[Edition 40] SYDNEY, Friday: Australian swimming legend Dawn Fraser has written about her lesbian experiences, in a desperate attempt to make a sporting biography interesting.

Titled ?Dawn: One Hell of a Lie?, the book outlines Dawn?s life of deception as a champion freestyler, and reveals for the first time that she was really a breast stroker.

Among the breasts she stroked were those of Joy Cavill, a film producer and screenwriter whose intimate relationship with Dawn inspired the unflinchingly personal and honest movie which portrayed Dawn as straight.

Suspicions about the swimmer?s sexuality were first raised at the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964, when Dawn stole a flag that was striped with all the colours of the rainbow.

The book describes in painful detail many of the injuries which kept Dawn in doctors? surgeries for months. ?Even when she wasn?t injured, she still kept wanting to come in and see me,? recalled her doctor Kerryn Phelps.

Another chapter deals with the champion swimmer?s 10 year ban from competition. Initially it was thought that this was because she was caught flicking Shane Gould with a wet towel in the showers. It was later revealed that the ban came after she wore an unofficial swimsuit at the Olympics. Dawn now admits that in hindsight she was wrong to wear the leather bikini with the cut-out breasts.

The book?s sordid revelations have shocked the wider sporting community, which is struggling to come to terms with the idea of there being a lesbian in women?s sport.

?I simply can?t fathom it,? said a member of the Australian women?s cricket team, who later enquired about personal lessons at the Dawn Fraser swimming clinic.

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