The coach and father of Australian running superstar Jessica Hull has admitted he reacted to his daughter's fall at the national athletics championships in "the wrong way" – and said he contacted the national federation to apologise.
But Simon Hull doubled down in his belief that his daughter was "robbed" on the home straight of the 1500-metre final and said the incident "destroyed her weekend of creating some history".
Hull had set herself the ambitious goal of winning each of the 800m, 1500m and 5000m titles at Sydney Olympic Park – a feat never achieved by any athlete, male or female, at a single Australian championships.
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But her bid for history was sensationally dashed on Friday night when she was clipped by Claudia Hollingsworth and sent crashing into the track face-first.
Hollingsworth won the race and was disqualified, but her camp appealed the disqualification and it was overturned in a two-hour hearing on Saturday afternoon.
As Hull picked herself up off the track and jogged the rest of the way, her dad launched a furious protest from the stands.
"We're not copping that," he yelled.
"Jess was robbed."
His blow-up went for about 15 minutes, at least in the public eye.
Reflecting on his reaction, he expressed remorse.
"I could have been a lot better. I could have been a lot calmer," he told Wide World of Sports.
"People have come to enjoy the event and if I've said something that kids [heard] – I love the kids and I love being involved in the sport – then I certainly regret it."
Simon said acting in such a way was not in his character.
"Jessica is an absolutely first-class sports person and you don't want people to think that their dad's a lunatic," he said.
"I probably was a bit boisterous, which usually I'm only boisterous cheering for her.
"There's right and wrong ways to go about things, and I was sort of on the edge of the wrong way."
Wide World of Sports can confirm he contacted Australian Athletics high-performance boss Andrew Faichney, with whom he has a great relationship, to apologise for the commotion.
Contrary to reports that have circulated in recent weeks, the Hull camp and Australian Athletics say there's no rift.
Hull, who skipped last month's Maurie Plant Meet due to her gruelling racing and travel schedules and no other reason, took aim at the reports after winning the 5000m final on Sunday.
"It's just a bit of emotion and it won't happen again," Simon added, speaking of his reaction to the fall.
In a statement, AA said Hollingsworth's disqualification was overturned after "viewing all the available footage and interviewing concerned parties".
No specific reasons were given for the reversal but Hull, speaking after winning the 5000m final, said: "Initially the DQ was based on jostling, which is the hand touch. A couple of taps in the back first was the original DQ and they overturned that because it wasn't enough to bring me down. But there was nothing in the original protest about the legs and you don't get a second go at that."
Hollingsworth was on Sunday among the first group of athletes named on the team for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games.
Hull wasn't able to be named as she hadn't secured automatic qualification, but there's no doubt AA will pick the Olympic silver medallist for the 1500m in the discretionary phase of the selection process.
"When you're denied an opportunity to win through no fault of your own, it's very difficult to take," Simon said.
"And we knew we had to put a protest in, but it's still not going to help you. So you're doing this basically trying to find the real winner of the race – it's just unfortunately not going to be you.
"You just want everyone who races in any race to have the opportunity for a fair and clean run. I think we were denied that.
"It's basically destroyed her weekend of creating some history, because I'm pretty confident that she was probably going to go on to win three events, or certainly give it a good nudge.
"The way the race unfolded was exactly how I thought it would, and she had another gear and unfortunately she didn't get to use it."
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