Swimming is Australia’s most successful Olympic and Paralympic sport, generating almost 50% of Australia’s medals. Nine of Australia’s top 10 Olympic medal winners are swimmers. This is the result of a world-class high performance system, a national footprint of eight High Performance Hubs and a heightened focus on technology and innovation.

Six of the top 10 fan moments from Tokyo 2020 were Swimming events. Emma McKeon, Ariarne Titmus, Cate and Bronte Campbell are all in the top 10 most marketed female athletes. We have a proud and active Dolphin Alumni Network, including household names of Kieren Perkins, Grant Hackett, Susie O’Neill, Libby Trickett and Ellie Cole. In 2022, we introduced a Hall of Fame to pay homage to our greats and Dawn Fraser, Shane Gould and Ian Thorpe were amongst the inaugural inductees.

Swimming is also Australia’s largest participation sport. Ausplay data reveals there are 5.34m organised swimmers, with over 50% growth in the last 10 years. We are a sport for life and our community spans from 6 month old learn to swimmers to 100 year old masters swimmers. Our GoSwim Learn to Swim program teaches over 100,000 kids per annum and our Junior Excellence program inspires the next generation of talented swimmers and coaches.

By donating to the Swimming Australia Foundation your donation can be targeted at any one of our 3 pillars:

1. Performance 

2. Participation

3. Planet

A donation to our performance pillar will help elevate the performance system towards 2032 and support our athletes to be the best they can be.

A donation to our participation pillar will support our learn to swim and drowning prevention programs. It will also support disadvantaged youth to have access to learn to swim environments. Other programs funded under this pillar include our Deadly Little Dolphins Program and Multicultural programs.

A donation to our planet pillar will provide support to our water warriors environmental leadership programs and also our health and wellbeing programs.