Who is Australia’s greatest Olympian? It’s bound to start an argument

Can of worms alert: who is Australia’s greatest Olympian?

The question arises now because this decade has produced three new entrants to the conversation, Jessica Fox, Ariarne Titmus and Kaylee McKeown. Here’s the first debatable point. Only three? As many as three?

My starting point is that the crown is Cathy Freeman’s to lose. I’ve narrowed the field to a top 12, including Freeman. Aptly in light of Australia’s Olympic record, it consists of seven women and five men.

With apologies to James Tomkins and Rachelle Hawkes, I’ve excluded team sports. The brief is to identify the greatest Olympian, singular.

But here’s another hitch: six on this shortlist are swimmers, whose bodies of work are bulked out by relays. American Jenny Thompson won eight Olympic gold medals, only one fewer than Carl Lewis, Katie Ledecky and Mark Spitz. But Thompson’s all were in relays, hence her lesser legend. This is going to get harder before it gets easier.

Let’s acknowledge this: there is no way to make an objective comparison. That’s because it’s incontrovertible that some sports and events weigh more in the public imagination than others. As it happens, 10 of the 12 are from swimming and athletics. Historically, these have been at the core of Australia’s Olympic mission and arguably (that word again) still are. For now. The exceptions are Fox and cyclist Anna Meares.

Necessarily, any judgment will be in part visceral. The scale against which all are measured slides in every direction. It’s a Rubik’s cube.

How big is the sport? How prized? Swimmers are giants in their pool, but the pool for some track and field athletes is as wide as the world. It’s an irresolvable debate, in session again here in Paris.

Is an event classic or niche? How to stand up 400-metre runner Freeman against backstroker Kaylee McKeown for instance? How to set Andrew Hoy’s vast career in equestrian against Fox’s canoe title defence here in Paris?

How many medals were and are available to win in a given sport? Swimmer Michael Phelps is by far the most prolific medal winner in Olympic history with 28, but next on the list with 23 is a Russian gymnast, Larisa Natynina. You’re forgiven for not knowing.

Some sports are suspected of tricking up their programs to deliver more medals and so more gravitas. Weightlifting was one, swimming is one. In swimming and athletics, mixed relays now muddy the waters further. Emma McKeon has a bigger swag of medals than any other Australian, but more than half were in relays.

How, when considering Dawn Fraser, Betty Cuthbert and Shirley Strickland, to allow for effluxion of time and the dulling of memory with no internet archive to assist? Arguably (sorry) they had fewer rivals to beat, but also fewer races to win. Olympians, like the rest of us, can only live in their time.

In the same way, the careers of Titmus, McKeown and Fox are not yet over and so can only be subject to history’s interim judgment.

How to compare the apples of a soaring moment with the oranges of longevity? Freeman and the peerless miler Herb Elliott won one gold medal each, as did Liesel Jones, but live on in the nation’s heart in a way you suspect some with more spoils will not. That’s not to cheapen their feats; it’s just the way the world works.

Swimmer Shane Gould won three individual golds in the only Olympics in which she ever competed. She was 16. How to rate that against the tireless perseverance of Fox, now at her fourth Olympics, for instance?

The might of opposition cannot be ignored. Thorpe took down a young Phelps, the greatest male swimmer of all. Titmus twice outgunned Ledecky, the greatest female. There’s also circumstantial adversary. Kieren Perkins gets into this discussion for his epic lane eight 1500 metres win in Atlanta alone.

Then there are the intangibles. Style and aesthetics must count for something in sport, or else it is just number-crunching. So must degree of difficulty. So must grace, on the field of play and off, since Olympism rightly places great store by such things. How poised was Ian Thorpe when the world’s eyes were fixed on him in Sydney? He was 17.

Underpinning all this is our faith that none of our legends were tainted by drugs. And it is faith.

I’m here to start an argument, not end one, so for what it’s worth, I think that Titmus can now be talked about in the same breath as Thorpe and that Fox might in time usurp both in the public imagination.

But none yet have dethroned Freeman. It’s hard to imagine that any athlete in history has had to carry so many candles at once, for her sport, for her people, for her country.

She was charged with both launching the Sydney Games and effectively crowning them on that indelibly memorable night. Either mission by itself would have wholly absorbed and possibly overwhelmed anyone else, but she pulled off both. She might not yet know how, but she did. She’ll take some catching.

From one to 12:

Cathy Freeman, Ian Thorpe, Jess Fox, Dawn Fraser, Kieren Perkins, Ariarne Titmus, Shane Gould, Herb Elliott, Betty Cuthbert, Kaylee McKeown, Anna Meares, Emma McKeon.

There’s an argument to say that distance swimmer Murray Rose should be on this list. There’s always an argument. This one might end up in the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

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