Mark Tonelli

Mark Lyndon Tonelli is an Australian former backstroke, butterfly, and freestyle swimmer. He won a gold medal in the 4×100-metre medley relay at the 1980 Moscow Olympics as a makeshift butterfly swimmer in the self-named Quietly Confident Quartet. Tonelli retired with eleven individual Australian championships in three different strokes. He is the father of future 1500m freestyle world champion and 1500m world record holder Stephen Holland.

About Mark Tonelli in brief

Mark Lyndon Tonelli is an Australian former backstroke, butterfly, and freestyle swimmer. He won a gold medal in the 4×100-metre medley relay at the 1980 Moscow Olympics as a makeshift butterfly swimmer in the self-named Quietly Confident Quartet. Tonelli was born Mark Lyndon Leembruggen into a working-class family in Ipswich, a city 40 kilometres southwest of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland. His father Lyndon was a blue-collar worker of Dutch origin and his Irish mother Muriel worked in the Queensland Department of Industrial Relations. Muriel was pregnant with twins, but miscarried one of the babies and gave birth only to Mark. His family moved around frequently due to his stepfather’s work, before settling permanently in Brisbane. He was effectively an only child; his half-sister was not born until he was 14. A decade later, he discovered two half-brothers from his biological father’s remarriage. He retired with eleven individual Australian championships in three different strokes. He is the father of future 1500m freestyle world champion and 1500m world record holder Stephen Holland. He also has a son, Mark, who is a professional swimmer who competed in the 1970s and 1980s in the men’s 100 m and 200 m backstroke events. He has two step-sisters from his step-father, Renato Ray Tonelli, an Italian immigrant labourer who worked as a miner in the northern outback mining town of Mount Isa. His mother encouraged him to take up the sport to ease his asthma. At the age of 10, he was regularly winning school carnivals and at 11, came seventh in the 100 M freestyle in his division before winning the event at the Queensland Championships the following year.

At 16, Tonelli won his first Australian titles in 1974. In 1975, he won his only individual medal at global level, a silver in the 200 M backstroke at the World Championships in Cali, Colombia. He went on to compete at the University of Alabama in the United States, studying and competing in the collegiate sport system. During his stay in America, he set times that would have placed him among the world’s leading swimmers, but he was expelled from the 1978 Commonwealth Games team for breaches of discipline. He returned to Australia and gained selection for his second Olympics. He performed above his previous record, posting a time fast enough to winSilver in the corresponding individual event and helping Australia to an unexpected win. He said that his greatest motivation was his desire to better his swimming times and their times were roughly 10% shorter than those in Australia, and that he could not understand his competitors’ desire to match his times. In the 1980s, he fought for the right of Australian Olympians to compete in the face of a government call for a boycott to protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He made little impact in the individual events, only reaching one final. In his first year, he came third in his age group at Western Districts Club.

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