Fun at the Games

Odd the way athletes get into trouble. Last week Dawn Fraser, the best woman swimmer in the world, was suspended for ten years by the Australian Swimming Union--for writing a book.

Some book. Titled Below the Surface: The Confessions of an Olympic Champion (William Morrow; $5), it has the splash of a poolside Peyton Place. "Olympic morals," Dawn confides, "are far more loose than any outsider would expect. There's material in the average Olympic Village for a thesis which might earn any budding Kinsey a Ph.D." Dawn should know. She's been going to the Olympics since 1956 --and taking notes, apparently, all the while.

Trade on the Track. Consider, for instance, her statement that the Japanese and Swedish teams regularly "provided girl partners for athletes who felt they needed their attentions." Or that Melbourne prostitutes at the 1956 Olympics "plied their trade mainly on the Village training track." Or that the favorite spot for "cuddling" at the 1958 British Empire Games in Cardiff, Wales, was St. Athan's Royal Air Force camp, where "strollers in the area usually ran the risk of tripping over somebody." Not that Dawn frowns on a little fun at the Games. "I'm no prude," she says, and after all, "swimmers have few delusions about the nature of the human anatomy."

Next to sex, says Dawn, "souvenir-ing" is the most popular Olympic pastime. After those same 1958 Empire Games, there was a reception at which Australian lady athletes "hitched up their skirts and tucked silver pepper and salt shakers and crystal wineglasses into the tops of their stockings or inside their girdles." Flags are particularly coveted: at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Dawn herself stole a five-ring Olympic banner from the Imperial Palace Grounds, was tackled by pursuing cops as she tried to dive into the palace moat. When police found out who she was, they made her a present of the flag. And how about the poor Japanese traveling salesman who committed the error of parking outside the Aussie dorm--only to discover later that -L-400 ($1,120) worth of transistor radios had disappeared from his car?

Selling the Evidence. Dawn, 27, has always had a flair for making waves, in the pool and out. The strapping (5 ft. 9 in., 150 Ibs.) daughter of a Sydney shipwright, now married to a bookmaker, she has broken 36 world records, won four Olympic gold medals. She was the first woman to crack 1 min. for the 110-yd. free style, the only swimmer of either sex to win the same event (the 100 meters) in three successive Olympic competitions. ("If I had been able to swim nude," she says, "I'm sure I would have broken the minute much earlier than I did.")

Dawn has also been suspended twice before by the Swimming Union--"the Colonel Blimps of swimming," she says. Cheerfully admitting an "affection for a jug of beer," she switched to wine to celebrate her 23rd birthday, while traveling from Rome to Naples after the 1960 Olympics. That night at an exhibition meet, feeling "a little tipsy," she plunged into the pool splashed 100 meters, surfaced--and discovered that she was swimming in a 200-meter race. The resulting suspension was lifted in time to let her compete in the 1964 Olympics, where she did her bit to annoy officials even further by disobeying orders not to march in the opening-day parade. She also refused to wear her regulation Olympic swimsuit because it was "too tight across my bust."

Australian sports officials, writes Dawn, "generally are not noted for the firmness of their principles." Maybe not, but they seemed firm enough last week. Dawn announced that she would fight the suspension in court. "I'm not going to take this lying down," she insisted. The Swimming Union said nothing about her position. Why should it? The evidence was in all the bookshops, selling briskly.

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