John Davies (swimmer)
| Personal information | |||||||||||||
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| Full name | John Griffith Davies | ||||||||||||
| National team |
 Australia
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| Born |
17 May 1929 Willoughby, New South Wales |
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| Sport | |||||||||||||
| Sport | Swimming | ||||||||||||
| Strokes | Breaststroke | ||||||||||||
| College team | University of Michigan | ||||||||||||
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Medal record
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John Griffith Davies (born 17 May 1929) is an Australian breaststroke swimmer of the 1940s and 1950s who won a gold medal in the 200-metre breaststroke at the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki. After retiring from competition swimming, he became a prominent lawyer in California, and after becoming a naturalized American, he was appointed a judge of the United States District Court by Ronald Reagan in 1986, and presided over the trial of the Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with assaulting Rodney King.
Growing up in Willoughby, Sydney, where his father was an accountant and his mother a nurse, Davies learnt to swim at the tidal pool in Northbridge, where he enjoyed competing against his friends. He and his brother spent their teenage years separated from their father, who joined the Royal Australian Air Force and was a Japanese prisoner of war for three years. Davies left Narrabeen High School in 1945 and worked for the Caltex oil company, who often granted him leave to compete at swimming competitions. He entered and won both breaststroke events at the 1946 New South Wales Championships held at Manly.
Davies began to train under Forbes Carlile in 1947 and won the 220yd breaststroke at the Australian Championships, as well as helping New South Wales to win the 3x110yd medley relay. He repeated these victories at the 1948 Australian Championships, earning selection for the 1948 Summer Olympics in London at the age of 19. In the lead up to the Games, he won two races in London. Davies came second in his heat and fourth in his semifinal with an Australian record 2m 44.8s to qualify for the final of the 200m breaststroke. Davies set a new Australian record in the final, recording a time of 2m 43.7s. Although his time was recorded by the timekeepers to be 0.2s faster than the bronze medallist R Sohl of the United States, the judges believed that Sohl had touched first and awarded him the bronze.
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