Australian Olympic swimmer Elijah Winnington has defended his coach Michael Palfrey. The Sunshine Coast trainer was fired Thursday from his coaching job over pro-Korea comments he made at the Olympic Games.
Winnington told Olympic broadcaster Channel Nine during the Olympics that he “couldn’t care less” about Palfrey’s comments about Kim Woo-min.
“Mick’s come and apologised,” Winnington said at the time.
“I don’t think he meant what he said. He’s a great guy and a great coach. Obviously (Kim) Woo-min trains with him but he’s come up to me and knows he didn’t mean what he said. At the end of the day, it’s just a comment, and I’m here to race the best I can. There’s no animosity among the team. It’s all good.”
Still, Australian head coach Rohan Taylor foretold the move in real time when he said that Palfrey’s statements were a “very bad error of judgement” and that “the consequences for that will be coming in the future when we get back home.”
Kim wound up finishing 3rd in the 400 free, one spot behind Winnington, who took silver.
Prior to the start of the Games, Palfrey, who works with Korean 400m free ace Kim Woo-min in addition to Dolphins at USC Spartans, said of that event’s prospects in Paris, “I think it’s going to come down to that last 100 meters.
“We need Woomin to lift, that’s what I’ll be saying to him. He’s got to race tough.”
He also reportedly stated, “Go Korea” in the interview with Korean journalists.
This is not Australian Swimming’s first row over the international activities of their coaches. Denis Cotterell was famously under fire for his coaching of Chinese athletes, including Olympic gold medalist Sun Yang. In 2020, Cotterell dropped his relationship with the Chinese Swimming Association and said he would not support Sun’s final appeal over an anti-doping rules violation after previously backing the distance ace. He said he believed that Sun was clean, and specifically that he thought Sun was just as clean as another former Cotterell athlete: Grant Hackett.
While it is common around the world for top swimming nations to train athletes from other countries (the US, UK, and Germany all had coaches train international swimmers en route to Olympic gold medals in the last quad), in Australia’s tightly-controlled centralized system, there has generally been less political and professional freedom to do so.
