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More woe for BOA over wall of honour

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The swimmers on the photo are, left to right: W. F. “Chummy” Hayward, Derek Oatway, Francis “Goose” Gosling, Philip Tribley, Donald Shanks, Walter Bardgett, Robert “Robbie” Cook and coach Bill Brooks (Photograph by Bernard Brown of The Royal Gazette in 1948)

Robert Cook could not believe his eyes when he discovered that the names of three of his team-mates who he competed with at the Summer Olympics were missing from the newly erected Olympic Wall at the National Sports Centre.

The wall, located outside of the Aquatics Centre at the NSC, is supposed to feature the names of Bermuda’s Olympians from Berlin 1936 to Rio 2016.

However, missing from the swimming team that represented the island at the 1948 Olympics in London along with Cook are Derek Oatway, Philip Tribley and Donald Shanks.

“My sister-in-law took a photograph of the column on which my name appears twice and sent it to me,” Cook, who resides in California, said. “I immediately saw that the names of three other swimmers were missing and I couldn’t believe it.

“When I looked at it I had to look at it several times because I know who was on the team with me and I said ‘can I be imagining this or not’, so I kept looking but the names were not there.

“I then went to the Bermuda Olympic Association website and found all the names to make sure their list included all those names, and they did.

“If you go on the BOA website and look under Summer Olympics it gives you the names of all the competitors going back to 1936 in Berlin and you will see these three names are there. But someway the contractor who made it missed those three names for the 1948 games.

“They are there on the original list from the BOA but someway the contractor who did it missed it and so I left a message on the Bermuda Olympic Association website that they were missing three names and then received an e-mail back from the president, Judy Simons, asking me to call her and so I did.

“At that point she had checked it and found out the three names were missing and that they are going to probably have to redo that one column in order to include those three names.

“The Bermuda Olympic Association is aware of the fact that these names are missing and I presume they will take some action to remedy it.”

Judy Simons, the Bermuda Olympic Association president, said the association has already begun the process of rectifying the situation.

“The BOA is working with the designer of the wall,” she said. “We will be meeting with them early next week and it will be rectified shortly.”

Cook, who celebrated his 84th birthday last week, was the youngest member of Bermuda’s five-member swimming team at the 1948 games.

“I was 15 years old in 1948 so I was a little kid,” he said. “I swam in the 400 and 100 metres freestyle and swam anchor on the relay which is 4x200 metres freestyle. I was swimming the fastest time at that moment.”

As for his team-mates, Cook said: “Derek Oatway was the best 1500 metres swimmer on the team and he also swam the 100 and 400 and the 4X200 relay. Philip Tribley swam only in the 100 and the relay and Donald Shanks swam the 100 and 200 backstroke.”

Cook remains active in the sport, competing at the masters level at events across the United States.

“I still compete in the masters competitions,” he said. “When I turned 80 I was number three in the United States and number nine in the world in the 1500 freestyle.”

Missing names: the wall at the National Sports Centre
Bermuda Olympians: Cook and his team-mates at Wembley in 1948