Dean Boxall: the obsessive, eccentric and world-beating Australian swim coach

Australian swim coach Dean Boxall has enjoyed more than a few special moments at this year’s world championships being held in Fukuoka, Japan. On the opening night of the meet, his star swimmer Ariarne Titmus cemented her status as the dominant force in women’s swimming with an unexpectedly emphatic victory (and world record) in the women’s 400m freestyle.

A few days later, Titmus was in prime position to add the 200m freestyle title to her haul when teammate Mollie O’Callaghan, another member of team Boxall, surged over the top to take gold in a thrilling finish. The 19-year-old also broke the longest standing world record in swimming, overcoming a mark last set at the 2009 world championships.

Related: Mollie O’Callaghan breaks 200m freestyle swimming world record

And then on Thursday night, as if things could not get better for Boxall’s stable, the Australian women won the 4x200m freestyle relay – breaking yet another world record. All four swimmers in the relay final for Australia – O’Callaghan, Titmus, Shayna Jack and Brianna Throssell – train under Boxall, at St Peters Western in Brisbane. O’Callaghan’s solo win on Friday, in the 100m freestyle, was yet more icing on the cake.

The Australian Dolphins have won 10 gold medals in Japan, with two nights of racing to go. Boxall-trained swimmers have had a hand in more than half of them (10 members of the 31-strong Dolphins in Fukuoka are part of his program). And when O’Callaghan and Titmus went one-two in the 200m freestyle, it was the first-time an Australian quinella at the world championships had come from the same coaching stable.

So who is this coach masterminding so much glory for Australian swimming? Boxall, now in his mid-40s, was born in South Africa and moved to Australia as a child. He has been in and around the water even since, but has always felt like an outsider in the close-knit world of Australian swimming. His eccentricities, his viral celebrations and his unorthodox approach meant that Boxall was not universally admired. “I never quite fit the mould,” Boxall admitted to the Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.

Fortunately, Boxall found two influential backers. Michael Bohl, then head of St Peters and now based on the Gold Coast, and former Dolphins head coach Jacco Verhaeren embraced him. Verhaeren and Boxall were an unlikely duo, a no-nonsense Dutchman and hyper-energetic South African-Australian. But over the latter-half of the 2010s, the coach flourished – fostering the rise of Titmus, from an inexperienced teenager relocating from Tasmania to pursue the big time, to the queen of the pool at the Tokyo Olympics.

Success begets success, and other swimmers have flocked to Boxall’s program hoping to benefit from the coach’s golden touch.

Boxall’s poolside theatrics, repeated in Fukuoka, have drawn critics – with some suggesting he has overshadowed the triumphs of his athletes. The coach’s swimmers have had none of it; they all speak glowingly of Boxall’s coaching genius. He is not just a master tactician for his swimmers, more a closer personal friend.

“That’s just me,” Boxall laughed, when asked about the criticism last year. “I do worse on the training deck, I do worse at the national age or open championships or the state championships. That’s just me – I give a lot of energy to the athletes, and I expect them to give it back.”

The coach explains the celebrations as a consequence of his relentlessness. Boxall buzzes with an uncontainable energy that has helped the likes of Titmus and O’Callaghan become world champions, Olympic champions, Commonwealth champions and world record holders. He likes to recall how, when Titmus joined his program as a teenager, there was daylight between her and arch-rival Katie Ledecky: 38 seconds difference in the 800m freestyle, 16 seconds in the 400m, eight seconds in the 200m.

Related: Titmus breaks world record to reign over Ledecky and McIntosh in swimming’s ‘Race of the Century’

Slowly but surely, Titmus and Boxall reeled Ledecky in – culminating in a sensational 400m victory at the Olympics, and then again in Fukuoka. “We were just getting on that journey,” he said last year. “You’ve got to be meticulous, you’ve got to be obsessed with detail.” And so when the win came, the volcano of emotion exploded: “I literally watched my plan come to fruition. That’s why.” This week, those plans have continued to come to fruition – and then some.

It has been a week of superlatives for Australian swimming, with the team on-track for their best-ever world championships performance. And it has been nothing short of triumphant for Dean Boxall. If the coach’s swimmers had their own category on the medal tally, they would currently be ahead of any other nation. But it was perhaps a non-Boxall trained swimmer, Australian breaststroke star Zac Stubblety-Cook, who said it best this week. “That is a mastery of coaching,” he said. It’s hard to disagree.