Record Aust. team for Los Angeles

Press, 7 May 1984, Page 29

Record Aust. team for Los Angeles

NZPA-AAP Melbourne Australia will send away its largest Olympic squad ever to Los Angeles in July. The general assembly of the Australian Olympic Federation has ratified the selection of 250 athletes and 84 officials to attend the Games. The previous biggest total was 307 athletes and officials who went to the Tokyo Games in 1964. However, the number could be reduced if the Australian women’s basketball team of 12 and three officials falls to win through at the qualifying tournament currently being played in Cuba. The chairman of the justification commission, Mr Tom Blue, dropped a bombshell when he told the delegates that the top Australian 4 x 400 metres athletics relay team will not go to the Games if even one of them fails to measure up to medical and physical examinations. Sydney’s 400-metre specialist, Darren Clark, who bettered the qualifying standard seven times this season, has made a full recovery from a nagging hamstring injury which stopped the selectors from naming him as an individual in the 400 m. However, if one of his teammates in the relay — the Moscow silver medallist, Rick Mitchell, Gary Minihan or Bruce Frayne — fails to pass the examinations, all four of them will be dropped, Mr Blue said. The average age of the team is 24.86 years. The Sports Minister, Mr John Brown, was at the meeting and told the delegates he believed the Michelle Ford controversy was now finished. The champion swimmer’s protracted selection bid was finally snuffed out on Friday with the vote of the seven member states on the Australian Swimming Union going 5-2 against. “I went out on a limb for Michelle Ford and if you could see the telegrams, sheafs of letters and tele-

phone calls you would understand why I had to get behind her,” he said. “But the Australian Swimming Union decision was a very proper one.” Miss Ford, aged 21, the winner of a gold medal in the 800 m freestyle at the Moscow Olympics, and a bronze in the < 200 m butterfly, and a gold in the 200 m butterfly and a silver in the 800 m freestyle at the Brisbane Commonwealth Games, failed to achieve the qualifying times for the Los Angeles Olympics.

Late last year she had a shoulder injury which interrupted her training and she was not fully fit at the Australian championships in Brisbane in February, her last chance to achieve the qualifying times for Los Angeles. She has since bettered the 800 m freestyle qualifying time.

Since then there has been a campaign to have her included in the swimming team, a campaign which has had the backing of her coach, the general public of Australia, and in the last couple of weeks, Mr Brown. However, the Australian Swimming Union failed to bow to the pressure. It was. not prepared to bend its rilles even though it knew that Miss Ford is the third fastest woman in history over 800 m freestyle, and the fastest outside the United States and East Germany, over 200 m butterfly.