Mark TONELLI

Mark Tonelli took up swimming to ease his asthma. He made his international début at the 1973 World Championships, where he finished a surprising sixth in the 200 m backstroke. In 1974, Tonelli won the 100 backstroke, 200 butterfly, 4x200 m freestyle relay, and medley relay titles and was selected to the 1974 Australian Commonwealth Games team. At the Games, Tonelli won gold in the 100 back, and silvers in 200 back and the medley relay. In 1975 Tonelli won the 100 backstroke, 200 back, 200 fly, and the medley relay at the Australian Championships and also competed at the 1975 World Championships, finishing second in the 200 back. After the World Championships, Tonelli enrolled at the University of Alabama, studying Communications and Film.

At the 1976 Australian championships Tonelli won only the 100 backstroke, but it was enough to qualify him for the 1976 Australian Olympic team. At the Olympics, he finished a disappointing fourth in the 200 back and was eighth at 100 back. In 1977, he won the 100 backstroke at the US Open Championships, becoming one of the few Australians to win a US title. In 1978 Tonelli was chosen as captain of the 1978 Australian Commonwealth swimming team, but was expelled from the team shortly before the Games, because Tonelli and two of his teammates, Mark Kerry and Joe Dixon, broke curfew on American Independence Day while at training camp in Honolulu, Hawai’i. According to Tonelli, Kerry was with a girl he had met, while Tonelli and Dixon had been drinking and smoking marijuana, which was not illegal in Hawai’i at the time.

In 1979 Tonelli graduated from the University of Alabama and returned to Australia, winning the 100 freestyle, butterfly and backstroke events at the 1979 Australian Championships. The following year, he repeated the freestyle and butterfly victories to gain selection for the 1980 Olympics, but then another obstacle occurred. Due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, several Western counties decided to boycott the Moscow Olympics and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who was also the patron of the Australian Olympic Committee, felt significant political pressure to also boycott. Tonelli took a leadership role among the Australian athletes, fighting for their right to compete, and adopting populist tactics in championing the athletes’ cause, saying that only the athletes would suffer and that trade relations would continue unabated, saying that Fraser was sending “wheat to feed the Russian army, wool to clothe the army and Australian metal to make Russian guns.” Tonelli finally got his wishes as Australia competed at Moscow, although with a clause that if individual athletes did not wish to compete, they did not have to, which left many Australian top athletes at home. At the Olympics, Tonelli finished seventh in the 100 back before winning a medley relay gold medal.

Tonelli retired from competitive swimming after the 1980 Olympics, and started to work as a sports administrator, completing a term on the Australian Sports Commission. Tonelli was an expert swimming commentator at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics for Australian national television and since 2004 he has been a swimming commentator on Sky News Australia. Outside swimming, he worked at a children’s cerebral palsy hospital in Brisbane in the 1980s before opening his own swimming school. He later worked as a real estate agent and corporate speaker.

Personal Bests: 100 m freestyle – 51.80 (1980); 200 m freestyle – 1:53.99 (1980); 100 m backstroke – 57.89 (1980); 200 m backstroke – 2:03.17 (1980); 100 m butterfly – 56.64 (1980).