A Brief History
On July 24, 1980, a quartet of Australian swimmers took the Olympic Gold Medal in the Men’s Swimming 4 by 100-meter medley relay race, the only time an American team failed to win this particular event.
Digging Deeper
While the US has dominated this particular event, the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, USSR, was plagued by politics and the US along with 65 other countries boycotted the games due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Australians, certainly among the greatest swimming nations, produced the “Quietly Confident Quartet,” a self-named crew consisting of Mark Kerry, Peter Evans, Mark Tonelli, and Neil Brooks. Despite numerous disciplinary violations, clashes with swimming authorities, and a government that did not want the men to compete, the four pulled off the upset win at the Olympics, beating the Soviet team. The team never competed together again after the Olympics.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Brennan, Gale. The XXII Summer Olympic Games, Moscow, 1980. Ideals Pub. Corp, 1979.
Forrest, Lisa. Boycott. Australia’s Controversial Road To The 1980 Moscow Olympics. Australian Broadcasting Corporation;, 2008.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by Dimast75 of the Olympic Pool during the Moscow Olympics in 1980, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
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