John Dowling Coates is not a religious man but would identify with the biblical quote: “No-one is a prophet in his own country.” Just as the citizens of Jesus’s hometown, Nazareth, could not bring themselves to acknowledge his greatness, so it is that Dowling - as I call him - is more highly regarded overseas than in Australia, particularly Victoria.

As an IOC Vice President, he has sat at the right hand of President Thomas Bach, advising on some of the key decisions in world sport, such as the banning of Russia from Olympic competition for state sponsored systematic doping, following revelations of breaches at the Sochi Winter Olympics. He is President of world sport’s ultimate judicial body, the Court of Arbitration for Sport, as well as chair of the IOC’s Legal Affairs Commission. It was in this latter role that he addressed the IOC Executive post-Sochi on the concept of “individual versus collective responsibility,” a key issue in whether it was fair to ban innocent Russian athletes.

The IOC obviously values his organising skills as much as his ability to speak fluent legalese, appointing him a member of the 2012 London and 2016 Rio Olympic Games Coordination Commissions. He was subsequently elevated to chair the Tokyo 2020 Coordination Committee which successfully ran the most challenged Games in recent history: the Covid postponed Tokyo 2020 Olympics. He was indispensable during the pandemic, required at zoom meetings of the Lausanne home of the IOC and most of the
Summer Olympic International Federations, maintaining hours rivalled only by a 7/Eleven shopkeeper.

I admit I am a disciple of a man who is under-acknowledged in his own land. This is despite my being a target of his wrath more than 40 years ago when he was a sideline eye on ABC Radio’s “around the grounds” coverage of the Sydney rugby league competition and I was coach of the Western Suburbs Magpies. He pilloried me on the airwaves for tolerating “minor” breaches of the rules, such as Bruce “Sloth” Gibbs treading on the delicate hands of an over-paid Eastern Suburbs rugby union recruit from a private school.

We later served on the board of the Australian Sports Commission together and I witnessed his leadership during the 11 Olympic Games I covered for the Sydney Morning Herald. In a recent piece in the SMH, I noted NRL club Wests Tigers hoped he would chair their board but he declined, owing to his multiple AOC and IOC duties. It prompted a reader to comment: “I like Roy Masters and his writing but his paeans to John Coates are doing my head in.”

However, I am not alone in his supporters from his own land. Australia’s top politicians and businessmen value his talents. A quartet of Australian Prime Ministers – Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard – were his four referees when nominated for the nation’s highest honour, a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC).

The fact he was bestowed an AC in 2006 at age 56, a relatively young age for such a major award, reflects highly on his achievements. Gough became acquainted with him when they toured 10 African countries over 30 days seeking their votes for Sydney to be chosen as host of the 2000 Olympics. They met with heads of state of these countries, as well as Nelson Mandela, soon to become President of a post-apartheid South Africa. Africa was a significant challenge considering Chinese aid had poured into the continent, and Sydney beat Beijing - by one vote. Hawke appointed him deputy chair of the Australian Sports Commission, the federal government’s funding and policy arm, while Keating, as Treasurer and later PM, provided then record funding to Olympic sports.

Howard was the incumbent PM when Sydney hosted the Summer Olympics, effectively run by the powerful duo of SOCOG chair, Michael Knight and Coates. They are still regarded as “the best Games ever,” the words of then IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch. Yet, within 11 years of being awarded an AC, forces assembled against him to remove him as AOC President, a post he had held since 1990. It was largely driven by Victorian businessmen, politicians and sports administrators who supported the candidature of former gold medal winning Hockeyroo, Danni Roche. Perhaps they had never forgiven him for supporting Sydney’s candidature over Melbourne as host city for the 2000 Games. I witnessed a bitter confrontation between Dowling and the late Melbourne businessman John Elliott on the tennis court of the Australian Ambassador’s residence in Seoul following the Closing Ceremony of the 1988 Olympics. The combative Elliott, as boss of giant brewer, CUB, threatened to cancel the contracts of one of Dowling’s most prominent clients in his legal practice but the then 38 year old lawyer returned serve with lightning verbal volleys. (Years later, the billionaire Melbourne truckie, Lindsay Fox - one of Dowling’s few Victorian backers - invited him and Elliott on a Mediterranean cruise to celebrate Fox’s 80th birthday and the pair got on very convivially).

One of the targets of the Melbourne push was the AOC’s future fund, a nest egg bestowed on the national committee following the Sydney Games. Dowling had secured the inheritance from SOCOG chair Knight via sometimes bitter negotiations. By 2017, the funds in the accounts of the Australian Olympic Foundation had grown to approximately $150m, despite funding the nation’s Summer and Winter Olympic teams to Games every two years since 2000, as well as supporting all other AOC teams. Roche’s backers in cash strapped sports and the ASC saw it as an opportunity to top up funding from government, rather than find their own sponsors.

Having withstood the challenge, Dowling took steps to protect his legacy, creating a Guardians Committee of trusted life members. So, apart from annual distributions, it became impossible for monies to be released. Somewhat triumphant and perhaps provoking hostility, he declared at the first AOC annual election following his eventual victory over Roche, “Our guardians on the wall cannot be defeated by the barbarians at the gate.”

George Orwell’s observation that “all animals are equal but some are more equal than others” is relevant to the 2017 AOC AGM. Some of the big sports, such as Melbourne based swimming and tennis, supported Roche, as did rugby union and golf which he had championed in 2009 to be included on the Olympic program. This was despite the international federations of these sports all urging a vote for Coates, consistent perhaps with the view that he is a man more honoured abroad than in his own country. However, Dowling knew that all Olympic sports have equal voting rights. Furthermore, he had long believed Australia’s future is in Asia. So he met with the President of the Olympic Council of Asia, Sheik Ahmad Al-Sabah, in Vietnam, in September, 2016 guaranteeing Australia was a participant in the Asian Winter Games in Sapporo.

The performance of Australia’s team of 30 athletes delighted the father of winter sport in Australia, Geoff Henke, a loyal supporter of Coates and another rare Melburnian backing him. It led to Australia and other Oceania countries being invited to the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan in 2017. Nothing in the Olympic movement guarantees a vote more than a sport having its airfares and accommodation paid to an overseas tournament. The combined vote of the winter sports and the martial arts sports supporting Coates eclipsed the popular and highly visible ones opposing him. Nor did the sports which debuted in Sydney - triathlon, taekwondo and womens’ water polo – forget, despite having already repaid his faith with two gold medals and one silver at the 2000 Games.

In the book, “Sydney’s Silver Lining,” American author Kyle Utsumi writes, “Coates relentlessly wrote letters to FINA and the IOC – 57 in total – pushing the case for womens’ water polo.” The author quoted one of the sport’s chieftains saying, “I think the stars aligned for us to have someone like John Coates in Australia.” Ironically, water polo, being part of swimming, did not have a vote at the AOC election.

Two of the five sports he endorsed to join the Olympic program in Tokyo – surfing and sport climbing – did not support him at the 2017 election. It upset him, but not as much as the forced resignation of Mike Tancred, the AOC’s long serving media manager. Tancred had been incredibly loyal to Coates, taking the election fight to the ASC forces. Before the election, Tancred had been cleared of bullying by two former High Court and one Supreme Court judge but a post election review called for a cultural review. A sacrificial lamb was required and it was Tancred.

Dowling is still troubled by it. Loyalty is critical to him. I have witnessed it in unusual places, such as the 2016 funeral of Pat Geraghty, the secretary of the Seamen’s Union. As I stood outside the small service in Sussex Street, Sydney listening as Dowling spoke, it became clear why he was attending. Geraghty had been a strong supporter of Australia sending a team to the 1980 Moscow Olympics and Dowling, although a minor Olympic official at the time, defied some of his more senior colleagues who supported the boycott stance of then Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser.

So, having won his last election as AOC President - making him the national body’s longest serving president over a 32 year period, and only challenged once - Dowling set to work on unfinished business. Early in his Olympic career, he had been chief executive of a bid to deliver Brisbane the 1992 Summer Olympics. He was basically put in the position of a loyal political aspirant seeking election to an unwinnable seat. The Games were always going to be awarded to Barcelona, home of the incumbent IOC President, Samaranch.

But now, nearly 40 years later, as an IOC vice president and a highly valued advisor to President Bach, Dowling was instrumental in rationalising the process for cities to bid for Olympic Games. It led to the “preferred host city” model, meaning the IOC executive would anoint a city as its targetted choice, rather than becoming embroiled in the costly process of cities bidding against each other. It also meant the end of cities and IOC members being accused of the vote buying that plagued the movement leading to the corrupted 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games.

Meanwhile, Brisbane had fast tracked its candidature. Bach visited south-east Queensland and was impressed by the facilities, meeting with Coates and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison at the G20 conference in Osaka in 2018. Morrison guaranteed federal government support. So, by the time the IOC Session met to vote on the city for the 2032 Summer Olympics, there was one “preferred host city” and the other candidates, such as Istanbul, northern Germany, Budapest, Indonesia and India hadn’t finalised their presentations. Brisbane was elected host city for 2032, meaning no-one, other than Dowling had delivered two Summer Olympics to one country in one lifetime.

So, following the announcement in Tokyo that Brisbane had won, made on the eve of the 2021 Opening Ceremony, it could be expected most of Australia would be joyful. But it merely allowed Dowling’s enemies to attack him. On the way to the Australian press conference, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, lamented she would miss the Opening Ceremony because she had given an obligation to the media that she would return from Tokyo as quickly as possible, cognisant that her home state was in Covid
lockdown. Dowling whispered to her, “I’ll fix it” and thus followed a clumsy direction to Palaszczuk to attend the Opening Ceremony. “You are going to the Opening Ceremony,” he said, explaining that Brisbane would be staging one and its pageantry nature set the tone for the Games. All those in the media room saw it as an example of his occasional inclination to be tormentor, rather than mentor. Even his friends back in Australia, witnessing it on TV, saw the glint in his eye, above the black Covid mask he was wearing.

But his critics lined up, including Melbourne’s Age newspaper. One columnist wrote that Coates prides himself “on being an arsehole”, when the reality is he can’t help himself go off script and deliver one-liners which invite retribution. It allowed his enemies to resurrect the line he delivered following Great Britain’s unexpected success in swimming at the 2012 London Olympics: “Not bad for a country that has no swimming pools and very little soap.” Or the put down to Swimming Australia president John Bertrand following the Dolphins relative lack of success at the Rio Olympics, despite an early observation from ASC chair John Wylie that a statute similar to Brazil’s Christ the Redeemer could be erected for Bertrand. Dowling responded to this piece of hyperbole
with, “A figurine would be more appropriate.”

He once greeted his guests at a Christmas AOC function held the same day Saddam Hussein’s son, Uday - president of the Iraq OC - had been captured by US forces. Uday had engaged in the torturous practice of falake - caning the soles of the feet of soccer players who had lost games. Dowling greeted guests with, “It’s a sad day for presidents of NOCs around the world.” But this was at a Sydney function, attended by his friends and supporters and all understood it as Dowling unable to resist a one-liner.

Seventeen days after the Palaszczuk incident and with the Games over, Dowling had delivered a rare trifecta: as AOC President, he had led the nation to its best overseas medal success. As chair of the IOC Co-ordination Committee, he had steered the Games through the Covid crisis, despite the naysayers expectations of disaster, including the doomsday predictions of Craig Tiley, chief of Tennis Australia, an Olympic sport. Furthermore, he had engineered an outcome where his country would host its second Olympic Games in 32 years.

He was one of the first sports officials to wage war against performance enhancing drugs. We were both on the board of the ASC at the time of the 1988 Seoul Olympics when he sent pentathlete Alex Watson home following a positive test for caffeine. Looking back, it may have been an over-reaction, considering the threshold level of allowable caffeine had only recently been lowered and it is now no longer on the banned list. Still, his strong stance against performance enhancing drugs was at odds with the more circumspect view of some of our fellow ASC directors and the verbal exchanges on the issue were occasionally brutal. But, as it transpired, Dowling was more in tune with the world view and sanctions were doubled from two years to four, although recently there have been concessions which accord with modern leisure practice, such as sanctions against cocaine only applying to samples taken in competition.

I witnessed first hand many battles between the AOC and ASC during my 24 years on the federal government board. Dowling fought bitterly to win support for the Olympic Insignia Act which guaranteed commercial protection of the Olympic rings. He actually gazumped the ASC which was mulling whether to buy Alan Bond’s Boxing Kangaroo. He pre-empted the decision by buying it for the AOC for $94,000 in 1994. He lobbied hard in ASC budgetary meetings to increase grants to then almost invisible Winter Olympic sports.

When success on snow finally came with a medal in Nagano in 1998, he worked with Henke to establish the Olympic Winter Institute of Australia. Dowling is not an Olympian in the sense that Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, was. The Baron once said, “If anyone were to ask me the formula of Olympizing oneself, I should say to him, the first condition is to be joyful.” Dowling, who has been an official at every Summer Games since 1976 when he was manager of Australia’s rowing team and subsequently chef de mission on teams from 1988 to 2008, would say, “Let the medal count begin and we’ll be joyful when we’ve come a respectable fifth.” The Baron used words like “comity” and “chivalry.”

Dowling, the ultimate pragmatist, lives by the credo, “don’t die wondering.” These were the words he delivered when a relentless journalist discovered Dowling had arranged with the NSW Government for the daughter of an African Olympic official to study domestic science at a Meadowbank technical school. The scholarship had been awarded during the bid process to the Sydney Olympics. Considering Sydney won by one vote, it was a shrewd investment. Women were barred from the first modern Games, with the Baron - doing his best impersonation of an ostrich - saying, “An Olympiad with females would be impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper.”

Dowling has been a champion of female participation and recognition. Consistent with the wishes of SOCOG president Michael Knight that women be honoured in the centenary year of their participation in Olympic Games, Dowling ensured that the final torch bearers ahead of Cathy Freeman lighting the cauldron at the Sydney Olympics all be past gold medal winning Australian female athletes. Australia had its first female chef de mission in 2016 in Rio, as well as multiple deputy ones on smaller teams, such as the Youth Olympics which he championed.

Still, he exploited the lack of sports knowledge of Bob Carr when the NSW Premier protested Dowling had installed insufficient women in positions of power during the Sydney Olympics. While the mayor of the Olympic Village was former federal sports minister, Graham Richardson, Dowling pointed out that Richo’s two deputies, Sallyanne Atkinson and Judy Patching were deputy mayors. This satisfied Carr who was unaware that Patching, a long term Olympic official whose real name was Julius, was male. Dowling has fought for women to equal men in numbers in Australian Olympic teams, first achieved at the Rio Olympics in 2016.

Years earlier, he fought to abandon the system of selection for Games - named the “Justification Committee” by its boss, the anachronistic long serving Olympic official, Tom Blue. This system, where delegates from the Olympic disciplines negotiated the size of teams in the individual sports, encouraged vote swapping. Dowling changed this by allowing any athlete to become a member of the team if they reached the standard set by their international federation. This system significantly advantaged Australia’s female athletes. This is why it is so sad his so called put down of Palaszczuk was interpreted as misogynistic behaviour.

However, if there have been times he has been at odds with the latest “ism” movement, or defied political correctness, it is because he is not an Olympian in the de Coubertin sense, or even in the image of some of the anachronistic IOC presidents such as the dictatorial Avery Brundage. (Brundage, as US Olympic Committee boss, sent home gold medal favourite swimmer, Eleanor Holm, from the 1936 Olympics for drinking champagne with male athletes on the ship carrying the team to Berlin. Holm later claimed Brundage was being spiteful because she had earlier rejected his advances.)

In the interests of journalistic impartiality, it should be noted Dowling was comfortable with double standards about fraternisation when he met Pauline, his first wife and mother of their six children. He was an Olympic official and she an athlete. I have observed Dowling in multiple settings, from the Shilla Hotel in Seoul to the bar of the Railway Hotel in Lidcombe, Sydney. The Shilla was the headquarters in 1988 of the IOC and I noticed the respectable way Dowling addressed the parade of European Royals
who passed by, including Anne, the Princess Royal who kicked the coke machine when a soft drink can failed to emerge. I saw the snakelike eyes of the then president of the IAAF, Primo Nebiolo, flicker at the sight of Dowling, as the Italian strutted along a red carpet at a function during the 1991 World Athletics Championships in Tokyo. Nebiolo’s eyes reflected a mixture of fear and respect, recognising Dowling as a future rival. Nebiolo could have been Don Corelone witnessing a new arrival from Sicily. It was a reminder that back then IOC politics were brutal and, as much as Olympic officials referred to it as “a family”, it was a family in the same way the Mafia was.

Under President Jacques Rogge and his successor, the reforming and very visible Bach, the IOC is a modern movement attentive to corporate governance. Bach has entrusted Dowling with the reforms of the past eight years. In some cases, he has been an attack dog in the carriage of the reforms. His bite can be more effective than an urbane Bach. Significantly, Dowling’s second wife, Orieta, is multi-lingual and her fluent Portuguese and Japanese have been very helpful to him at the past two Summer Games. Dowling has achieved all this while suffering pain and multiple surgeries from hip, back, and shoulder issues, exacerbated by long periods in planes and at meetings. Yet, with a work ethic to shame a Sherpa, it is almost impossible to see him not exercising an influence as Australia approaches its third Olympics, even if attending meetings in a wheelchair, covered with a black and white tartan rug hiding a small portable bar.

He retains his position on the IOC Executive to the 2024 Paris Olympics which entitles him to sit on the board of the 2032 Brisbane Organising Committee. Assuming he is made life honorary AOC president, he will remain one of the 2032 Games directors. He will continue to be chameleon-like in his deal making with rival politicians and warring sports, consistent with a man whom some would deem a “Coates of many colours.” This allusion would also seem to be fitting because, like Joseph in the biblical story, our Coates does seem to have a capacity to read the future.

Yet, to me, he is coloured black and white, the defining hues of his team, the Western Suburbs Magpies. The club takes its motto from words written by the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats: “Ask not where man’s glory begins and ends, my glory was I had such
friends.” I believe Dowling identifies with that loyal ethos, rather than the anachronistic ideals of the old Baron de Coubertin. Essentially, he is still a child of Sydney’s west, having been schooled at Homebush and living at Drummoyne. Yet he has been to almost all the world’s countries, even to Israel’s Sea of Galilee and Nazareth. On a recent visit, Orieta took the opportunity to visit a church commemorated in Jesus’s honour but Dowling declined.

The truth is the last church he entered was when his 96 year old mother died a couple of years ago. Many of his and his brother Graeme’s old school friends and those with whom they played cricket in the streets of Sydney’s west, attended her funeral. It mightn’t mean much to those who can’t acknowledge Dowling’s achievements but to his friends, it says much about a man.