Early Years
O'Brien grew up in the rural town of Wellington, 360 kilometres (225 miles) from Sydney. Neither of his parents were skilled swimmers. His father Roy knew only one swimming stroke—the breaststroke—and his mother Thelma did not take her first swimming lesson until she was 55. O'Brien's sister Ann was a talented swimmer in her childhood years, but she preferred horseback riding. The local pool was an old-style facility that had no pump system and was only manually drained once a week. Aged four, O'Brien got his first swimming lessons from the local Learn to Swim program. There were not many non-sporting activities for children in Wellington, and O'Brien played basketball and rugby league, did athletics, swimming and rode horses. In 1954, a chlorinated pool was built in the town, leading to the formation of Wellington Swimming Club. At the age of 10, he began competitive swimming under local coach Bert Eslick, and raced in regional country swimming carnivals at Dubbo, Bathurst and Orange.
After winning all the breaststroke events at the country championships, O'Brien was taken by his father to the Ryde pool in Sydney in 1960, to be coached by Forbes Carlile and his assistant, retired world record-breaking breaststroker Terry Gathercole. Carlile was regarded as the leading swimming coach in Australia at the time. At age 13, O'Brien was already a large teenager, weighing in at 82.6 kg. He only trained with Gathercole during holidays, when his father could take him to Sydney; Jim Wilkins, a Catholic priest in Bathurst, supervised him according to Gathercole's program while he was in the countryside. Within a year, O'Brien rose from being a country carnival champion to a national-level athlete, despite the death of his father in the same year.
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