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Thorpe Has 1904 Company On AUS Olympic Medal Count
Craig Lord
Feb 27, 2009

2009 Best Performances

1500 METRES FREESTYLE

#CountryTimeNameIPSMeet
1TUN14:37.28Mellouli, Oussama1007WORLDJUL
2CAN14:41.38Cochrane, Ryan1000WORLDJUL
3CHN14:46.84Sun, Yang991WORLDJUL
4CHN14:47.51Zhang, Lin990CHNLCAPR
5ITA14:48.28Colbertaldo, Federico989WORLDJUL

Move over Thorpey, we read Down Under: the holder of Australia's largest haul of individual men's medals from a single Olympics is one Francis Gailey. Note "medals" - not gold. On that most important of counts, Ian Thorpe reigns on.

He also matches Gailey (someone just got the maths wrong). Reports Down Under tells us that, more than a century after Gailey was painted in Stars and Stripes of the USA on his way to silver medals in the 220, 440 and 880 yards freestyle and bronze in the mile at the 1904 Olympic Games in St Louis, his true Aussie nationality has been confirmed and Olympic history corrected.

His feat is reported to have knocked Thorpey off the overall medals at one Games perch - but someone must have counted wrong: Thorpe won four medals at Sydney 2000 - silver 200m, gold 400m freestyle, 4x100m freestyle, 4x200m freestyle  - then considered the biggest medal haul for an Aussie man in the pool before Gailey's birthright was claimed for him.

The greatest Australian Olympic performance remains that of "Die Goldfish" Shane Gould, who in Munich in 1972 won five medals, three of them gold - all those in world records times and all five medals in solo events. It might have been five golds but for the fact that her coach and sports science pioneer Forbes Carlile was denied the chance to accompany his charge at a time when swimming officialdom placed more store in their own place on the team bus and cocktail lounge rather than in the value of coaching.

Brisbane-born Gailey was listed as an American and the mistake was perpetuated for more than century until his true nationality was discovered by Olympic historians. Gailey's medals, now credited to Australia, increase the nation's total at summer Olympics to 449 - 135 gold, 144 silver and 170 bronze. As if they needed the boost...

The Australian Olympic Committee's official historian Harry Gordon described record-keeping at both the 1900 Paris and 1904 St Louis Games as "haphazard". The official records of the Olympic Games from the time  will always have Gailey down as "USA" and that record is not exactly inaccurate in this sense: the 22-year-old (in 1904) wore the colours of the Olympic Club of San Francisco at the Games. However, while he settled in the US in 1906, he did not become a US citizen until the 1920s.

Until now, it had been thought that the only Australian to compete in the 1904 Games was hurdler Corrie Gardner.