RELATIVE VELOCITY
Gene pool proving key to Aussie swim team’s Games chances
THE Australian swimming team is keeping it all in the family at the Commonwealth Games.
The 70-member team – made up of 49 Olympic program and 21 para swimmers – has three sets of siblings and a father-daughter combo set to take up the battle in the pool from the first day of competition tomorrow.
Sisters Cate and Bronte Campbell and Taylor and Kaylee McKeown join David and Emma McKeon and Michael and Georgia Bohl in a family affair in the pool. While it’s not the first time any of them have been on a team together, all say being able to share the experience of competing at a home Games with a family member makes it special.
Kaylee McKeown, who at 16 is one of the youngest members of the swim team, said having her sister beside her helped calm her nerves when she made her senior international debut at last year’s world championships.
“Lucky for Kaylee and I we do different events because it would be a bit of a fight if we did the same,” Taylor said, confirming the McKeown supporter group would swell to about 30 family members at the Gold Coast Aquatic Centre this week.
“But I get up and support her in her races and vice versa.
“We really thrive off each other’s energy when we race.”
Cate and Bronte Campbell do swim the same events, swapping places at the top of the podium for the freestyle sprints at various events.
Cate returns from a post-Olympic break, while Bronte will take a sabbatical after.
“If you can’t win yourself, there’s only one other person in the world you would want to be beaten by,” Cate said.
While the McKeowns and Campbells are writing their own history, the McKeons and Bohls are continuing a Games legacy that stretches back to the last time Queensland hosted the Commonwealth Games.
David and Emma McKeon replicated the efforts of their parents and uncle by making a Games team in 2014.
Four years on they write another chapter, about 70km south of where parents Ron and Susie, and uncle Rob Woodhouse represented Brisbane in 1982.
Michael Bohl’s name is synonymous with coaching but in 1982 he was a sandy-haired youngster set to compete at his first Commonwealth Games.
Thirty-six years later, his daughter Georgia joins him on the team on the Gold Coast, as she did at the Rio Olympics.