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Grant Hackett Second To The Wall

Editorial Review

Editorial Review

If Kieren Perkins rewrote the book on the 1500 metres freestyle - borrowing from those that had been written before by the likes of Murray Rose and Vladimir Salnikov - Grant Hackett turned it into a movie.

Australia has been fortunate to boast some of the world's best swimmers of every era for at least the past 100 years and, in some cases, they are among the best-known Australians anywhere in the world.

That is undoubtedly the case with Hackett, who took over from Perkins as the world's best long-distance pool swimmer after the 1996 Olympics and raised the bar repeatedly over the subsequent dozen years.

In the meantime, he managed to win 10 World Championship gold medals, including four in his pet event, set world records (he still holds for both the 800m and 1500m freestyle) and win three Olympic titles (one as a member of the 4x200m relay team in Sydney).

At 196 cm tall (six-foot-five in the old language) he is an imposing figure, and with a relatively extroverted personality - particularly by comparison with his old mate and sparring partner Ian Thorpe - Hackett is one of the faces of Australian sport.

On top of all that, he is a gentleman and a sportsman, as magnanimous in defeat as in victory.

That package partly prompted Swimming Australia to reinstate the position of team captain a couple of years ago and Hackett has been the man for the job ever since, even when he was recovering from injury and not even competing.

After inspirational performances to win the 1500 metres gold medals at the Sydney and Athens Olympics, only a very mean-spirited person would have wished against him making history with a third in Beijing.

It wasn't a mean-spirited person that denied him what perhaps would have proved the ultimate accolade to draw the curtain on his illustrious career, but a 24-year-old from Tunisia who just wanted that Olympic gold medal for himself.

So does being beaten by little more than half-a-second at the end of a 14-and-a-half-minute race diminish the Hackett legacy in any way? Or does it somehow add to the legend?

Time will tell.

Murray Brust in Beijing for Citysearch

View Citysearch's TV guide for details of Olympic Games coverage.