HARRY GALLAGHER (AUS)
1984 Honor Coach
FOR THE RECORD: Australian & Canadian Coach; Olympic Games: 1956, 1960, 1964, 1968 (9 gold, 6 silver, 3 bronze); BRITISH COMMONWEALTH GAMES: 12 gold, 6 siler, 3 bronze); AUSTRALIAN CHAMPIONSHIPS: 201; WORLD RECORD holders: 52; Author of Harry Gallagher On Swimming and How to Sprint the Crawl.
Harry Gallagher was to Dawn Fraser what Bill Bachrach in a different time was to Johnny Weissmuller. Both Harry and "Bach" had many other Olympic swimmers, but based alone on their handling of what may have been the two most tempestuous top male and female swimmers of all time, these two coaches deserve their place in the International Swimming Hall of Fame.
And then there are Harry's other credentials--three of Australia's most successful Olympic teams, working with exercise physiologists as early as 1953, his two successful swimming books and his always hopeful but unpublished mystery novel, his painting and his eight years as an age-group coach in Canada.
On the lighter side, he pushed a hospital bed 320 miles from Adelaide to Port Pirie in an fundraising effort for the heart Fund. "I've always been pushed for money!" says Harry.
Harry has coached swimming more than 30 years, turning out such Hall of Famers as the "fastest afloat" Jon Henricks and Dawn Fraser, and Olympic performers Brad Cooper, Lyn McClements, Steve Holland and Graham White. His swimmers won nine Olympic Sprint titles. Harry's motto is "teach them before you train them."
As Sir Edgar Tanner phrased it in the forward to the book Harry Gallagher on Swimming, "The 'Fox' of Fox-under-the-Hill, Donvale, Australia, fashions his pupils in a graceful style that brings speed, beauty of action, and develops determination and the will to win."
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