Andrew George Lauterstein

Andrew is a talented sportsman and as a junior played   in the Victorian state football team and also represented Australia at baseball. He stopped both sports at the age of 16 to concentrate on swimming.

Andrew qualified for his first Australian Open team while still in Year 12 at BGS. After finishing school, and narrowly missing out on making the 2004 Athens Olympic team, Andrew’s commitment to swimming intensified and in 2006 moved to the Gold Coast to follow his coach. He enrolled at Griffith University to study business. His goal was to swim at the Olympics.

Andrew achieved his goal, representing Australia at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, swimming both freestyle and butterfly. So successful was Andrew he brought home three medals; a silver medal in the 4 x 100m medley  relay (butterfly leg) and a bronze medal in both the 100m butterfly and the 4 x 100m freestyle relay.

In the lead up to winning bronze in the 100m butterfly, Andrew swam a personal best and set an Australian record in each of the three stages and qualified for the final with the third fastest qualifying time. He took bronze in the final with a time of 51.12 seconds in a race where US superstar Michael Phelps won his 7th gold medal of the Games.

Andrew has reflected “I was on the dais with Michael Phelps, the world’s greatest athlete, for his 7th and 8th gold medals in Beijing… and to do the laps of honour with him was something really, really special”.

Following the Olympics, Andrew moved to the NSW Institute of Sport. He set a national 50m butterfly record, at the 2009 Australian Swimming championships. At the World Championships in Rome later the same year, Andrew won bronze in the 4x100m medley and swam 5th in the 100m butterfly.

Outside the pool Andrew has had a successful modelling career, and was nominated for the 2008 Australia’s Cleo magazine ‘Bachelor of the Year’ Award. Andrew is now owner of swimwear company Engine Swim and has established a learn-to-swim centre, ‘New Wave Swim School’.

Built like a gladiator, Andrew is the most successful swimmer ever to hail from Brighton Grammar School!