When Melbourne 1956 Olympic modern pentathlete Terry Nicoll was a child in the late 1930s, his father took him to a theatre in Sydney to watch the newsreels. The show included a film about the Berlin Olympics and at the end of it, the greatest athlete in the world Jesse Owens spoke directly into a young Australian boy’s heart.
“I still remember today, that his face came on the screen, and covered the whole screen, and he just simply said: “You win a race, they put a gold medal around your neck, you become the Olympic champion”. That went through me like a knife in my chest, and from then on all I wanted to be was an Olympian,’’ Terry recalled, more than 80 years later.
George Terence ‘Terry’ Nicoll was born and bred in Randwick, Sydney, the eldest of 11 children, and named after his father George, an avid swimmer and captain of the Coogee and Clovelly Surf Clubs.
Terry inherited the competitor’s spirit and recalls racing his brothers and sisters around the block for bragging rights from an early age. He played cricket and rugby at Waverley College, to no great acclaim, but left at 15 to help support his family.
He found work out in north-western NSW, as a stockman on properties around Moree, Mungindi and Collarenebri. In his spare time, he tried his hand on the local rodeo circuit as a bull and bronc rider.
Back in Sydney in his late teens, he joined the Bronte Surf Life Saving Club and began competing there. To improve his swimming, he turned to 1936 Olympian Evelyn Whillier, then coaching at Bronte Baths.
Fellow swimming coach Forbes Carlile turned up one day, having become the first Australian to compete in the Modern Pentathlon at the Helsinki 1952 Olympics. He had heard that young Terry was “a bit of a horseman’’ and promptly recruited him to train for the Modern Pentathlon for the next Olympics in Melbourne.
“He told me about all the events of the modern pentathlon and said that one of them was fencing. I asked him how many chain of fence you had to put up, and he said “Not that kind of fencing – it’s sword-fighting”,’’ Terry recalled.
Another 1952 Olympian John Gibson proceeded to teach Nicoll the art of fencing, equestrian instructor Diana Gould converted him from a rodeo rider into a showjumper, while local distance star Al Lawrence (who won the bronze medal in the 10,000m at the 1956 Olympics) assisted him to develop his running.
He worked nights as a taxi driver to leave the days free for his training.
“Most blokes found the riding the hardest, but for me it was the running,’’ Terry recalled.
Despite taking up Modern Pentathlon little more than three years before the Melbourne Olympics, Terry performed well at the Olympic trials and was one of three men selected to compete at the Games, joining Neville Sayers and Sven Coomer.
However, his long-held dream of becoming an Olympian was almost shattered, along with his nose, when he had a serious horse-riding accident while training in Melbourne just six weeks before the Games.
“The horse shied at a gate post and I came off, and then he kicked me in the face and cut my nose completely in half,’’ Terry said, adding that his helmet had saved him from a worse injury. “I woke up in hospital.’’
He needed surgery to repair his nose and a plaster cast was placed across his face to aid the healing process.
After a few of days he was released from hospital back to the Olympic village and gently began to ease himself back into training.
However, he said it was only with the assistance of Tarzan, and Australia’s wonder women Shirley Strickland (later de la Hunty) and Betty Cuthbert, that he was able to make it to the starting line for the competition.
Terry recalls sitting on the edge of the Olympic pool trying to figure out how he could swim with the plaster on his face, when “an enormous man in a red tracksuit” came up to him and asked if he was that pentathlete and whether he still intended to compete at the Games.
“I told him that I would compete if I could find a way to swim, and he said he was working with the US team and offered to help me,’’ Terry said. “We got in and he helped me work out a way to swim with my head out of the water.’’
It was only when they emerged from the pool that Terry asked for the kind stranger’s name and discovered that he was being coached by the 1924 and 1928 Olympic 100m freestyle champion Johnny Weissmuller, then a Hollywood star after playing Tarzan in a series of popular movies.
Running was also difficult as he could not breathe through his nose, but he said Shirley knocked at his door in the village at 6am every morning to take him for a walk or run, and when she was unable to attend, Betty came with him instead.
By the time the Games began Terry felt he was back in “pretty good shape”. He vividly recalls marching in the Opening Ceremony, before the Duke of Edinburgh, at the Melbourne Cricket Ground.
The Australian team officials had schooled the athletes to tip their hats and turn their eyes right to acknowledge the duke when they marched past him, but with almost 300 athletes in the team, they decided they needed someone in the team to blow a whistle to signal the salute, and handed the whistle to Terry, placed roughly in the centre of the athlete ranks.
He performed that duty and wishes to this day that he had kept the whistle as a souvenir rather than returning it to the team officials.
When the opening day of competition arrived, he felt ready for the first of his five events – the cross-country riding – but he fell victim to more bad luck when his horse fell after clearing one of the jumps, and then bolted.
The rules required him to remount and complete the course within a timed period, but first he had to chase down his horse and the time ran out before he could finish.
That meant he received no points for the horse-riding event and was effectively eliminated from contention, but he continued through the next four days to complete the other four disciplines, finishing second in the fencing and in the top five in the Swimming, for an overall placing of 35th. His persistence also allowed the Australian Equestrian team to finish 8th overall.
Despite his bad luck, the experience left him “mad keen to go to the next one in Rome”.
In the meantime, he joined the NSW Police and was assigned to the mounted unit where he spent the next six years. His father died during that period, leaving him with “five brothers to try to keep on the straight and narrow’’ and younger siblings who needed financial support.
However, it was another horse-riding accident that ended his chances of going to a second Olympic Games. While riding in Wilberforce, he jumped his horse through a hedge but it was hiding a steel post, and they both fell and slid across a muddy hillside, the horse landing on him.
His competitive fires still burned and he recovered in time to contest the 1962 World Modern Pentathlon Championships in Mexico City, where he finally had the chance to shine and finished tenth in the world. He also competed at the 1965 World Championships in Leipzig, East Germany, and finished 13th. He regards that as the best performance of his career, competing against the might of the European and Eastern Bloc pentathletes.
“The standard was so high – three of the fellas in that field were sub-four minute milers,’’ he said.
At 32, he retired from Modern Pentathlon but found another competitive outlet in Masters Swimming, winning 19 gold medals over the next 30 years. He was also a regular medallist at the Australian and World Police Games into the 1980s.
He frequently helped out with training squads at the Prince Alfred pool near Central Station in Sydney, which is how he was roped into coaching Dawn Fraser for her Masters comeback in 1986.
Stationed for much of his police career in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, he could often be found swimming from Bronte Beach to Wedding Cake Island and back, and was at one stage inspired by his friend, the Channel King Des Renford, to complete an English Channel crossing with him. They started training but Renford’s failing health prevented them from doing the trip.
Terry retired from the NSW Police at 55, having reached the rank of Acting Inspector, and moved to Kiama on the southern NSW coast. But he could be found on his local golf course even as he approached his 90th birthday, his competitive spirit undaunted after a lifetime of sporting achievement.
