Archive for April, 2011

New Zealand Swimming Championships 2011

Monday, April 11th, 2011

By David

I begin this story with a heavy heart. The New Zealand Swimming Championships have just ended. It was the most contemptible and depressing version of this meet I have ever attended. The meet now reflects perfectly the character and personality of the person who has led this sport in New Zealand for a decade; full of intrigue and deception, politics and graft. It was a most disheartening sight.

But before I address the concerns that have brought swimming to its knees, I am pleased to report that Swimwatch has hired a prominent firm of attorneys to investigate and report on the decision of the Swimming New Zealand Board to alter the published minutes of the 2010 Annual General Meeting. In particular, I have asked the attorneys to consider whether the SNZ Board’s decision to remove a properly passed remit from the minutes is in any way illegal or unconstitutional and what further action they would recommend. We will report to you in full on their findings. As you can well imagine this type of action is something Swimwatch can ill afford. However the sport of swimming can even less afford to have a group at its head who alter the course of history if it doesn’t suit them.

Jan Cameron’s ways are an abomination. They deny all the good this proud little country represents. I walked into the pool on the first day of competition to find that Cameron’s Millennium Institute swimmers were permanently located in privileged seats next to the New Zealand selectors while the rest of us were expected to shift around the pool to a new location every day. The Millennium swimmers arrived in their black and silver outfits already adorned with the silver fern. There is no need for any of them to win an international swimming race – they already have the finest seats in the building and have become heirs to a uniform their predecessors had to earn. I have the privilege of living in a home where my wife and my daughter represented New Zealand in track and swimming. I have also coached a dozen athletes who have represented four different nations. I know the effort it took them to earn and the value they put on their national uniform. New Zealand’s uniform is not for some Australian to give away to anybody that turns up at her Millennium Institute.

I have also been fortunate enough to attend swim meets with swimmers whose names you might recognize – Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Dara Torres, Amanda Weir, Ian Thorp, Matt Biondi and several other similarly prominent names. Without exception these swimmers sat with their club mates. They mixed happily with those who would never progress past the heats. They displayed a humility that kept them in touch with reality; that kept them aware that they must perform. Even at this meet names like Danyon Loader, Rhi Jeffrey, Gary Hurring, Paul Kent and Jon Winter sat with the common herd. But with four Olympic medals and a dozen World Championship finals between them I guess they represent the sport the way it used to be. The way it was before Cameron.

I owe New Zealand’s Head Coach, Mark Regan, an apology. Here, at Swimwatch, we assumed Regan was a willing Cameron puppet. We were wrong. He was actually her pawn. He was employed as a temporary stand in, to fill in time before Cameron could complete her real mission of appointing her son to the position of New Zealand’s National Coach. At these National Championships Cameron took the next step towards assembling her family dynasty. The team of coaches selected to accompany New Zealand’s swimmers to the World Championships excluded the National Coach, Mark Regan. The three coaches that will travel with the team are Cameron’s son, Scott Talbot, Christchurch coach Leanne Speechley and Invercargill coach Jeremy Duncan. I would be surprised if Regan did not see this as the insult, Cameron certainly intended. He will resign and Cameron will announce that her son will reluctantly step in to save Swimming New Zealand in its hour of need; mission accomplished. But really, you would have to be pretty bloody stupid to believe it was any way to run a national sport. For four years Swimwatch has been pleading for the sport to stand-up to the Cameron dictatorship. This time perhaps someone is listening.

I watched Scott Talbot closely during the Woman’s 100 freestyle final. The race was a essentially a head to head contest between a swimmer from the Millennium Institute, Tash Hind, and a swimmer who left Scott Talbot ten weeks ago to be coached in the United States, Hayley Palmer. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they react in circumstances like that. Well, in this case Tash Hind won and Scott Talbot danced all over Hayley Palmer. He pumped the air and beat his chest. They say sport does not make character, but certainly reveals it. What was revealed in this instance was most unpleasant. Swimming New Zealand with Scott Talbot in charge will be a nasty place. Good manners, breeding and dignity will recede further into our past. Mark Regan has done a good job in exceptionally difficult circumstances. He should be going to the World Championships in China. We wish him better in the future than he has been dealt here.

The announcement of the World Championship team was a mystery wrapped up in an enigma. I was pleased to see “B” qualifiers, Hayley Palmer, Dylan Dunlop-Barrett and Matthew Stanley, selected. One thing I don’t understand though. While Hayley Palmer’s selection is a good one and well deserved, I’d have thought Cameron would have preferred to have her finger nails removed than select the swimmer who rejected her son’s coaching. I’d love to know what caused Cameron sufficient grief; what put her under enough pressure that she included New Zealand’s fastest female swimmer on the team. We will never know but there must have been something. It’s the only time I’ve seen her chicken out of anything. Perhaps she is afraid of the SPARC investigation. I hope so.

Cameron’s influence on the sport of swimming in New Zealand has been awful. The National Championships are not a patch on what they used to be. Ironically though it was Cameron who provided one of the event’s best moments. A swimmer who had been in Cameron’s office recently was telling me about the visit. In a voice positively complete with awe she said, “There is a name plate that goes all the way across Cameron’s desk.” With a title like “Swimming New Zealand General Manager of Performance and Pathways”, I guess it probably does. With an once of luck though, it won’t be there much longer.

From our Club, Jessica Marston performed best, improving her 100 freestyle by one second, her 200 by the same amount, her 400 by four seconds and her 800 by ten seconds; just reward for 664 kilometers she swam in this season’s eight weeks of build up aerobic conditioning.

Burning Lies Led To My Silent Cries

Sunday, April 3rd, 2011

By David

I desperately hope this post is a bunch of lies. I want the story to be a colossal misunderstanding; an error based on misinterpretation and ignorance. Because, if I have not made a mistake; if this post is true, the Coulter gang have plunged to depths I would never have imagined possible.

In previous articles, Swimwatch has identified examples of the Coulter gang’s deception. Remember the Project Vanguard committee that the AGM ordered to be made up of three Swimming New Zealand appointments and three representatives from the Regions. Annual General Meeting remits, however, have never worried the Coulter gang. That Committee now has five Coulter gang “yes-men” and only one Regional appointee. Remember the assurance given by Coulter and Byrne and Hemsworth that their Project Vanguard had no intention of stripping the Region’s assets. They told us the assets would remain in the disbanded Regions. And yet while they mumbled their assurance they knew that the law requires all Regions to have a clause in their Constitutions, that in the event of the Regions being wound up, their assets will be transferred to SNZ. That is the law. Remember the famous minutes of the Project Vanguard meetings posted on the SNZ website. When the Regions complained that the “minutes” bore no relation to what had gone on in their meetings, Hemsworth wrote back declaring that the “minutes” were not “minutes”; they were simply “notes” of what she thought the meetings had decided. The whole Project Vanguard exercise has been marked by deception and dishonesty.

However, if my discovery today is accurate, the Swimming New Zealand Board and their management team have stooped to a new low, way below the dishonesty of anything we have published before. If our findings are true the SNZ Board must not survive. It cannot be trusted. Here is what I think I found.

On Tuesday, 18 January this year, I wrote a Swimwatch story called “In the Vanguard of Political Intrigue”. The story began like this.

Approval from the membership will continue to be sought at the end of each phase of the project seeking continuation to the next. Any resulting outcomes or recommendations requiring constitutional change will need to be considered and approved by a Special General Meeting of SNZ.

“On Sunday 12 September 2010 this remit was passed at the Swimming New Zealand AGM. There are 22,000 members of Swimming New Zealand. Everyone should pin a copy of the resolution to their bedroom wall. It is the sport’s lifeboat on a sinking Titanic. The Board, its Chairman, Byrne and Cameron are required to obtain the permission of the regions before they can move Project Vanguard to the next stage. The current stage will conclude in February when Cathy Hemsworth submits her report to the SNZ Board.”

I think you will all agree that seems pretty clear. On Sunday 12 September 2010 the AGM of Swimming New Zealand passed a remit requiring SNZ to seek the approval of the membership before Project Vanguard could proceed to a new stage. The Regions ordered the Board to follow a clearly defined course and the Board is compelled to comply. Well, Hemsworth has now handed in her report and there is no sign of the Swimming New Zealand Board recognizing the obligation that – “Approval from the membership will continue to be sought at the end of each phase of the project seeking continuation to the next.” Instead the Board is giving every indication it intends to ignore a specific instruction from the membership. They are acting illegally.

So, I decided to write a story about the Board’s cavalier disregard of an AGM remit. I just hate it when people disregard the rules of the game like that. Their arrogance puts us all at risk. We live in a society where the “rule of law” provides a framework that keeps our daily lives honest. When people operate outside the “rule of law”, none of us are safe. This was clearly fertile territory for a new Swimwatch post.

So I went again to the Sunday, 12 September 2010 AGM minutes posted on the SNZ website. And do you know what I found? THE MINUTES HAVE BEEN CHANGED. THE REMIT REQUIRING REGIONAL APPROVAL IS GONE. HISTORY HAS BEEN CHANGED. This is what Swimming New Zealand has put in its place.

“Project Vanguard

Mr Berge tabled a retrospective motion:

MOVED

“That project vanguard seeks the ratification from this Annual General Meeting to continue this process recognising the independent regional funding streams. Any resulting outcomes or recommendations requiring constitutional change will need to be considered and approved by a Special General Meeting of Swimming New Zealand”

Chairman Project Vanguard Committee/Taranaki”

No mention any longer of “approval from the membership” continuing “to be sought at the end of each phase of the project seeking continuation to the next”. The original wording is still available in this document on Swimming New Zealand’s website, at the bottom of page one and the top of page two. In the event that Swimming New Zealand remove the remit from this document as well–as they have with the contents of the minutes–we have taken a screenshot of the paragraph:

Would you believe it? Coulter and his conspirators consciously resolved to take down the Minutes of an Annual General Meeting and eliminate a clause they found difficult. They knew they would lose a vote so they changed the rules; at the stroke of a pen they altered history. They replaced what actually happened, what was actually approved, with a bald-faced, deliberate lie. The original words now only exist in this supplementary document.

Does their arrogant disregard for the rules, for the Constitution, for the membership and for the sport, know no limits? They are no better than common criminals. They have relinquished all moral authority to be anywhere near the Board Room of an important New Zealand sport. They are despicable and deserve only our contempt.

So, what should happen to a Board and management team who alter Annual General Meeting minutes; who don’t like the instructions given to them by their stakeholders and who consciously ignore orders by obliterating them from history? Is that the sort of management team, is that the standard of honesty expected from an organization that takes $2 million a year from the public purse? On the Board of SNZ there are lawyers and commercial people who are expected to maintain ethical standards way superior to this example. What on God’s good earth are they doing? This is not the way SNZ’s main sponsor, State Insurance, runs its business. I’m pretty certain the executives of State would be appalled to learn their $300,000 was going to a bunch of crooks. SNZ’s Wellington Head Office is in need of a clean out. The top floor of the organization is broken beyond repair. It stinks. They should leave now before they cause any more damage.

Could Jan Cameron Coach Colin Meads?

Friday, April 1st, 2011

By David

Paul Newnham recently sent Swimwatch a very interesting comment. This is what he said.

Hi David,
Interesting article above. I’m doing a bunch of SPARC endorsed community coaching courses. The guys from Unitech School of Sport tell us we need to learn to create \Self directed athletes\ much like the farmers etc who once made up the all blacks. According to SPARC we have lost some of the chaotic self directed decision making. We have become boring and predictable resulting in poor international performance. If SPARC already know this how could they possibly endorse a sports organization moving to a boring and predictable management structure away from one that produced the likes of Loader!!

I could not agree more. For years elite swimming in New Zealand has been run like some middle school physical education class. Come to think of it, that’s not so strange. Jan Cameron, the boss of the program, is a middle school teacher by trade. Mind you, she should know better. During the 1960s, I believe she was a very good friend of Arthur Lydiard. Certainly he would have been horrified at the “school mom” tactics she performs with New Zealand’s best swimmers.

The best example is her ban on the consumption of alcohol. Many of New Zealand’s best swimmers are well into their 20s. If they want a glass of wine or a beer with their dinner, what’s the problem? When the competition is over and they want to relax with two or three glasses, isn’t that a good thing. Not according to Jan Cameron it’s not. Her blanket prohibition during a swim meet would see a sip of pastoral wine at Sunday Communion have you placed on report. She really has lost the plot of what all this is about.

Compare her antics with Duncan Laing. In 1992 I went with Duncan to the World Cup Final in Majorca. As the airplane lifted us up over the Tasman Sea on our way to Singapore he saw Toni Jeffs and me pouring a glass of wine with our lunch. He breathed a deep sigh and said, “Thank God for that. Steward! Do you have Speights on this plane?” The meet we were going to was the forerunner of the World Short Course Championships. There were three swimmers on the team and everyone came back with a medal. Toni won a bronze in the 50 freestyle and made the final of the 100 freestyle. An occasional glass of wine didn’t seem to do her any harm.

The really funny thing about Cameron’s rules is they don’t work. It seems like the very presence of this boarding school matron encourages misbehaviour. I’ve coached three swimmers who were members of Cameron led teams – Jeffs, Chellingworth and Copland. On every occasion I arranged for Duncan Laing to be their coach. I wouldn’t let a swimmer of mine anywhere near Jan Cameron. Just check her history. She has a unique capacity to attract misbehaviour. In Yokohama at the Pan Pacific Games there was too much drinking. Every reader of Swimwatch will be well aware of Daniel Bell’s repetitive disregard for Cameron’s rules. She treats swimmers like children and then is shocked when that’s what she gets.

The title of this story is ridiculous because it’s so impossible to imagine Cameron and Meads in the same anything. Mind you, putting Cameron and Loader together is just as bazaar. Therein lies the problem. Winning and Cameron, oil and water – concepts that just don’t mix.

It’s off the subject a bit but Cameron’s inability to communicate anything in writing is stunning, especially for someone in her position and, even worse, for someone who once taught English to Australia’s impressionable youth. The stuff she writes is just rubbish. Take a look at an email she sent out yesterday to New Zealand’s unsuspecting Regions.

Cameron’s first paragraph is a bundle of confusion.

“Over the last year, SPARC has been signaling that they wish to have all parts of their and our performance pathways aligned with the established Podium Pathways as part of our performance strategy.  This time has come. SNZ and SPARC have agreed on a podium pathway, given the statistical information from worldwide analysis over a ten year period.  SPARC has provided and worked with SNZ to develop this pathway so that it is real and achievable and they have agreed to funding in this performance area.”

In half a dozen lines she has offered up “performance pathways”, “Podium Pathways”, “performance strategy”, “podium pathway” (no capitals this time) and a “performance area”. It maybe just me but at the end of it all I have no idea what she’s talking about – especially as the whole thing appears to have taken a “worldwide analysis over a ten year period”. No wonder swimming hasn’t won an Olympic medal in that time. The boss has been busy collating data for this momentous email.

Cameron’s next paragraph adds to the confusion.

“SNZ knows that it also has a responsibility to develop swimmers under this podium umbrella so that they can and will jump up onto this pathway as they mature. As we all know, swimmers develop at different stages.  To this end, SNZ continues to develop and nurture a critical mass of swimmers below this podium pathway with its partners the regions and clubs of New Zealand.  The enjoyment of swimming and the many benefits we all obtain from our sport are greater than just performance and this is a wonderful pathway in itself and one we all believe in.”

Once again Cameron mixes metaphors and words in a jumble of confusion. Are the swimmers from my club competing in the National Championships next week under Cameron’s “podium umbrella” or “jumping up onto this pathway” or perhaps even part of the “critical mass below the podium pathway”? But isn’t her last sentence reassuring? Whether we’re under the umbrella or on the pathway or under the pathway it’s all wonderful and we all believe in it – whatever “it” is.

Do you notice how she desperately fits the “Regions and the Clubs of New Zealand” into the email. That’s straight out Project Vanguard propaganda. Constitutionally the Regions are partners of Swimming New Zealand and the Clubs are partners of the Regions. The Coulter gang, including Cameron, have always chosen to ignore that constitutional reality.

Cameron’s third paragraph continues under the same umbrella, along the same pathway.

This week SPARC delivered its updates on performance as it moves to synchronise levels and pathways for all sports it funds. SNZ has agreed with SPARC to outline these ‘pathways to podium’, demonstrating its incremental steps and support.  Essentially, SNZ carding now aligns with the Pathways to Podiums Strategy supported by SPARC.

The “Pathways to Podium Strategy” and the “pathways to podium” (no capitals) were not mentioned in the list of umbrellas and pathways revealed in the first paragraph. They seem to be important now though and we are assured they are supported by SPARC, so they must be good.

Cameron’s stunning missive concludes.

“There are exciting new proposals for individual Training Enhancement Grants from Swimming New Zealand that will be budget dependent on SPARC funding going forward.  Further details will be announced following SPARC HP Review.”

Bloody hell, just when I thought we’d been through every conceivable umbrella, pathway, strategy and plan, Cameron hits us with “Training Enhancement Grants”. Where did they come from? And finally, what do you think the world did before someone invented the words “going forward”? Being as the alternative isn’t available to us yet, it does seem to be stating the obvious.

I’m a great believer in Meads and Lydiard and Laing. They knew how to win a game. My guess is they’d struggle with this Cameron memorandum, even if it did take ten years of worldwide analysis. But there is hope. Cameron’s last sentence tells us that, “Further details will be announced following SPARC HP Review.” With any sort of luck one of those details will be a change to the signature at the bottom of the page – “Jan Cameron”.