Danyon
Loader

His togs were wet, his hair was wet, both dropped under a tap. His body was not.

The boy hadn’t felt like going to training, lap after lap, so he’d fooled his parents. More than once too. It doesn’t sound a promising start to what transpired to be the career of the greatest swimmer New Zealand has produced.

Danyon Loader’s performance in winning two gold medals at the Atlanta Games of 1996 is indisputably among the finest achievements by a New Zealand athlete.

And that’s why he sits among the top five athletic achievements in the Herald’s list of the best of the best Olympic performers.

He remains New Zealand’s only Olympic swimming champion — if you exclude the oddity of Malcolm Champion, the New Zealander in the Australasian quartet who won the 4 x 200m freestyle relay at the Stockholm Olympics of 104 years ago.

Only five New Zealanders, including Champion, have won Olympic swimming medals.

Jean Stewart won bronze in the 100m backstroke at Helsinki in 1952; at Seoul in 1988 Paul Kingsman, from lane one, took the bronze with a late run in the 200m backstroke; and Anthony Mosse won the 200m butterfly bronze. Then there’s Loader, who won gold in both the 200m and 400m freestyle in Atlanta. When he arrived there, Loader was 21, far from an unknown quantity. Indeed he was at the peak of his athletic powers.

So to lodge Loader’s success in the bolt-from-the-blue category is well wide of the mark. Even so, no one saw the double glory coming. He was a respected international swimmer, winning Olympic silver in the 200m butterfly in Barcelona four years earlier and a Commonwealth Games title in the same event in Victoria, Canada, in 1994.In a sense the stage was set. Add in that, as 1996 New Zealand head coach Mark Bone acknowledged, the fields for Loader’s key events were not of the usual stellar class and it’s possible to look back and figure the stars were neatly aligning for the tall, shy young man with the ponytail.

“To [Loader’s coach] Duncan Laing’s credit, he had noticed that internationally, middle distance freestyle was an event where there weren’t the great competitors entering,” Bone says.

“It seemed more good luck at the time, but great research had identified that.”

Laing, a larger-than-life figure who died in 2008, was Loader’s only coach. The pupil only ever referred to him as Mr Laing. Still does. Loader joined Laing’s swim squad in Dunedin aged 10 and, by his own admission, spent two years mucking around. Then came a change. Aged 12, at a camp in Cromwell, Loader found the spark.

Perhaps it was brought on by Laing telling Loader that “either I had to train harder or I had to train with the girls”.

Loader took the hint and a massive corner had been turned. Loader was soon training 10km a session, 11 sessions of two and a half hours, each week. Aged 14, he was swimming 110km a week.

Bone believes the work done at a pre-Atlanta camp in Hendersonville, North Carolina was important for what followed. Loader had won events at the Pan Pacific Championships a year earlier using the same base. It was laidback, had a good 50m outdoor pool and the New Zealand group relished the environment.

Upon arrival in Atlanta, thoughts turned to what Loader might be capable of.

“We always felt the 400m (was his better event),” Bone says. “We wondered in the 200m, did he have enough speed? We always knew he had enough endurance and when he was able to kick and get into the last part he was pretty dynamic, so we were confident about the 400m.”

Atlanta Olympics 1996 - 200m freestyle final Photo: Getty Images

Danyon Loader NZ	Gustavo Borges Brazil	Daniel Kowalski Australia
1:47.63 s	1:48.08 s	1:48.25 s

At his press conference afterwards there was a goose-like performance from New Zealand’s then Minister of Sport John Banks, who leapt to his feet and asked the first question of the conference: “What does it feel like to be a New Zealander and to have the greatest swimming coach in the world working with you?” Later, when quizzed about his gauche, patsy question, Banks quipped: “I’m used to asking the donkey-drop questions in another forum.”

As for Laing, it was too much.

“At the end of it, Duncan didn’t really identify whether Danyon had won,” Bone says.

“He was going ‘did we win, did we win?’ Brett (assistant coach Naylor) said ‘yeah he won’. And Duncan just started crying. This was a big man and the emotion was just too much for him. Seeing a man of that stature burst into tears ...”

The day before the 400m, this writer approached Laing for a chat through the mesh netting at the training pool, looking for a quote for a preview. What were Loader’s chances of completing a golden double, Laing was asked.

He ummed and aahed a few seconds, pawed the ground with a foot, reluctant to offer much. Then he fixed his inquisitor with a beady eye: “I’ll tell you this, if he’s within a length of the lead when they turn for home no one will catch him.”

So it proved, except Loader was in the lead turning into the final lap and simply extended that, holding off Briton Paul Palmer beside him, winning in 3:47.97. It was a more emphatic victory than the 200m and when he had the second gold medal placed around his neck there was no question Loader had been one of the stellar achievers in the Atlanta pool.

Atlanta Olympics 1996 - 400m freestyle final Photo: Getty Images

Danyon Loader NZ	Paul Palmer Britain	Daniel Kowalski Australia
3:47.97 s	3:49.00 s	3:49.39 s

His rivals were unstinting in their praise for the pony-tailed Kiwi. “I knew by the 200m mark of the 400m final that Danyon couldn’t be beaten,” said Australia’s then world champion and record-holder Kieran Perkins, who had failed to qualify out of the Australian trials. “He can beat any swimmer in the world if the field isn’t more than half a body length ahead at that stage. I include myself in that. Danyon is so good you can’t afford to give him even a sniff over the final stages.”

Palmer called him a phenomenal swimmer.

“He has the best finish I’ve seen. He is amazingly strong. I’d hate to think what work he does in training.”

Or this from American Tom Dolan, who had recorded the fastest time of the year, pre-Games but who also missed making the final: “He’s a one-in-a-million swimmer. He’s casual and seems laidback, but in the water he’s a killer.”