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Labelling the likes of Drew Ginn and James Tomkins “elites” is a curious form of criticism, Gary Merritt says.

Both were members of the “Oarsome Foursome” – a crew who so dominated world rowing throughout the 1990s and 2000s that the team’s nickname transcended the sport and entered everyday Australian parlance.

“There would be a very genuine debate over who is Australia’s greatest ever rower,” Merritt says. “James Tomkins or Drew Ginn?”

Yet “elites” and “agitators” are precisely the words the minister responsible for delivering the infrastructure for 2032 Brisbane Olympic Games has used to describe those critical of the Queensland government’s decision to host rowing and canoeing on Rockhampton’s Fitzroy river.

Merritt, the chair of Rowunion Queensland – an incorporated body that organises the state’s oarspeople past and present – is co-author of an open letter that raises concerns with the legacy of the Fitzroy as an Olympic venue.

Instead of investing in new, highly specialised infrastructure more than 600km north of Brisbane, the letter suggests instead “a once-in-a-generation opportunity” to build a “permanent home for rowing” in south-east Queensland – where “almost 80% of the state’s rowing participants live”.

So far from most of the rowing community and the “big private schools” that invest most in the sport’s grassroots – and hold annual major events – the Fitzroy “just won’t get the patronage to generate the income for maintenance costs”, Merritt says.

“It’s like saying: ‘we’re going to hold the Melbourne Cup in Birdsville for one year, have all the infrastructure built there and then, for the remaining years, hope that it is going to get used,” he tells Guardian Australia.

“It would become a white elephant.”

His letter was one to which more than 500 members of the Australian rowing community put their names. Ginn’s perched atop that list, as it so often did in his competitive rowing days – during which he was a five-time world champion and triple Olympic gold medal-winner.

“I didn’t want to be someone just complaining for the sake of complaining,” Ginn tells the Guardian. “But I’m very passionate about the athletes having the very best event they possibly can – and having an event that is fair.”

Because, for all his storied success, Ginn knows what it is like to miss out on winning a big race by fractions of a second. There is the personal anguish, of course. But also, there is the funding which – in a sport such as rowing – can be directly linked to results at just a few major events.

With such high stakes, if uneven water flow or wind makes that a fraction of second’s difference to a result, anguish turns to outrage.

“We don’t host major events on rivers,” Ginn says. “So, for me, it is baffling to think that you would host the greatest sporting event on the planet and accept something that is inferior.”

The day after receiving the letter in late March, the state’s infrastructure minister and deputy premier, Jarrod Bleijie, described it at a keynote speech on Olympic venue delivery as a “disappointing read” penned by “some agitators” intent upon “turning up their noses at Rocky from afar”.

Bleijie is not the only member of the conservative Liberal National party – whose power base is in the regions – to deploy colourful language in defence of its vision for “the mighty Fitzroy”. An oft repeated government line, including by premier David Crisafulli, in response to concerns about the deadly saltwater crocodiles that inhabit reaches of the river is that if it is good enough for local kids, it is “good enough for Pierre from Paris”.

But the deputy premier and LNP’s chief attack dog appears to go after his opponents with particular relish.

Bleijie told the Queensland Media Club late last month that organisers were poised to “hit the drive phase” in their bid to make Rockhampton an Olympic venue.

“This is despite, ladies and gentlemen, this is despite the best efforts by some elites who have been trying to take rowing away from regional Queensland,” he said.

Merritt’s letter emphasised that discontent within the rowing community with the Fitzroy proposal was not about a “debate about Brisbane versus regional Queensland”.

But other “taunts” thrown at him and his fellow “agitators”, the Rowunion Queensland chair says, were “absolutely right”.

Merritt says his concerns are not so much that the world’s best rowers might get snapped up by a saltie. The Fitzroy sits at the southern limits of “croc country”. Local rowers and kayakers daily paddle a stretch of the river upstream from a barrage beyond which large crocodiles are targeted for removal. There have been no officially recorded crocodile attacks on humans in the Fitzroy.

The river makes a “fabulous rowing venue that gets used all the time”, Merritt says – as a training venue for the national team and a host for local regattas and state championships and for local high school students.

“But this is about the elites,” Merritt says. “That is what the Olympics is about. If this was a picnic regatta, if this was another local regatta, [the Fitzroy] would be fine – but we are talking about the elites of world sport, who demand a completely fair playing field.

“This is not a normal regatta.”

Ginn too lets the deputy premier’s criticism slide like water off his oar.

The former champion athlete draws on analogy from a different sport when referring to the barbs of politicians: they are “playing the people, not the ball”.

“Calling people ‘elites’ is another word for ‘experts’,” Ginn says. “The rowing community are the experts in this – and the Brisbane and Queensland rowing community, in particular, know the various opportunities.

“I think they want to see a legacy item pretty strongly.”

And the Olympian from Leongatha knows a thing or two about legacy.

Ginn remembers Athens hot and dry, like a Victorian summer, fretting about the wind off the Aegean sea in the week before he rowed a coxless pair with Tomkins to Olympic gold in 2004.

Four years earlier, he and Tomkins were favourites to win the same event at their home Games in Sydney – only for Ginn to be cruelled by late injury.

Yet Ginn speaks far more favourably of the Australian rowing and canoe sprint venue at which he was forced to watch on as a spectator than he does of the Greek one at which he ascended to the utmost pinnacle of his sport.

“The Penrith Regatta Centre in 2000 was built one hour out of Sydney,” Ginn says. “That is a facility that is used every year, immensely. It is probably one of the best examples of a venue that was well thought out, well placed – and it is a legacy item.”

The Schinias rowing centre, in contrast, was among the Athens Olympic venues to descend into post-Games dilapidation. Seeing those facilities abandoned, he says, was “devastating”.

Ginn and Merritt draw a clear parallel between the Penrith venue and a proposed rowing and canoeing facility at an old quarry site in Moreton Bay, a 30-minute train ride from Brisbane’s CBD, for which the local council has backed a $250m course. Nor are they the only ones championing this option.

In the weeks since his letter was published, Merritt says he has had many from the rowing community, including “big influential names” who said that they wished they could have signed but were away or missed the memo. Others, he said, have official positions in the sport’s governing bodies and cannot publicly criticise the government.

One who has since publicly criticised the Rockhampton plan but was not on the letter, is Ginn’s gold medal-winning former rowing partner: Tomkins.

“Nothing has galvanised the rowing community like this government’s decision to take rowing to Rockhampton,” Merritt says.

Not every single rower is paddling in unison. Rockhampton Grammar alumni and Olympic medallist Alexander “Sasha” Belonogoff told local media that the Fitzroy was a “gift from the rowing gods”.

Which is a line Bleijie has quoted in leading the Queensland government to double down on the Rockhampton plan.

Rowing and canoeing international federations and the International Olympic Committee are yet to fully back the course and are awaiting final technical assessments.

But the deputy premier has already told the IOC, through the media, “if they don’t want it in Rocky – it ain’t happening”.

Bleijie responded to questions by saying the Games would deliver an “incredible venue” and “a long-lasting legacy for Rockhampton”.

“The delivery plan for regional Queensland has always been about so much more than the sporting facilities,” he said. “It’s ensuring communities across the state also benefit from the halo investment, opportunities and benefits, like road and transport improvements, housing and tourism.”

World Rowing said it was working to reach a final position on the Fitzroy “in a timely manner”.

The International Canoeing Federation, Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority, Brisbane 2032 organising committee and Rowing Australia were contacted for comment.