim and Popov were left behind.

Also left behind were two vials containing a small number of white tablets which puzzled police sufficiently to have them tested.

Allegedly the tablets were Stanozolol, an anabolic steroid popular among weightlifters and the drug that ended the career of Canadian sprinter Ben Johnson at the Seoul Olympics.

It will be the same for Touretski, if found guilty, who faces up to six months in jail and a life ban from coaching.

At present suspended from the AIS on full pay, Touretski denies the charge. He did not appear to answer the summons in the Canberra Magistrate's Court last Thursday, but maintained his innocence through lawyer Jason Parkinson.

The case has been adjourned until May 3.

But much more than Touretski's ultimate fate is at stake.

The sensational allegation of drugs attached to the man who trains some of Australia's best swimmers, and who was to have coached them again for the world championships in Japan and the Goodwill Games in Brisbane, has rocked the Australian psyche.

More than cricket, more even than Aboriginal runner Cathy Freeman, swimming has attained an almost religious stature in Australia, its heroes feted by the nation's powerful and wealthy, idolised by lesser mortals and their bodies transformed to new symbols of sexuality and virility.

Until the discovery in the Dunlop pond there was an invulnerability about them, a near-worship that forgave even the commercialisation that runs from personal websites and internet fan clubs to the international courting of superstars like Ian Thorpe.

Thorpe, worth an estimated $A10 million ($12.44 million) over the next three years and cutting back sponsors to a handful of corporate majors - even giants like News Ltd and Coca-Cola have been purged - is now Australia's most sought-after endorsement.

Former swimmer Susie O'Neill ranks fourth, behind tennis player Pat Rafter and Cathy Freeman.

Swimmers help strengthen Australian's Max Dupain view of themselves as Adonises of beach and sea, holding a disproportionate share of Australia's unquestioned international sporting success.

In the Sydney Olympics, swimmers won five of Australia's 16 gold medals, and almost one-third of the nation's total medal tally. The rest were spread over 19 other sports.

Swimmers won more fourth places than any other athletes; they outshone the closest rival sport by a factor of two in the number of athletes finishing in the top eight; and, after the national championships in Hobart, Thorpe appears likely to become the greatest swimmer ever.

Touretski, a revolutionary, often cantankerous and at times troublesome coach, has played no small part in this, invoking such loyalty in his swimmers that Popov left Russia to follow him to Canberra, still competing for Russia but training at the AIS.

In addition to Popov, and Klim - who holds the world 100m butterfly record and two gold, two silver and one bronze Olympic medals - Touretski trained Australia's gold medal-winning Olympic 4 x 200m and 4 x 100m freestyle teams, and has coached Olympic medallists Nicole Stevenson and Sarah Ryan, and world shortcourse 400m individual relay record-holder Matthew Dunn.

Much has already been forgiven for Touretski.

In 1995, he was suspended from coaching for four years after a drunken melee on a plane in which he poked another passenger in the eye, pushed a flight attendant and bit the arm of another member of the crew.

Fined $US10,000 ($24,480) and jailed for 30 days in Hawaii, Touretski was restored to training after urgent lobbying by his stars.

Two years later, he was fined $A600 for failing to stop after an accident, failing to supply a breath test and negligent driving.

In his latest scrape, Touretski has again been bolstered by the deep loyalty of his swimmers who, despite their shock and fears of their own reputations, have rallied around the trainer with public statements of support.

But an unmistakable angst is abroad in Australia.

Sports officials attacked the media for sensationalism and unfair hounding of their stars even before reporters had learned the facts of the story, lashing out during the first press conference at the media groups which they appeared to believe would inevitably cast suspicion and innuendo on all Australian swimmers.

This was largely unfair and a misreading of the depth of respect the Australian media hold for the integrity of their sports stars and the system of testing for drugs in sport.

If anything, the emphasis in covering the Touretski allegations has been to reinforce that belief and to emphasise the rigour of the testing regime - Klim's drug-testing record was reported in detail - and the unlikelihood of any top Australian athlete using such an easy drug to detect as Stanozolol.

But the saturation coverage of the discovery of the steroid and the alacrity with which such senior figures as Prime Minister John Howard have leapt to the defence of the purity of Australian sport demonstrates the sensitivity Australia feels.

There is a painful recognition that whatever the outcome of Touretski's court case, Australia is going to suffer, if for no other reason than its own at-times excessive zeal in casting stones at other nations.

To the thumping echoes of mass breast-beating, leading commentators and big newspapers have pointed to the scorn they have cast on foreign suggestions that Thorpe or other Australians may have used drugs, while at the same time pointing fingers of their own.

O'Neill, for one, had said she was pretty suss at Dutch swimmer Inge de Bruijn's rapid-fire collection of seven world records, reinforced by coach Scott Volker's assessment that the run was close to unbelievable.

China and Germany have felt a similar Australian sting.

It hurt, but no one was really surprised when World Anti-Doping Agency president Dick Pound said the Touretski allegations had cast a cloak of suspicion across Australia, or when British 1500m swimmer Paul Palmer said: "Well, some may say they're not surprised."

Former AIS director John Boulter warned that mud would inevitably stick, swimming coach Laurie Lawrence lamented that Australia now looked stupid, and columnist Patrick Smith warned that Australia could no longer take the high moral diving board.

Swimmers in glass pools should not throw mud, the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised. It comes back to cloud the water and choke you.

Added the Canberra Times: This episode should be a lesson to Australian swimmers regarding the ease with which reputations can be made and lost by innuendo, and the danger of supposing that Australian swimmers must, by birthright, be intrinsically fairer competitors than those occupying the other lanes.

If nothing more sinister, Touretski has put humble pie on the Australian menu.