A triple gold medal winner who won more individual medals in Munich in 1972 than Mark Spitz, Gould won all her three Olympic titles in world-record times. She is the only swimmer ever to hold world records at every distance from 100m to 1,500m freestyle at the same time. Her international career was as bright and as brief as they come.

It was at the age of 14 at Crystal Palace in London on April 30, 1971, that Gould shot to prominence, by equalling the 100m freestyle world record of 58.9sec that had stood to fellow Australian, the legendary Dawn Fraser, since 1964.

That was the first of the 10 world records that she would establish in the 16 months that led up to one of the finest ever Olympic performances by a woman.

At Munich, the girl dubbed by the local media as "the goldfish" who had grown strong by climbing trees in her youth spent on the island of Fiji, Gould was the chief target for the dominant team from the United States. They believed that the 15-year-old might be vulnerable, one woman swimming 4.2km in 12 races in eight days.

In an attempt to pysche Gould out, the US women's team wore T-shirts stating "All that glitters is not Gould". In her first race, the 200m medley, she proved them wrong by taking almost half a second off the world record to win her first Olympic title in 2mins 23.07sec.

The next day, she faltered, beaten into third in her first freestyle race, the 100m, by Sandy Neilson and Shirley Babshoff. The race marked her first defeat in two years. The next day she proved the 100m result to be a mere glitch, taking 2.6sec off her own world record to win the 400m freestsyle title by 3.4sec, in 4:19.04, a winning margin that has not been repeated since.

Two days later, she won her third gold medal in a world record of 2:03.56sec over 200m freestyle. Her last race of the Games produced a silver medal in the 800m behind Keena Rothhammer, of the US, who set a world record.

After Munich, Gould took a break before starting to train again in the Australian summer. By February 1973, she had returned to best form to become the first woman to swim 1,500m freestyle inside 17 minutes. Her 16min 56.9sec effort was to be her last world record and one of her last races ever. Tired from the hype surrounding her at home, she moved to train in the US. It did not work out and Gould retired.

At the age of 18 she married Neil Innes, who belonged to a devout Christian sect. They spent much of the next 25 years in Margaret River, Western Australia, out of public life. The couple, who have four children, divorced in the late 1990s, and Gould has since returned to public life, as a coach and a "masters" swimmer.

Gould, the last great female swimmer before the onslaught of the East German medals machine, has spoken out vociferously against drug-taking in sport.

When she did so at the world championships in Perth, 1998, amid the breaking scandal of several positive drugs tests among Chinese swimmers, an official from Fina, the international governing body, declared that Gould had "no platform to speak about swimming".

Gould's record and her insight into the sport that brought her fame make her more eligible to take the stand on swimming than any member of Fina has ever been.

CRAIG LORD
The Times