Sports official Tunstall dies, aged 93

Controversial Australian sports administrator Arthur Tunstall has died, aged 93.

Legendary boxer and Sports Administrator Arthur Tunstall

The sometimes controversial Australian sports administrator Arthur Tunstall has died. (AAP)

Polarising Australian sports administrator Arthur Tunstall was proudly old-school.

"I don't believe in political correctness. I'm of the old tribe and if I want to say something, I say it," Tunstall said in 2012.

From Cathy Freeman to feminists, from New Zealanders to Jews and disabled athletes - Tunstall upset them all.

The name of Tunstall, who died on Thursday aged 93, is forever linked with Freeman, the Olympic and Commonwealth champion 400 metre runner.

At the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, Canada, Freeman won the 200m and 400m double - and celebrated by carrying the Australian and Aboriginal flags on a victory lap.

Tunstall, the secretary of the Australian Commonwealth Games Association, threatened to send her home.

"She should have carried the Australian flag first up. And not seen the Aboriginal flag at all," he said.

At the same Games, athletes with a disability competed for the first time at a Commonwealth Games.

Tunstall wasn't impressed, saying it was "embarrassing to have them with able-bodied athletes". And, for good measure, he added: "In Australia, people feel exactly the same way."

Those furores came four years after he upset New Zealanders at the 1990 Commonwealth Games by suggesting the country should become the seventh and eighth states of Australia.

And later, in 1997, he enraged feminists with his take in beach volleyball: "You see two girls in nice little bikini costumes flopping themselves around and that's good for television."

One year on, in 1998, Tunstall told a series of jokes about Jews and Aborigines at an Australian Olympic Writers and Photographers Association function.

Tunstall's gaffes punctuated his decorated career as a sports administrator.

He was the honorary secretary/treasurer of the Amateur Boxing Union of Australia for 46 years, from 1953.

He was Australia's Olympic boxing team manager at the Games in 1960, 1968, 1976 and 1980; a boxing technical delegate at the 1988, 1992 and 1996 Olympics; a boxing jury member at the 1984 and Sydney 2000 Games.

Awarded an OBE in 1979 for his service to boxing, Tunstall was awarded honorary life membership of the Australian Olympic Committee (AOC) in 1990.

In 2005, Tunstall was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame as an administrator for his contribution to the Commonwealth Games movement and boxing.

"He was at the forefront of the old school of voluntary sports administrators who did so much to create the Australian sports industry as we know it today," AOC president John Coates said in a statement on Friday.

"Arthur was one of the most respected sporting administrators around the world. He was a man of the highest integrity and character."


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Source: AAP



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