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Swimming
(From Left to Right) Michael Klim, Ian Thorpe, William Kirby and Grant Hackett at the World Championships, 2001
A large part of Australia’s medals came from swimming, where they have won a total of 56 gold medals in total. The country in the past had given us some of the greatest swimmers who made the biggest splash in the form of Shane Elizabeth Gould, Dawn Fraser and Ian Thorpe, who was nicknamed ‘the Thorpedo’. Thorpe along with good mate Grant Hackett made Australia a force to reckon with in swimming, both at the Olympics as well as the FINA World Championships, in the early 2000’s
Post the retirements of Thorpe and Hackett, the medals from the pool have dried up, coinciding with the country’s dip in Olympic performance, just as it had happened with the departures of Fraser and Gould after the 1972 games. The effect carried over to the World Championships as well as can be seen in the graphic below.
Tennis
Tennis legends Roy Emerson (left) and Rod Laver (right) at a tennis gathering in Los Angeles
The tennis courts too have seen a steep decline in the number of top rated players that Australia produces. Samantha Stosur, world ranked 13, is the only Australian in the top 100 in the WTA rankings. On the men’s side, three players – Bernard Tomic (41), Lleyton Hewitt (64), Marinko Matosevic (73) – are in the top 100, but it has been quite a while since an Australian man challenged for the top ranking or top honors at a Grand Slam event. Even getting into the second week of a Grand Slam event has become a thing of the past in Australian tennis.
Some of the most storied names in tennis, both on the men’s and women’s side, hail from Australia. Speaking of the great Rod Laver, the last man to win the Grand Slam (he did it twice), Roy Emerson, Ken Rosewall, John Newcombe, Pat Cash and Tony Roche is enough to get you dizzy. And you had Margaret Court, Daphne Akhurst and Evonne Goolagong on the women’s side.
Australia has had 18 male Grand Slam winners with 77 singles titles between them and 4 female winners with another 42 titles. For a country with all those legendary names and ridiculous numbers, the cupboard looks threadbare at the moment.
Patrick Rafter and the record breaking doubles pairing of Todd Woodbridge and Mark Woodforde (the Woodies) continued to hold the fort for Australia for some time into the new millennium and Lleyton Hewitt, the Aussie battler, carried on the legacy for a few years winning 2 Grand Slams and finishing runner-up in a few. Since then, Stosur’s US Open triumph in 2009 remains a sweet anomaly in an otherwise bitter phase for Australian tennis.
