Australian Olympic swimmer Elijah Winnington has defended 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.
If your national pride is so easily offended then you really got to look in the mirror
I really hope this global flair up of jingoism can get put back in the nasty hole from wence it came, just feels like were watching a slow motion trainwreck of history repeating with paranoid conspiracies leading to witchhunts
Is the slow motion train wreck of history repeating with paranoid conspiracies leading to witch hunts in the room with us?
This statement is kinda funny given the reaction to cate campbells comments. Seriously.
Sport Australia is the entity specifically mandated to fund Australia’s Olympic medal table aspirations.
If it disapproved of funded coaches like Palfrey training aliens, surely it would contractually prohibit them from doing so — or at least bar them from coaching Olympic teams.
Palfrey’s Paris comments seemed merely spontaneous expressions of support for his .Korean swimmer. And his quip of “Go Korea” specifically for a Korean TV audience seemed perfectly in line with Olympic ideals like international fellowship.
For Swimming Australia to come down so hard on him smacks of political expediency and has feint echoes of a Stasi-infested Cold War sporting juggernaut.
Swimming Australia itself still owes a huge public explanation for how a corporate… Read more »
Is she a corporate sponsor or an individual philanthropist? Genuine question…I thought that she was “donating” funds to SA via a trust/charity?? It does change things a bit- not in a good way because, when it’s a corporation giving funds (sponsoring), it usually is more hands-off (eg. Big banks, etc.). In her case, it reminds me of John DuPont in Foxcatcher!!
Regardless, if she had a direct hand in getting this poor guy fired, it’s big-time meddling. That’s the challenge with letting this sort of person into the inner sanctum of an organization. You can’t say “no” often times and then you have the perception of impropriety, poor governance and shoddy leadership that cow tows to the almighty dollar.
People with that much money are a corporation unto themselves.
At the Olympics during the athlete procession after the medal ceremony I yelled to Elijah, “silver medal in the Olympics, way to go,” and he said “right on,” back to me. I thought it was cool.