Armidale gears up for Polar Plunge at Dumaresq Dam

Armidale’s Polar Plunge returns to Dumaresq Dam on Sunday, 23 August, as organisers look to build on last year’s icy dip in support of local Special Olympics athletes.

The Law Enforcement Torch Run (LETR) Polar Plunge is one of twelve events being held across NSW this year, raising money for Special Olympics clubs including Armidale’s own.

LETR NSW President Scott Whyte said conditions at last year’s Armidale plunge were about as cold as they come, recalling that it had been snowing before the event.

Registrations for this year’s Armidale plunge were sitting at around 40 to 50 as the campaign moves through its final weeks, according to Mr Whyte, who expects the number to keep climbing before the 23 August event, given it falls two weeks later in the campaign than the Mid North Coast plunges at Coffs Harbour and Port Macquarie.

The Polar Plunge is part of the Law Enforcement Torch Run, a police-led fundraising movement for Special Olympics that began in the United States. Mr Whyte said it started small. “In 1981, a police chief in Wichita, Kansas was approached to have some of his officers run with a torch from police headquarters to a high school where Special Olympics Kansas were holding their summer games,” he said. Five officers took part, and that year they raised $900.

Forty five years on, the picture looks very different. “We go forward 45 years and collectively we’ve raised over 1.1 billion US dollars,” Mr Whyte said. He said the Torch Run now has around 100,000 law enforcement officers taking part worldwide, across about 25 countries. “I quite proudly tell people in the cops, we’re the largest policing charity in the world,” he said.

The Australian arm of the movement began in 2002, when a retired NSW police assistant commissioner asked the then police commissioner to support a torch relay ahead of the Special Olympics national games in Sydney, running the flame from the Victorian border at Albury into the city. Mr Whyte, who joined the cause in 2006, said he and the other founding members were not personally connected to the disability community. “None of us have any family or friends with intellectual disabilities, that’s not why we do it,” he said. “I certainly saw it as something that was worthwhile. We’re helping people in the community who actually need help.”

Money raised locally goes straight back to Armidale’s own Special Olympics club. “Every cent of it is lodged in a Special Olympics Australia bank account,” Mr Whyte said, explaining that fundraising collected by a local team is returned almost in full to that area’s club, while the $30 registration fee goes into a central pool used to support funding requests from clubs across the country.

Mr Whyte pointed to what that support has grown into elsewhere. Sydney’s Illawarra club used to raise about $900 a year from a Bunnings sausage sizzle. After joining the Polar Plunge, that jumped to $26,000 in its first year, then $42,000 this year. Sydney South, one of the original clubs involved when the plunge began at Cronulla, raised $82,000 this year, well ahead of the roughly $15,000 its annual golf day used to bring in. “We just get a kick out of seeing what gets done with the money,” Mr Whyte said.

He said a strong result in Armidale would make a real difference for a smaller club. “We’d like to see 10,000 at Armidale,” he said. “It’s not just nice, but it’s also really important to give a small club like that a bit of a kick along.”

He pointed to the growth of the Polar Plunge program statewide as proof of what community support can achieve. The very first NSW trial, held at Gunnamatta Bay, Cronulla, in 2024, drew 150 plungers and raised $90,000, with proceeds returned to four Sydney Special Olympics clubs that took part. Last year the program expanded to eight events across the state, drawing 1,100 plungers and raising $270,000, including a stop at the NSW Police Academy in Goulburn, where about 250 recruits took the plunge.

For anyone weighing up whether to sign up in Armidale, Mr Whyte kept his pitch simple. “You might get wet, you might get cold, but you’ll actually feel good about it afterwards,” he said.

Those who don’t fancy the cold water can still support the cause. “It would be great if the community would get behind their other community members with intellectual disabilities by throwing, just donating a few dollars,” Mr Whyte said. “If someone’s reading your paper and says, well, this is actually a good cause, I could spare $20, they can just jump on it and donate it.” Registrations and donations for the Armidale Polar Plunge at Dumaresq Dam are open now at include.specialolympics.com.au/polar-plunge