And this year he joins the man he grew up learning from, his father - Olympic swimming medalist, coach and administrator Terry Gathercole AM - in the ACT Sport Hall of Fame.

He followed his father into swim coaching in 1989, before he discovered triathlons in 1991 and began competing.

The Triathlon ACT life member later identified a coaching gap in the sport and went on to build one of the top club's in Australia, lead Triathlon Australia as a director, run training camps for the International Triathlon Union and coach Olympian Simon Thompson to Athens 2004.

"There's not many father son combinations in there [the Hall of Fame], so I'm one of the lucky ones," Gathercole said.

"You never start your coaching or your administration career thinking that this is something that you'll achieve. So it's pretty cool that you go through your journey of your coaching and administration career, and have your sport think that you're worth something like this.

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"Dad didn't really understand the whole triathlon thing, he was pure swimming, but he was cool. He took a bit of interest in it.

"The years upon years of growing up around that coaching environment, ever since I was four or five years old to until I left to go to university at 18, I guess I learned that way - the informal education early and then a formal education a bit later on."

In addition to his triathlon coaching, he later moved into the sports administration side of high performance sport and took on a team director role with the ACT Brumbies from 2014-2016. Before he became the performance manager for Carrera Cup driver Cameron Hill in 2019.

Hill signed a Super 2 series deal with Triple Eight Engineering this month, leaving Gathercole without a gig in 2022 but he is excited for the unknown possibilities of the future, and his new passion for water safety alongside his mother Carol and daughter, Georgia.

"To this day I still work with my mum, we're teaching kids to swim and about water safety. That's probably one of my new interests, ensuring that young kids have an opportunity to be a little bit safer and a little bit more aware of what's happening in and around swimming pools and bathtubs. You hear those drowning accidents and your heart just bleeds," he said.

"I was incredibly fortunate through swimming, I got my education in the USA on a scholarship, I came back to Australia and I was always involved in endurance sports.

"I was very lucky, getting in early and spending a good 25 years being a professional triathlon coach, which still astounds me to this day. During those 25 years, the Olympic journeys, the Commonwealth Games journeys, world championships - we traveled the world - all these things that you just never think that you will get to do. And being here in Canberra, off we went, we conquered the world so to speak."

The former Florida State University swimmer has been involved in a range of high performance sports - swimming, triathlons, Supercars - but he said across all sporting codes people were the same.

"They all want to be respected. They all they all need clear and concise communication and they all want to know that they're part of what the process happens to be," he said.

Gathercole, alongside others, will be inducted into the ACT Sport Hall of Fame's class of 2021 at the Canberra sport awards, which will be held as an online event on Thursday, December 2.

Register to attend by clicking here.