Turning the Tide

<p>Against the backdrop of the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan the 1980 Moscow Olympics was always going to be political.</p><p><br></p><p>Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser wanted Australia's Olympic athletes to boycott the Games in line with the USA but many of the athletes had a different view and competed anyway.</p><p><br></p><p>Athletes were the victims - and most of them female.</p><p><br></p><p>According to Ford who was Australia's first and founding member of the International Olympic Committee's Athletes Commission that struggle is far from over.</p><p><br></p><p>In <em>Turning the Tide</em> 800 metres Swimming Gold Medal winner Michelle Ford charts the highs and lows from the beaches of Sydney as a young girl with a dream to the dizzy heights of Olympic swimming gold against the odds of Cold-War politics spilling into sport like poison.</p><p><br></p><p>Olympic boycotts death threats wilful blindness and misogyny coincided with the first and most ferocious systematic state-sponsored doping the world has ever witnessed.</p><p><br></p><p>As Paris prepares to host the 2024 Olympics 100 years after the Modern Olympics founding father Pierre de Coubertin declared that <em>Women have one task that of the role of crowning the winner with garlands </em>an indifference to female athletes lives on. </p><p><br></p><p>In this roller-coaster account of courage and resilience in the Olympic realm <em>Turning the Tide</em> is a manifesto for change.</p>