Brenton Rickard recovers stolen swimming medals with help of good Samaritan

Former Olympic swimmer Brenton Rickard has been reunited with dozens of medals that were allegedly stolen from his Gold Coast home a year ago.

About 100 medals were taken from the breaststroker’s family home at Bundall which was unoccupied due to renovations.

More than 60 have been recovered by police and returned to the retired swimmer whose career spanned Olympic and Commonwealth games and world championships.

“I’m just grateful to get some of them back because I truly believed that they were all gone,” he said.

“It’s a little bittersweet that there are still some out there, and whether I’ll ever see them again, that is another question.

“But just to have some back, just to be able to show the kids when they are old enough to understand is fantastic.”

Lifetime of achievement sold for $32

Mr Rickard said a woman contacted him via Facebook about some medals she had purchased in an online auction.

“She has a family history of swimming coaching and her grandmother was a coach for a lot of years,” he said.

“She thought, by the description, that they were medals from that generation of her grandmother, not realising that they were medals from the early 2000s to 2012.

“I was really lucky and really thankful for her honesty.”

The woman told Mr Rickard she paid $32 for the medals, which included Commonwealth Games silver medals from Melbourne 2006 and Delhi 2010.

“That’s always been the hard thing to reconcile for me is that these things have huge sentimental value for me, but, from a financial point of view, they’re not really worth much, if anything,” he said.

“I kind of accepted that I probably would never see them again.

“I do have probably my most precious medals very safely locked away somewhere else, so that’s fortunate, but there’s still a huge part of my career missing.

“If we could stumble across the other ones one day, that would also be a fantastic result.” 

Police said a 42-year-old Labrador man had been charged with fraud and was due to appear in Southport Magistrates Court later this month.

2020 a year of lows

In November, Mr Rickard was forced to plead his innocence to the Court of Arbitration for Sport in Switzerland after a sample from the 2012 London Olympics returned a positive result for a banned diuretic when it was re-tested.

“That’s still with the Court of Arbitration for Sport, so hopefully at some stage in the near future I’ll be able to speak at length about it, but right now I’m not allowed to talk.”

He was a member of the men’s 4x100m medley relay team that claimed bronze in London and the entire team could still be stripped of its medal.

“It’s been a pretty tough 18 months; that’s really the only way you can describe that case.

“I’ll just be glad when it’s over.”