logo
Current not crocodiles could sink Olympic river venue

Current not crocodiles could sink Olympic river venue

West Australian20-05-2025

A crocodile habitat unveiled as an Olympic venue is set to come under the microscope, sparking speculation at least one Brisbane 2032 sport could be held interstate.
Rockhampton's Fitzroy River is set to be assessed, with an Olympic boss saying it remains to be seen whether it hosts the 2032 Games rowing and sprint canoeing.
The river is home to freshwater crocs but its current has emerged as the concern, with the Sydney International Regatta Centre looming if a suitable Queensland venue is not confirmed.
Outgoing International Olympic Committee (IOC) president Thomas Bach was not able to guarantee the river would host rowing after arriving in Brisbane for a landmark meeting, saying the world body would evaluate the venue in July.
IOC heavyweights have gathered in Brisbane to receive updates on the 2032 Games at a three-day meeting starting on Tuesday.
It marks the first time the IOC delegates have visited Australia since Brisbane was unveiled as host almost four years ago.
The Fitzroy River has hosted national team training camps, but eyebrows were raised when it was unveiled as a 2032 venue after the Brisbane blueprint was revealed in March.
Crocodile sightings are common at the central Queensland site, but organisers have played down speculation that competitors could be attacked.
"It makes for a colourful story. But I think that's probably not a key concern," Rowing Australia CEO Sarah Cook told AAP.
"We we have schoolkids rowing up there. We put the Australian rowing team out there.
"And look, you know, maybe that gives us a bit of home ground advantage."
Questions have been asked about the river that has a current, unlike a man-made venue such as the Sydney course.
The Queensland government's 2032 venue plan opted for the Fitzroy River, ignoring recommendations to hold rowing at the Sydney 2000 host course at Penrith.
Two-time Olympian Ms Cook said the river would have to be assessed against international rowing regatta standards.
Any current that could impact results or favour certain lanes would fall outside the rules, she said.
"It's a bit of a waiting game. I think there's just a lot of unknowns about that venue at the moment," Ms Cook said.
"It is certainly a concern, I think, for Queensland, that potentially another state could pick up the rowing if there's not a suitable venue found in Queensland."
Penrith would be able to host the 2032 rowing if the river was scrapped, said Ms Cook, adding that she hoped a Queensland venue was confirmed to ensure the sport's legacy.
"That (Penrith) is a fantastic venue. From a Queensland perspective, I can imagine that that's not an appeal and option for the government," she said.
"We would love to see a permanent home for rowing in Queensland.
"We think that the legacy out of having an Olympic and Paralympic standard flatwater venue would be incredibly important for ... the sport's future."
Cook said there were a number of other rowing host options in Queensland including Hinze Dam near the Gold Coast and Wyaralong Dam south of Brisbane.
The Australian rowing team are looking to bounce back from their worst Olympic result since 1988 after securing a sole bronze medal at the Paris Games.
Local organisers have impressed at the three-day IOC co-ordination committee meeting also attended by IOC president-elect Kirsty Coventry.
"You are building on the commitment to our shared values that unite us in this journey towards a successful Olympic Games," Mr Bach told the meeting on Tuesday.
"Brisbane 2032 (is) an event where I'm sure ... will inspire the world and set a new benchmark for a new era of Olympic Games."

Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Brisbane super-gran qualifies for Hyrox World Championships
Brisbane super-gran qualifies for Hyrox World Championships

7NEWS

time39 minutes ago

  • 7NEWS

Brisbane super-gran qualifies for Hyrox World Championships

It is hard enough to complete a Hyrox circuit but 62-year-old Australian Sue Rogers is not afraid of the difficult. The Brisbane mother-of-three and grandmother-to-five is in Chicago to compete in the world championships of the viral fitness craze which has surged in popularity thanks to its addictive races. WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Australian grandmother to compete in world championships of new fitness craze. Think of Hyrox like an Olympics for everyday gym-goers. There is a series of eight 1km runs split by eight different fitness stations including walking lunges, sled pulls and pushes, wall balls and burpee broad jumps. It is not for the faint-hearted but Rogers smashed the event when she competed in Brisbane in March this year. She qualified third fastest for her age group (60-64) and is one of 10,000 people at the championships this week. She is representing Australia and proving age is just a number. 'My five grandchildren, one on the way, they do push-ups with me,' she told 7NEWS. 'They say, 'Where's nana? Oh yeah, she's exercising'.' Rogers has reasons beyond fitness to keep her moving. 'My 'why' is to keep mobile and strong right into my more mature years — I don't know, 100-plus,' she told 7NEWS. 'I do it for the enjoyment, the feeling, the connection. 'Community and connection are my highest value, it floats my boat.' Rogers also coaches at BFT Everton Park where the 'weapon' is getting others ready to enter their first Hyrox event in Sydney at the start of July. '(Rogers is) so positive, her energy is very infectious,' one person in her class said. Rogers will race on Friday.

Steve Smith rues missed opportunity after losing wicket to Aidan Markram on Day 1 of World Test Championship final
Steve Smith rues missed opportunity after losing wicket to Aidan Markram on Day 1 of World Test Championship final

7NEWS

timean hour ago

  • 7NEWS

Steve Smith rues missed opportunity after losing wicket to Aidan Markram on Day 1 of World Test Championship final

Steve Smith went to bed after Day 1 of the World Test Championship final against South Africa still trying to work out how he nicked off to part-time spinner Aidan Markram. In the early hours of Thursday morning (AEST), the Australian batting maestro became the most prolific overseas Test run-scorer at Lord's in history, passing a century-old record previously held by early 1900s Aussie batter Warren Bardsley. WATCH THE VIDEO ABOVE: Australia in dominant position after Day 1 of WTC final. With his gritty 66 (112) in tricky batting conditions against a moving Duke ball, Smith reached 591 total runs from 10 innings at the Home of Cricket, passing Bardsley's 575, which had stood as the record since 1926. And yet, for all his dominance at the ground, he still managed to cough his wicket up to Markram when in reach of a 37th century. Asked what he learnt from the innings, Smith was facetiously blunt. 'Don't nick the part-time off-spinner... down the slope,' he said, putting his head in his hands. 'I'm still trying to fathom how I've done that. But yeah, don't do that. 'And then, nah, I don't know, just play what's in front of us. 'It (the pitch) might take a bit more spin as the game wears on, it's pretty dry. 'The seam might go down as the game goes on as well, potentially. 'I think the bounce is going to be variable throughout the game, as we've seen already on Day 1. 'Just play what's in front of us and hopefully we can get a few early ones in the morning and go through them and have a bit of a lead. That's the ideal scenario for us right now.' It was all about the Proteas quick Kagiso Rabada redemption story early in the day, running riot underneath overcast skies in London by taking two wickets in four balls. Rabada, in his first Test since serving a one-month ban for testing positive to cocaine, removed Usman Khawaja (a 20-ball duck) and Cameron Green (four) in the seventh over. In his first Test since March 2024, fit-again Green hit his first delivery to the boundary at fine leg in a promising start. But the 26-year-old was gone just two balls later, edging a Rabada rocket to slips where he was superbly caught by Markram. Marnus Labuschagne, in his first innings as a Test opener, started brightly to get through until drinks. But as he often has during the last two years, the under-pressure Queenslander struggled to keep the score ticking over. Labuschagne got caught between playing a shot and leaving a Marco Jansen delivery, nicking off for 17 from 56 balls. The 30-year-old, who was once described as having 'opening-itis', won the battle to be Khawaja's fifth opening partner in 18 months over teenager Sam Konstas. The spectre of Konstas, one of Australian cricket's rising stars, will now loom even larger for the upcoming three-Test tour of the West Indies. Labuschagne's last Test century came back in July 2023 at Manchester. Travis Head, who starred with a matchwinning 163 in Australia's WTC final triumph in 2023, was out on the final ball before lunch after wicketkeeper Kyle Verreynne hung on to a screamer.

The Professor with golden touch plots more swim success
The Professor with golden touch plots more swim success

The Advertiser

time3 hours ago

  • The Advertiser

The Professor with golden touch plots more swim success

Fittingly for a maths and physics nerd nicknamed The Professor, Cam McEvoy uses a bell curve to describe his swimming success. The Olympic 50m freestyle champion's latest data point on his curve was entered at Australia's selection trials for the looming world titles. McEvoy clocked 21.30 seconds, the quickest time in the world this year, to win in Adelaide on Wednesday night. The 31-year-old's feat extends his unheralded two-year span of swims in the low to mid-21 second range. "The best way I can put it is, because my training is so hyper-specific, when it comes time to racing, if I were to put everything out on a bell curve, all I have to do is my average to probably get something like that," McEvoy said. "I don't have to go into a race and hope I'm on that 99th percentile of my best ever. "And that's a huge amount of confidence that just allows you to relax before the race and trust the process." McEvoy has a bachelor of science degree, majoring in physics and mathematics. He aspired to be an astronaut and has worked as a fellow at the Centre for Quantum Dynamics at Queensland's Griffith University. And he relishes the technical intricacies of swimming and his event. "Usually I can finish a rep in training and call it down to the microsecond, within 0.02," McEvoy said. "I know where I'm at each point of the race as well. "You look at the Olympic gymnasts, they do the most crazy stuff and they can do it down to the millimetre - and they can do it day in, day out. "It's a level of skill we're hoping to develop here in the water. "And then what comes with that, there's so many angles you can approach and attack the problem and find 0.03 (reduction) here, 0.08 there. "Then you have just got to hope that on the day, all of it aligns." All has aligned for McEvoy since he almost quit swimming after the Tokyo Olympics of 2021. After an extended hiatus, he returned to the pool and vowed to do things his way. Instead of traditional training, he embarked on funky pursuits including rock climbing and calisthenics. And all his time in the water focused on the minutiae of his event in a revolutionary approach that delivered gold in the French capital at McEvoy's fourth Olympics. "It definitely took a chip off my shoulder that I had for a while," he said of his Olympic triumph. "But the manner in which I did it gives me a lot of pride; thinking about where I was, especially in 2022, but the years before that as well. "To go from there, create something and then execute it - that process is more special than the bit of metal at the end. "Getting that out of the way, to then move on to getting married, having my first born on the way - that's even more special. "Digesting the marriage, digesting starting a family, that puts the whole swimming gig into comparison; it humbles the whole job here and makes me realise there's so much more to the world." Fittingly for a maths and physics nerd nicknamed The Professor, Cam McEvoy uses a bell curve to describe his swimming success. The Olympic 50m freestyle champion's latest data point on his curve was entered at Australia's selection trials for the looming world titles. McEvoy clocked 21.30 seconds, the quickest time in the world this year, to win in Adelaide on Wednesday night. The 31-year-old's feat extends his unheralded two-year span of swims in the low to mid-21 second range. "The best way I can put it is, because my training is so hyper-specific, when it comes time to racing, if I were to put everything out on a bell curve, all I have to do is my average to probably get something like that," McEvoy said. "I don't have to go into a race and hope I'm on that 99th percentile of my best ever. "And that's a huge amount of confidence that just allows you to relax before the race and trust the process." McEvoy has a bachelor of science degree, majoring in physics and mathematics. He aspired to be an astronaut and has worked as a fellow at the Centre for Quantum Dynamics at Queensland's Griffith University. And he relishes the technical intricacies of swimming and his event. "Usually I can finish a rep in training and call it down to the microsecond, within 0.02," McEvoy said. "I know where I'm at each point of the race as well. "You look at the Olympic gymnasts, they do the most crazy stuff and they can do it down to the millimetre - and they can do it day in, day out. "It's a level of skill we're hoping to develop here in the water. "And then what comes with that, there's so many angles you can approach and attack the problem and find 0.03 (reduction) here, 0.08 there. "Then you have just got to hope that on the day, all of it aligns." All has aligned for McEvoy since he almost quit swimming after the Tokyo Olympics of 2021. After an extended hiatus, he returned to the pool and vowed to do things his way. Instead of traditional training, he embarked on funky pursuits including rock climbing and calisthenics. And all his time in the water focused on the minutiae of his event in a revolutionary approach that delivered gold in the French capital at McEvoy's fourth Olympics. "It definitely took a chip off my shoulder that I had for a while," he said of his Olympic triumph. "But the manner in which I did it gives me a lot of pride; thinking about where I was, especially in 2022, but the years before that as well. "To go from there, create something and then execute it - that process is more special than the bit of metal at the end. "Getting that out of the way, to then move on to getting married, having my first born on the way - that's even more special. "Digesting the marriage, digesting starting a family, that puts the whole swimming gig into comparison; it humbles the whole job here and makes me realise there's so much more to the world." Fittingly for a maths and physics nerd nicknamed The Professor, Cam McEvoy uses a bell curve to describe his swimming success. The Olympic 50m freestyle champion's latest data point on his curve was entered at Australia's selection trials for the looming world titles. McEvoy clocked 21.30 seconds, the quickest time in the world this year, to win in Adelaide on Wednesday night. The 31-year-old's feat extends his unheralded two-year span of swims in the low to mid-21 second range. "The best way I can put it is, because my training is so hyper-specific, when it comes time to racing, if I were to put everything out on a bell curve, all I have to do is my average to probably get something like that," McEvoy said. "I don't have to go into a race and hope I'm on that 99th percentile of my best ever. "And that's a huge amount of confidence that just allows you to relax before the race and trust the process." McEvoy has a bachelor of science degree, majoring in physics and mathematics. He aspired to be an astronaut and has worked as a fellow at the Centre for Quantum Dynamics at Queensland's Griffith University. And he relishes the technical intricacies of swimming and his event. "Usually I can finish a rep in training and call it down to the microsecond, within 0.02," McEvoy said. "I know where I'm at each point of the race as well. "You look at the Olympic gymnasts, they do the most crazy stuff and they can do it down to the millimetre - and they can do it day in, day out. "It's a level of skill we're hoping to develop here in the water. "And then what comes with that, there's so many angles you can approach and attack the problem and find 0.03 (reduction) here, 0.08 there. "Then you have just got to hope that on the day, all of it aligns." All has aligned for McEvoy since he almost quit swimming after the Tokyo Olympics of 2021. After an extended hiatus, he returned to the pool and vowed to do things his way. Instead of traditional training, he embarked on funky pursuits including rock climbing and calisthenics. And all his time in the water focused on the minutiae of his event in a revolutionary approach that delivered gold in the French capital at McEvoy's fourth Olympics. "It definitely took a chip off my shoulder that I had for a while," he said of his Olympic triumph. "But the manner in which I did it gives me a lot of pride; thinking about where I was, especially in 2022, but the years before that as well. "To go from there, create something and then execute it - that process is more special than the bit of metal at the end. "Getting that out of the way, to then move on to getting married, having my first born on the way - that's even more special. "Digesting the marriage, digesting starting a family, that puts the whole swimming gig into comparison; it humbles the whole job here and makes me realise there's so much more to the world."

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into the world of global news and events? Download our app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store