Brad Cooper
Cooper in 1972
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| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Bradford Paul Cooper |
| Nickname(s) | "Brad" |
| National team | Australia |
| Born |
19 July 1954 Singapore |
| Height | 1.60 m (5 ft 3 in) |
| Weight | 72 kg (159 lb) |
| Sport | |
| Sport | Swimming |
| Strokes | Freestyle, backstroke |
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Medal record
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Bradford Paul Cooper (born 19 July 1954) is an Australian former freestyle and backstroke swimmer of the 1970s, who won a gold medal in the 400 m freestyle at the 1972 Summer Olympics. In that race he originally finished second by the smallest margin ever to decide an Olympic swimming final (one hundredth of a second), but was later awarded the gold medal after the victor, American Rick DeMont, an asthmatic, was disqualified when his urine alysis tested positive for traces of the banned stimulant ephedrine.
The second of three brothers, Cooper was born in Singapore but 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 with their mother. For the next three years his father 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 fifteen schools and train under ten coaches, briefly including 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 briefly in contention for that year's Commonwealth Games team.
Cooper then moved to Sydney, where he trained with Don Talbot. This paid dividends at the 1971 Australian Championships, when he won both the 100 m and 200 m backstroke, the latter in an Australian record time. He also came second in the 400 m freestyle behind fellow Talbot swimmer Graham Windeatt, surpassing the previous Australian record. This earned Cooper selection for a national team to tour Europe for competitive experience.
In January 1972, Cooper hit the headlines when he broke the 800 m freestyle world record. Within a month, at the Australian Championships in Brisbane, he won the 400 m and 1500 m freestyle events and the 100 m and 200 m backstroke, showing versatility over a large range of distances. This included a world record in the 400 m freestyle, while his 1500 m freestyle time was only 0.6s outside the world record. He was went to Munich as one of the favourites in both the 400 m and 1500 m freestyle events.
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