This article is about the Australian swimmer. For the Bahamanian discus thrower see Bradley Cooper (athlete), for the disgraced Sydney businessman see HIH InsuranceBradford Paul "Brad" Cooper (born 19 July 1954 in Singapore) was an Australian freestyle and backstroke swimmer of the 1970s, who won a gold medal in the 400 m freestyle at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. In that race he originally finished second by the smallest margin ever to decide an Olympic swimming final (one hundredth of a second), but was later awarded the gold medal after the victor, American Rick DeMont, an asthmatic, was disqualified for taking the banned stimulant ephedrine.The second of three brothers, Cooper moved with his family to Rockhampton, Queensland at the age of five. There, his father was the manager of a cinema centre and the family also water skied on weekends. The Cooper brothers all learned to swim early and joined the Rockhampton Swimming Club, but it was Brad who shone from the start, winning his first Central Queensland medals at age seven. After his parents divorced when he was twelve, Cooper lived with his father while his brothers stayed their mother. For the next three years his father inexplicably entered an unsettled phase, during which time he and Brad lived in a dozen men's boarding houses and hostels in Brisbane and Sydney. This disrupted his education and coaching: he would attend no less than fifteen schools and train under ten different coaches,including - for a few weeks - John Konrads, himself a prolific world-record breaking swimmer and Olympic gold medallist. In 1970, at age 15, at the national open championships, Cooper came second in both the 100 m and 200 m backstroke, putting him brielfy in contention for that year's Commonwealth Games team.Cooper then joined the substantial Queensland swimming diaspora to the hugely successful Sydney swimming scene, where he boarded with several families and trained with Don Talbot. This paid dividends at the 1971 Australian Championships, when he won both the 100 m and 200 m backstroke, the latter in an Australian record time. He also came second in the 400 m freestyle behind fellow Talbot swimmer Graham Windeatt, surpassing the previous Australian record. This earned Cooper selection for a national team to tour Europe for competitive experience.In January 1972, Cooper hit the headlines when he broke the 800 m freestyle world record. Within a month, at the Australian Championships in Brisbane, he won the 400 m and 1500 m freestyle events and the 100 m and 200 m backstroke, showing versatility over a large range of distances. This included a world record in the 400 m freestyle, while his 1500 m freestyle time was only 0.6s outside the world record. He was went to Munich as one of the favourites in both the 400 m and 1500 m freestyle events.In the 400 m event, Cooper contested the race with DeMont and West Germany's Werner Lampe who attacked immediately. In the end Lampe faded, and DeMont touch
$18 Million
