The Scott Miller Story review: inside a former Olympian’s fall from grace

Scott Miller, silver medal winner at the 1996 Olympics in the 100 metres butterfly, hates getting wet. Getting back in the pool, which is what he’s about to do at the start of this two-part documentary, is not his idea of a good time. ‘I’ve got a lot of trauma from water,’ he says. And that’s just the start of his problems.

‘I’m here because I made decisions that looked logical at the time,’ he says early on. Those decisions led to a string of criminal convictions, including possessing a prescribed restricted substance and possessing an offensive weapon in 2008, a one-year suspected sentence for possession of methamphetamines in 2013, and a five-year jail sentence in 2022 for his role in a drug syndicate.

It was a pretty dramatic fall from grace for the former Young Australian of the Year. Now he’s clawing his way back.

Watch Deep End: The Scott Miller Story trailer

The Olympics pressure cooker

Today, Scott Miller is living in the Northern Beaches of New South Wales in the family home, taking care of his elderly mother. He’s now giving talks to kids about where it all went wrong for him. And he’s returning to swimming, getting back into training for the upcoming Masters Swimming Australia National Championships.

Miller’s sister gives some background on their swim-centric childhoods, and Miller sits down with his former coach, Paul Hardman, to watch and comment on the footage from his 1996 Olympics. The Russian who beat him took an approach to the race – the ‘submarine start’, swimming as far as possible underwater – that was later banned. Hardman says we didn’t get to see Miller’s real speed until the final stretch of the race.

It’s pretty much all downhill from there. Even now Miller sees his loss as ‘failure’; after he won the silver he threw the medal in the bin. He had a relationship with television host Charlotte Dawson that fizzled, in part due to Alan Jones, who had taken an interest in his career. Dawson later took her own life, and by the end of the first episode he’s in a pretty rocky place.

The Australian obsession with comeback stories

It’s been 15 years since he was last in the water and he’s still got the bulky build of a professional swimmer. It’s not hard to imagine how his size and strength might have been an asset out of the pool. While this doesn’t exactly skip over his criminal career, the focus here is clearly on his path to redemption; much of the present day interview material shows someone who’s still struggling with his past.

Part two, which airs next week, follows his descent into the criminal underworld. Struggling to cope with life after sport, he started getting into drugs, then started selling them to help pay for his own habit. Soon we’re told that he was desperate and increasingly in trouble; he was also a drug dealer who was arrested trying to transport over $2 million dollars worth of meth across NSW.

Most of the time, the Australian media is only interested in the crimes that criminals commit; as far as their personal lives go, they’re bad people, end of story. Any excuses or justifications for crime are just attempts to escape punishment. Up next, how the justice system failed yet another victim of crime.

But when it’s a high profile sportsperson, then it’s a little different. The harsh lights are dialled down a little, the path to redemption isn’t completely barred. That’s not to say sportspeople don’t deserve a second chance – just that our media often seem a little stingy when it comes to handing them out to anyone else.

Scott Miller’s side of the story

Here, Miller gets to state his case. He’s remorseful and trying to get his life back on track; prison saved him from himself. His lawyer points out that it’s usually the middlemen who get busted – not the real criminals at the top.

And the regimented life inside prison sems to have suited him. As his sister puts it, ‘The only difference between the AIS and jail was that jail didn’t have a pool.’

Deep End: The Scott Miller Story works best when modern-day Miller is on the screen, and he’s on-screen a lot. Whatever you might think of his story, there’s still clearly a lot going on with him, and it’s all close to the surface. Watching him grapple with his past and search for a way forward is strong stuff.

And if you want to see him get back in the pool? They gave away the ending right at the start.

Deep End: The Scott Miller Story premieres 22 June on ABC TV and ABC iview.

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