International Olympic chiefs have rallied round to give replica medals to Gary Hall Jnr, the US swimming great and one-time scourge of the Australian team, who's lost his home amid the Los Angeles wildfire disaster.
Hall, who won 10 Olympic medals in a glittering career and is still famed for his claim at the 2000 Games in Sydney that the Americans would smash the home swimmers "like guitars", has proved one of sport's high-profile victims of the fires.
The 50-year-old triple Olympian, a diabetic, revealed how he had to leave his medals at his gutted LA rented home in the Palisades fire, rushing instead to save his dog, Puddles, and grab his insulin.
