SING OR SWIM
As music star Cody Simpson makes his Olympic swim trial debut, he shares his favourite swimming moments with
AS far as his “inkdividuality” is concerned, Cody Simpson is adamant his body art remains a work in progress. The musician-turnedentertainer will take to the blocks at the Olympic Games-qualifying swim trials in Adelaide later this week, alongside the best of the best in Australian swimming.
Should Simpson make the team for Tokyo, he’ll be celebrating by adding a fresh tattoo to his storyboard of skin ink.
“Absolutely I’ll be getting one... maybe I should stop until I’m selected on a team? But seriously, you would be kind of kidding yourself to think you could make an Olympic team in less than a year,” Simpson says.
“You always want to say nothing’s impossible, but what you need to go through to swim at that level takes time. And I am prepared to give it that time.”
For Simpson, this means the 2024 Paris Olympics is a more likely proposition. Should the man with more than 10 million followers on his social-media accounts make the 2021 Games, it will be one hell of a showstopper – the swimming showstopper of all showstoppers. Except if you ask the man himself. So that’s what we did.
And here is what the humble product of the Gold Coast’s famed Miami Swimming Club and Surfers Paradise Life Saving Surf Club nominated as his favourite all-time Olympic moments.
( We’ll wait until after the Australian Swimming Trials from June 12-17 fi nishes before nominating ours – because we’d love to add one C Simpson to the list.)
1
Grant Hackett’s 1500m win at the 2004 Athens Olympics – with a partially collapsed lung “Swimming is the only sport that I have ever really followed over a long period of time, and I really love the history of swimming and watch a lot of the old races,” Simpson explains. “And what Grant did in that race was so gutsy.
“He’s a long-time friend of the family and he just smashed it. That swim just showed how resilient he is.”
Hackett was also one of the few people Simpson reached out to when toying with the idea of making a comeback after more than a decade out of the pool.
One of the other guys was US swimming superstar Michael Phelps.
2 Michael Phelps’ swim to become the first to break 50 seconds in the 100m butterfly in Rome in 2009
“That swim was about redemption. There was a fair bit of controversy when Phelps won Olympic gold the year before by one-hundredth of a second... and a lot of people thought that wasn’t the right result,” Simpson says. “[Then] he comes out and beats the same guy, Milorad Cavic, by a greater margin and becomes the first guy under 50 seconds for the same event I swim. It was such a super-cool race, and I still watch it.”
3 A dramatic comeback. A world record. Air guitars. The men’s 4x100m freestyle final at the Sydney Olympics in 2000
“This is so hard. Maybe this should be number one? Everyone thought the Americans would win this and Gary Hall Jr came out and said they would smash the Aussies like guitars.
“But they just closed the concert. Ian Thorpe swimming that fi nal leg ... that last minute just gives me goosebumps every time I watch it.
“Actually, can we reorder this?
But then...
Grant did swim with a collapsed lung...”
4 Aussie Jon Sieben upsets the great Michael Gross, of West Germany, and US star Pablo Morales to win the 200m butterfly at the 1984
Los Angeles Olympics
“This guy Sieben is like 5 foot 6” [173cm] and goes out and beats Gross, who is like almost 7 foot [200cm]... and Sieben had to beat his personal best by two seconds to make the final.
And he explodes past [Gross] in worldrecord time. This is just such a really cool race to watch.”
5 American Caeleb Dressel sets a new world record in the men’s 100m butterfly at the world championships in South Korea in 2019
“That race was the one that actually inspired me to start swimming again. I pretty much started training after watching that race, and that’s when I got serious about figuring out how I was going to get to the Olympics.”
The Australian Swimming Trials will be exclusively available to stream live on Amazon Prime Video from June 12-17. Amazon has followed some of Simpson’s journey in its new docuseries Head AboveWater, now streaming, which also features Ian Thorpe and fellow Olympic medallists Bronte Campbell and Kyle Chalmers.