High achiever led an extraordinary life
Scott Gullan From: Herald Sun July 21, 2010 12:00AM Increase Text Size Decrease Text Size Print Email Share Add to Digg Add to del.icio.us Add to Facebook Add to Kwoff Add to Myspace Add to Newsvine What are these?
David Baxter (left) won bronze in the 4x100 relay at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, 2002. Picture: Craig Borrow Source: HWT Image Library
DAVID Baxter knew from an early age his two main aims in life - run for Australia and become a neurosurgeon.
In 2002 he achieved his first goal, winning bronze as part of the 4x100m relay at the Manchester Commonwealth Games.
His second was well advanced when, cruelly, the disease he was studying to become an expert at preventing, claimed his life.
Last Friday, the athletics community gathered at St James’ Anglican Church in Ivanhoe to farewell the 33-year-old who died from a brain tumour in Stockholm on July 2.
Matt Shirvington remembered an “extraordinary” person while Tamsyn Lewis and Lauren Hewitt, a former training partner of Baxter’s, recalled the incredible spirit he showed in his final days.
Baxter started his career at the Doncaster Little Athletics centre and was Australian junior champion at both 100m and 200m in 1995-96.
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He won bronze in the relay at the 1996 world junior championships and made his first senior team as a relay squad member at the 1999 world championships in Seville.
His best times were 10.30sec for 100m and 20.57sec for 200m.
John Quinn, the former Essendon fitness adviser who recently joined the new GWS footy team, coached Baxter and said he was the most amazing person that he’d had the privilege to work with.
“I remember being in New Zealand with him on an athletics trip and he was sitting in the bus reading a book. I sat down beside him and asked what he was reading,” he said.
“It was a book on brain surgery and I was like; why is a 16-year-old kid reading a book on brain surgery? He just said, ‘That’s what I think I will do, I want to be a neurosurgeon’.”
Baxter’s studies took him around the world. He completed degrees at Melbourne University and Oxford and worked as a researcher in Stockholm and at Monash University.
Last year he was one of only a handful of doctors to be accepted into the prestigious neurosurgical program at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh.
But his life changed in May last year when he discovered a melanoma that had spread to his brain.
Throughout his illness Baxter continued with his studies, and at last week’s funeral a professor from Monash University revealed the remarkable steps he’d already taken in his chosen field.
“He had written a thesis as part of his PhD which hasn’t been published yet but the paper had generated six other papers to be written,” Mr Quinn explained.
“It was ground-breaking research and he was one of the more brilliant minds in that sphere of medicine in the world.”
Just weeks before his death Baxter married his long-time Swedish girlfriend, Judith, in his favourite park in Stockholm.