By David
There seems to be worldwide interest in the turmoil at Swimming New Zealand. Swimwatch received an email from Baden-Württemberg in Germany this week. The correspondent is a New Zealander and said she had received an email from New Zealand telling her that Swimming New Zealand were trying to make the case that Swimwatch told lies about the goings on in New Zealand swimming. In particular Swimming New Zealand strenuously denied the twenty points made in last week’s Swimwatch post. I wonder which ones they meant.
Has New Zealand won an Olympic medal recently that we all missed? Did the New Delhi Commonwealth Games rank higher than seventh? Perhaps it wasn’t Cameron commentating on Sky Sport. Bell didn’t get drunk and wasn’t sent home. Reagan and Cameron are bosom buddies. Everyone has their PEGs money. Millennium team spirit matches wartime London. No, I don’t think so.
Remember the title of this story. It may be the epitaph of New Zealand’s 2012 Olympic swimming campaign. I recall Lydiard counseling me, to everyday ask and answer the question, “What did you do today to improve your athletes’ chances of winning.” Two years out from an Olympic Games every coach, parent and administrator involved with a potential Olympian must be able to provide a very specific and detailed reply to this daily inquiry. Right now the sport of swimming in New Zealand is totally absorbed in political horseplay. Athlete’s chances of winning are well down the sport’s order of priorities. The supporting cast is making a mess of things.
Instead; can Cameron hold on to her job? Who’s going to get PEGs money? Can we sell Project Vanguard? How can we screw the Manawatu remit? Will we attend a reconciliation meeting? Who said what to whom? Who is loyal and who is not? In Swimming New Zealand, at the Millennium Institute and in SPARC right now all this stuff is far more important than whether Mellissa Ingram or Dean Bell should be doing a set of aerobic or anaerobic 200s tomorrow morning. Figuratively speaking, no one is swimming a length of the bloody pool. And New Zealand’s swimmers will pay big time for the negligence of those responsible for their Olympic dream. Every day there is the sad news of another costly payment.
How do I know this? Well I’m a bit of an expert. Many readers may not remember but before the Barcelona Olympic Games I made the same mistake. I was coaching Toni Jeffs. She had just won a bronze medal at what was then the world short course championship finals. She was favored to do well in Barcelona. Instead of concentrating on that fact we got involved in exotic sponsorships. We shifted pools. We made our own training plans. We traveled to the Games on our own. With Toni’s mother, we stayed in the French resort of Canet en Rousellon. We filed a complaint against Swimming New Zealand through the Olympic Athlete’s Commission and we won. We took Wellington Swimming to the Small Claims Tribunal and we won there as well. And do you know what? In the end we lost – we lost really, really badly. Toni was quite capable of winning an Olympic medal but ended up being placed 21st. It was a bad mistake; one that I got badly wrong.
The whole sport in New Zealand is currently heading off in the same direction – and at a hundred miles an hour. I doubt that there is a swimmer in New Zealand’s elite program right now that has their mind and body on the job. While their competition beaver away doing the hard yards our guys are up to their eye balls in sporting gossip and political intrigue. Phelps is swimming about 90 kilometers a week right now. Torres is lifting weights five times a week. Neither of them is debating the meaning of life with their coach or club. Neither of them will be beaten by a New Zealander in two years. I doubt the same clean bill of health could be said about our state run program. If New Zealand does not win a medal in swimming at the London Games, the country should remember clearly what its best swimmers were doing two years ago. Olympic champions do not prepare that way.
Regular Swimwatch readers will realize that I believe the only cure is for Cameron to recognize quickly the divisive effect her presence is having and do the decent thing by moving on. It is no longer relevant to debate whether that view is just or fair. It does not matter whether Cameron has been good or bad for the sport. She may have been a great poolside coach. But it’s way past all that. The sport is really sick and needs a major initiative to put it back on course. Cameron should provide that initiative. Going could be her greatest contribution.
