Nick D'Arcy seriously injured fellow swimmer Simon Cowley in a Sydney nightclub three years ago and was ordered to pay him $180,000 in damages. His behaviour was condemned and he lost his place on the Olympic swimming team and the chance to shine at the Bejing Olympics. It took a long time for Cowley to heal, surgeons inserted a total of five plates into his face, one under his fractured eye socket, two on either side of his broken nose, and another two in his jaw.
Initially D’Arcy was defiant and denied everything but finally admitted he has a drinking problem and anger issues. But now he has filed for bankruptcy and it looks bad because it is. The right thing to do would be to go to Cowley and work something out but he didn’t. When he is discharged from bankruptcy, somewhere between three and five years, whatever he still owes is not repayable, it’s all over, finished.
The media is saying that filing for bankruptcy won’t affect D’Arcy’s participation in the London Olympics and both he and Cowley are hoping to qualify for the games next year. But the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) is currently looking into it. “Remember we didn’t take him last time because he brought himself into disrepute” an AOC spokesman said.
Nick D’Arcy’s account of what happened that night.
It was a marked night for celebration, but ended in tragedy, unfortunately. Everyone had been drinking, everyone had been celebrating Olympic selection. I hadn't drunk personally in between 10 and 12 weeks. I came over and talked to my friend, Eamon. I was giving him a bit of a hard time, because he'd decided to stop drinking. And I copped a bit of a whack on the side of the face and I was a bit taken back and Josh then apparently said "What the hell did you do that for?" to a person I now know as Simon, Simon Cowley. And I kind of, was in a little bit of shock because obviously I wasn't expecting to get a slap. Maybe if I'd kind of known the guy and like I expected something like that, it would have kind of been laughed off, but I didn't expect it. As I walked back to where I was almost to approach him to say "What was that about? Like who are you? What are you doing?" He then got up out of his chair and made a motion towards me which I found quite, which I found threatening, because I had just been struck. And I thought "Well, if he's slapped me, he's getting up to hit me". And just in that split second that he was getting up towards me, he was quite close, so the strike that I did use was an elbow, struck him in the middle of the face and he fell back in his seat and kind of looked quite shocked and the look on his face kind of scared me a little bit. I was like, whoa, it wasn't a look of anger, it kind of a look of a little bit spaced out. I've just kind of just put my hands up and just, whoa, like started to walk away. I was talking with one of the girls and they said the police have been notified because an ambulance has been called and I've, "well is he okay?" and they were like "well, he's quite hurt, he was bleeding out of his nose" and I just thought well maybe it's a broken nose. I mean it sucks but it happens, like he shouldn't have hit me in the first place and he shouldn't have done what I thought was quite a, quite a threatening move. But, um, there's statements that support that story, there's statements that are completely different to that story, there's statements that are in the middle.
When John Coates, Olympic Australian Committee President announced he was terminating Nic’s membership of the 2008 Olympic team, his parents were furious, they believed he had earned his spot in the team. Nick didn’t care and said he didn’t want to swim for a country that didn’t want him but his father Justin D’Arcy, general surgeon, was outraged and immediately appealed through the Court of Arbitration of Sport. But the decision was upheld and he didn’t get to go with his team mates to Beijing.
The question for the Olympic Committee now is does he deserve to go to London?
No comments:
Post a Comment