Poor Skippy. Former Olympic medallist swimmer, and current private citizen Geoff Huegill, along with his wife Sara Hills, have been arrested and charged after the pair were allegedly caught with small amounts of a white powder, believed to be cocaine, at Randwick Racecourse on Saturday afternoon. The pair will front Waverley Local Court on May 14th to answer the charges.
Police were alerted to the couple whilst on routine patrol at the race meet, and were directed to a private suite in the racecourse grandstand by security guards.
“Skippy” Huegill has no prior history of being caught riding the lane ropes, though he is certainly not the first swimmer to find himself in thrown into the heated pool, with fellow high-profile swimmers Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett both doing stints in rehab this year alone.
Huegill covered himself in Aussie glory at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, bringing home a silver medal as part of the 4×100 metre medley relay, as well as taking out individual bronze in the 100 metre butterfly. His remarkable comeback for the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games, which included losing 41kg of post-retirement weight, is the stuff of sporting legend; a glorious triumph of man overcoming the pie to recapture the green and gold glory of yore.
In all seriousness, Huegill has for years held a position as ambassador for depression research institute, Black Dog. And with more and more former swimmers seemingly running into trouble in later life, perhaps its time for sporting bodies to put extra resources into researching the effects of retirement, the isolation of individual sports, and support paths and structures for athletes lives once that brightly burning flame flickers out.
Photo: Morne de Klerk via Getty Images.
via SBS News.
