The first woman to race inside a minute for the 100m freestyle, Dawn Fraser was also the first swimmer to win the same Olympic title (100m freestyle) at three consecutive Olympic Games.

The Balmain Bullet might have made it four but for the high-handed bureaucracy of the Australian Amateur Swimming Union in response to the swimmer’s high jinks at the 1964 Olympic Games.

Dawn's trouble with blazers started many years before that: she was just 12 when she was accused of professionalism because she received two shillings for showing how well she could swim at a children’s Christmas party. She was suspended by the Amateur Swimming Union for two years - and would not make her international debut until she was 18 ... at a home Olympic Games in Melbourne.

The head honcho of the Amateur Swimming Association of Australia was Bill Berge Phillips, who, Fraser would later reveal, told her she would never swim for Australia. “I said: ‘Yes I will, and not you or anyone else will stop me’,” she writes in her biography.

Described as "an independent, stormy petrel" by Pat Besford, the doyenne of swimming journalists of her era, and a "larrikin" back home in Australia, Fraser was said to have swum a moat so that she could steal a flag at Tokyo 1964. It wasn't quite like that - there was a flag, an accomplice or two, a getaway bike, a moat, a twisted ankle, an arrest and a deal with the police chief, a prize and a pardon - but the blokes in blazers needed to assert their authority, and imposed a 10-year ban on Fraser.

More detail in the conclusion to this overview of a career that needs a library in its pantheon, rather than a tribute feature, but here we go...