It was declared the biggest story in sport since Phar Lap died. Two decades on, Ian Thorpe, Craig Stevens and others remember the most infamous false start in swimming history.
To this day, 20 years on, Ian Thorpe swears he heard a noise. Standing on top of the blocks for the last heat of the men’s 400m freestyle at Australia’s Olympic swimming trials in 2004, Thorpe pressed forward ever so slightly, thinking it was time to race.
Thorpe, who will commentate for Channel 9 at the upcoming Olympics in Paris, was the reigning 400m freestyle Olympic champion and had won a gold medal in the very same lane in his home pool four years earlier. He knew a false start meant automatic disqualification. Before Australia’s Olympic swimming trials in Brisbane next week, this masthead revisits the circus that followed Thorpe, Stevens and those close to the story for weeks – right up until the event in Athens.
“A lot has happened in that time,” says Stevens, who after short stints as a bank teller and Toyota employee, is now a respected swimming coach in the Sutherland shire. “It feels like something that happened last week. It’s not really spoken about as much any more … but sometimes people put two and two together.”Those who were there on the morning of March 27, 2004, still sipping on their coffees, had no idea of the storm that was to follow.
A potential scenario emerged. Thorpe could swim the 400m freestyle if Stevens agreed to give up his spot.Craig Golding Stevens’ training partner, Sarah Ryan, said at the time, “he was in tears because of the way the media have been going on about it”.At times I wasn’t my normal self. Sarah probably saw that as something I had on my mind. Thinking about it now, I wonder if I did it the right way . There were people in our ears all the time. I just thought why not? I let Ian know first before it was all done. It was a bit surreal.
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