Grim Australian swimming reality exposed by bad boy’s latest drama

The latest drama surrounding Isaac Cooper has exposed the one chink in Australian swimming’s otherwise shining armour: able-bodied men’s backstroke.

But while the recent results of Australia’s male backstrokers have left a lot to be desired, two brilliant teenagers offer hope.

Four years after being sent home from the Dolphins’ training camp in France ahead of the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, Cooper is again in hot water after failing to meet team requirements in Glasgow because he was instead enjoying a drinking session.

As revealed by The Sydney Morning Herald, the 22-year-old missed the final night of swimming competition at the Glasgow Games. He was also a no-show at the team’s closing meeting that evening.

He has since stood himself down from the Dolphins’ athlete leadership group.

Australia’s swim team carved out an outrageously successful campaign in Scotland, reeling in 76 medals including 37 golds. No country came close.

However, able-bodied men’s backstroke accounted for none of those 76 medals.

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Cooper finished sixth in the 50m backstroke final. He reached the final of the 100m backstroke, getting there as the eighth-fastest qualifier, but didn’t show up at the pool that night, either to swim or support his competing teammates. He was out drinking.

Former Australian backstroker Mitch Larkin is a Dolphins great. At the peak of his career, he claimed gold in both the 100m and 200m backstroke at the 2015 world championships in Russia.

Since Larkin retired, Australia has achieved very little by way of able-bodied men’s backstroke.

Across all Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games and world long-course championships since, and including, the Tokyo 2021 Olympics, Australia has racked up 240 medals, including 102 golds.

But of those 240 medals won in that five-year window, able-bodied men’s backstroke contributed only three.

Kudos where kudos is due. Cooper won gold in the 50m backstroke at the 2024 world championships in Doha.

It was a world championships missing a stack of the world’s best swimmers because of the Paris Olympics that followed, but Cooper beat the reigning world champion at the time, the USA’s Hunter Armstrong, to win gold.

Still, it doesn’t reflect well on the state of able-bodied men’s backstroke in Australia that it’s delivered so few medals across the Olympic Games, Commonwealth Games and world long-course championships in recent years.

Bradley Woodward delivered the two other of those 240 medals in able-bodied men’s backstroke in the aforementioned five-year window, picking up silver and bronze at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games in the 100m and 200m respectively.

In Cameron McEvoy, Kyle Chalmers, Flynn Southam and Kai Taylor, Australia’s men’s freestyle sprinting stocks are loaded.

Sam Short, Elijah Winnington, Benjamin Goedemans and Matthew Galea take care of the middle and long-distance stocks in men’s freestyle.

In men’s butterfly, Australia has Chalmers, Matt Temple, Ben Armbruster and world championship bronze medallist Harrison Turner, and in men’s breaststroke, Sam Williamson and Zac Stubblety-Cook.

In the women’s freestyle sprints, Meg Harris and Mollie O’Callaghan lead the way, and in middle and long-distance women’s freestyle, Lani Pallister shines.

In women’s butterfly, Alex Perkins and Brittany Castelluzzo; in women’s breaststroke, teen phenom Sienna Toohey; and in women’s backstroke, the greatest of all time, Kaylee McKeown.

The men’s backstroke stocks make for sobering reading – but in teen stars Henry Allan and Bryce Krause, there is promise.

Allan, an 18-year-old from Bendigo, holds four national junior long-course records in backstroke events.

In a heat swim at this year’s national championships on the Gold Coast, he clocked 1:57.56 to break the Australian 17 years 200m backstroke record. Larkin had held it for 15 years.

And in the final that night, he stopped the clock at 1:57.00 to lower his newly minted mark and break the 17 years all-comers record. He broke an all-comers record set by American Aaron Peirsol in 2000. Peirsol finished his career as a five-time Olympic gold medallist.

Allan is already a Commonwealth Games gold medallist, having swum the backstroke leg for Australia’s triumphant men’s 4x100m medley relay team in Glasgow.

And Kraus, a 15-year-old from Dalby, a town 200 kilometres west of Brisbane, owns three national junior long-course records in backstroke events.

Able-bodied men’s backstroke is the bane of Australian swimming – but perhaps for not much longer.