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Australian swim masterminds look to Paris 2024

Rohan Taylor, head coach of Australia's swimming team, has already started planning for Paris 2024 James Chance/Getty Images

The masterminds of Australia's record-breaking Tokyo Olympics swimming campaign are well advanced in their planning for the next Games in Paris.

Swimming Australia head coach Rohan Taylor said the upcoming two weeks in quarantine would be used for virtual meetings and after a conference in September, they expect to have their plans finalised for the upcoming three-year cycle.

But there will be challenges ahead, with an independent investigation looking at claims of an abusive culture in Australian swimming.

The national swim team has a packed schedule next year, with the Japan world championships in May and then the Birmingham Commonwealth Games two months later.

"We've been working on that for months, on plans, and in quarantine we'll finalise some of those," Taylor said.

"At the end of September, we should be pretty-well set for the next three years."

Australian swimming enjoyed its best Olympics, with nine gold, three silver and eight bronze.

That is one gold medal more than the entire Australian Olympic team managed at the London and Rio Games.

One reason being put forward for the swimmers' unprecedented success is that the selection trials were held in June, must closer to the Games than usual.

Taylor said that appears to have been a factor in their record Tokyo medal haul, but said the most important factor was the collective spirit and talent of the swimmers themselves.

"Obviously we've performed very well, so I would suggest off that ... it went well," he said at a Monday media conference of the date change for the trials.

"It's something we needed to do - we needed to try something different, because we'd been doing the same thing for so long.

"I'd say it's one of the ingredients, but probably the most important ingredient is we have up here talented athletes who know how to compete under pressure."

Another element was a 10-day event camp late last year, where the swimmers were confronted with uncertainty and unclear plans to prepare them for the chaos of the COVID-19 Olympics.

In the middle of the camp, they had a race meeting with pyrotechnics on the pool deck and a small crowd to put them under pressure.

"The whole idea was to just not let them know about anything that was going to happen, to create uncertainty," he said.

"The uncertainty bit was what we were expecting to be happening here, which it is - we had no way of being familiar with what we were going to deal with - and create competition.

"They had to perform with uncertainty."

Away from competition, a nervous Swimming Australia hierarchy also is uncertain about what the independent investigation will find.

SA formed the panel in the wake of the furore sparked by Rio Olympic medallist Maddie Groves, who withdrew from the Tokyo trials citing "misogynistic perverts in sport".

Her claims triggered other reports of incidents including fat-shaming of female swimmers with at least six other elite swimmers reportedly preparing to outline their concerns.

SA has admitted that unacceptable treatment of some swimmers dates back decades.