Quietly Confident Quartet - Personnel

Personnel

The Australian team for the event was a young and inexperienced foursome. Mark Tonelli was the oldest at the age of 23, followed by Mark Kerry, who turned 21 a month after the Olympics. Both were attending their second Olympics, while Peter Evans and Neil Brooks were 18 and 17 respectively and had never represented Australia at the Commonwealth, World Championship or Olympic level. Evans and Brooks were from Western Australia, a state that had never been prominent in Australian swimming. The team members had some contact prior to their Olympic selection; Brooks' family had billeted Tonelli in 1976 when the Australian Olympic team held a training camp in Perth. Brooks cited his experience with Tonelli as a motivating factor in his career.

The quartet was also marked by rebellious and anti-establishment tendencies. Tonelli and Kerry were expelled from the 1978 Commonwealth Games team by the Australian Swimming Union for violating a curfew during a training camp in Hawaii before the team's trip to Edmonton, Canada for the competition; Tonelli had been out drinking and admitted to smoking marijuana, which was not illegal in Hawaii, while Kerry had been courting a female. In 1980 during the lead up to the selection of the Olympic team, Brooks walked out of a training camp, alleging that the coaches were neglecting him, while Evans once stopped during a training session and refused to do extra mileage, emphatically proclaiming that "work is a poor substitute for talent". Later in their careers, Evans and Brooks continued to have their clashes with swimming officialdom; Evans over his coaches' demands for more training mileage and Brooks over swimmers' rights. Brooks was later suspended twice in his career for his clashes with swimming authorities, and expelled from the Australian Institute of Sport for indiscipline.

The rebel qualities of the group were on show in the lead up to the Olympics. An obstacle arose with the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which resulted in a boycott of the Games by a large part of the Western world, led by the United States. The Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was also the patron of the Australian Olympic Committee, and he and sections of the public put significant political pressure on the athletes to join the boycott. Tonelli realised that only the sportspeople would suffer from a boycott and that trade relations would continue unabated. He took a leadership role among the athletes, fighting for their right to compete and publicising their cause to the Australian community. Evans was fully supportive of Tonelli's campaign, reflecting that "We were political tools, and the only ones to suffer would be us." He rhetorically asked: "Do you really think that if we didn't go someone would come up to us after the Games and pat us on the back for not going?"

Kerry was equally adamant that he was going to compete, unlike some swimmers who decided to make personal boycotts. He received offers from Australian officials to not compete in return for financial payments. He said

I felt the biggest statement we could make was to go to Moscow and show the world. If there was a total boycott, fine, but trade was still going on. It was disgusting. Why should the athletes be made to suffer?

According to women's swimming captain Lisa Forrest, Tonelli adopted populist tactics in championing the athletes' cause. He said that Fraser was sending "wheat to feed the Russian army, wool to clothe the army and Australian metal to make Russian guns", claiming that this contradicted the proposed protest against the invasion and Russian military aggression. Tonelli's anti-authoritarian and individualistic style manifested itself during media appearances, including a news interview in which he debated with Reverend Lance Shilton, who had called the athletes traitors. Shilton expressed sympathy for the athletes, which Tonelli interpreted as condescension. He responded by rolling his eyes and twirling his finger, a gaffe that was broadcast on national television; Tonelli mistakenly thought that only his voice was being shown at the time and that the images were showing something else. Forrest said that "the damage was done—one of our most prominent anti-boycott lobbyists ... looked like a smart alec".