Brad Cooper

Who is Brad Cooper?

Bradford Paul Cooper was an Australian freestyle and backstroke swimmer of the 1970s, who won a gold medal in the 400 m freestyle at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. In that race he originally finished second by the smallest margin ever to decide an Olympic swimming final, but was later awarded the gold medal after the victor, American Rick DeMont, an asthmatic, was disqualified for taking the banned stimulant ephedrine.

The second of three brothers, Cooper moved with his family to Rockhampton, Queensland at the age of five. There, his father was the manager of a cinema centre and the family also water skied on weekends. The Cooper brothers all learned to swim early and joined the Rockhampton Swimming Club, but it was Brad who shone from the start, winning his first Central Queensland medals at age seven. After his parents divorced when he was twelve, Cooper lived with his father while his brothers stayed their mother. For the next three years his father inexplicably entered an unsettled phase, during which time he and Brad lived in a dozen men's boarding houses and hostels in Brisbane and Sydney. This disrupted his education and coaching: he would attend no less than fifteen schools and train under ten different coaches,including - for a few weeks - John Konrads, himself a prolific world-record breaking swimmer and Olympic gold medallist. In 1970, at age 15, at the national open championships, Cooper came second in both the 100 m and 200 m backstroke, putting him brielfy in contention for that year's Commonwealth Games team.