The Quietly Confident Quartet was the Australian men’s 4 × 100 metres medley relay swimming team that won the gold medal at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The quartet consisted of backstroker Mark Kerry, breaststroker Peter Evans, butterflyer Mark Tonelli and freestyler Neil Brooks. The group disbanded after the Olympics due to Tonelli’s retirement.
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The Quietly Confident Quartet was the Australian men’s 4 × 100 metres medley relay swimming team that won the gold medal at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. The United States boycotted the Moscow Olympics in protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The quartet consisted of backstroker Mark Kerry, breaststroker Peter Evans, butterflyer Mark Tonelli and freestyler Neil Brooks. The team was seen as an unlikely prospect to win; all four of the swimmers had clashed with swimming authorities over disciplinary issues and three experienced suspension or expulsion from the Australian team during their careers. The group disbanded after the Olympics due to Tonelli’s retirement, although some of the members continued to be present in the relay team at various times alongside new swimmers. By 1986, all four members of the 1980 team had retired from international competition. The Australian team for the event was a young and inexperienced foursome. All four members were from Western Australia, a state that had never been prominent in Australian swimming. 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’ human rights.
The team members had some contact prior to their Olympic selection; Brooks’ family had billeted Tonelli in 1976 when the Australian Olympic team held aTraining camp in Perth. 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. Tonelli was the oldest at the age of 23, followed byMark Kerry, who turned 21 a month after the Olympic Games. Both were from Perth and Tonelli had been out drinking and admitted to smoking marijuana, which was not illegal in Hawaii, while Kerry had been courting a female. Tonelli realised that only the Australian sportspeople would suffer from a boycott and he took a leadership role among the athletes, fighting for their right to compete. He was also a spokesperson for the Australian athletes’ campaign for theirRight to compete at the Olympics against the wishes of the Fraser Government. 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?” He was equally adamant that he was not going to compete, unlike some swimmers who decided to make personal offers from Australian officials. He decided to go to the Games, reflecting that the only ones to suffer would be us. He said: ”We were political tools, the only Ones to suffer us.’” It remains the only occasion the United States has not won the event at Olympic level since its inception in 1960.
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