Finest Gold

de Brad Cooper

We journey from Brad’s childhood in 1960s Rockhampton, where his acid-tongued mother feeds a pining for her glamorous ex-pat days by holding Latin nights and smoking Craven ‘A’, via his parents’ vicious split, to an itinerant adolescence with his amnesiac, portent-driven father, where the only constant is the relentless search for training lanes as the pair pinball up and down Australia’s east coast, from boarding house to sleep-out. At fifteen, with the Munich Olympics looming, Brad teams up with the legendary and fearsome coach Don Talbot, aka Ming the Merciless; his career is about to step into overdrive with two world records and an Olympic gold medal, but it would take the rest of his life to work out what it all meant.