Ian O'Brien

Medal record
Competitor for  Australia
Men's Swimming
Olympic Games
Gold	1964 Tokyo	200 m breaststroke
Bronze	1964 Tokyo	4x100 m medley relay

Ian Lovett O'Brien (born March 3 1947 in New South Wales) was an Australian breaststroke swimmer of the 1960s, who won a gold medal in the 200m breaststroke at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. He also won five Commonwealth Games gold medals in his career.

O'Brien grew up in rural Wellington, New South Wales, neither of his parents having a sporting background. The local pool was an old-style design which had no pump system and was only (manually) drained once a week. O'Brien got his basic swimming instruction at the age of four from the local Learn to Swim program. In 1954 a chlorinated pool was formed in the town, leading to the formation of a swimming club. At the age of 10, he began competitive swimming under Bert Eslick, and participated in regional country swimming carnivals at Dubbo, Bathurst and Orange.

After dominating the country championships, O'Brien was taken in 1960 by his father to the Ryde pool in Sydney to be coached by Forbes Carlile and his assistant, former world-record breaking breaststroker Terry Gathercole. O'Brien trained with Gathercole only during holdiays when his father could take him to Sydney, while a local coach supervised him according to Gathercole's plans while he was in the country.

O'Brien gained international selection in 1962 when he won the 220yd breaststroke at his first Australian Championships. At the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth, he won both the 110yd and 220yd breaststroke. He then added a gold in the 4x110yd medley relay, along with Julian Carroll, Kevin Berry and David Dickson. In 1963, he again captured the breaststroke double at the Australian Championships to earn an overseas tour to Europe with the Australian team. He repeated the double in 1964 to claim selection for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo].

Arriving in Tokyo, the favourites for the 200m breaststroke were Chet Jastremski of the United States who held the world record, and Georgy Prokopenko of the Soviet Union. The Australian head coach Don Talbot organized time trials in front of opposition swimmers in an attempt to unnerve them. O'Brien swam an Olympic record in his heat, before lowering it again in the semi-final. In the final, as was his style, Jastremski attacked from the outset, while O'Brien raced with a characteristic even pace. After being fourth at the halfway mark, O'Brien overtook his rivals to claim the gold medal in a new world record time of 2m 27.8s. He combined with Peter Reynolds, Berry and Dickson to collect a bronze medal in the 4x100m medley relay.

In 1965, O'Brien again won the breaststroke double at the Australian Championships, and again in 1966 to qualify for the 1966 Commonwealth Games in Kingston, Jamaica. He again won both breaststroke events, but in the 4x100m medley relat, the team was disqualified for an illegal changeover. In 1967 he skipped the Australian Championships in order to enter the workforce, as his father had died five years earlier. In 1968, without a breaststroker, the Australian team persuaded him to make a comeback, after a crash diet and fitness program. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico, he was eliminated in the heats of the 200m breaststroke, with the eventual winner posting a time slower than his time four years earlier. He did better in the 100m, finishing sixth, and narrowly missed a bronze medal, by 0.1s in the 4x100m medley relay, along with Micheal Wenden, Robert Cusack and Karl Byrom. He retired after the Olympics at the age of 21.

References

• Andrews, Malcolm (2000). Australia at the Olympic Games. 
• Howell, Max (1986). Aussie Gold. 

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