There are as many ways of preparing for a Games as there are swimmers in the event. There is no fixed formula; no compulsory recipe. Distances swum can vary. The makeup of training sets can differ. Some swimmers continue with their gym programs and others focus on swimming alone. There is certainly no one road to Games success. If there were we’d all be on it. However there are a few features that seem to be standard. One of them is the importance of pre-Games competition. You don’t need to be a qualified swim coach to understand that swimmers need warmup competitions. Going straight from the training pool to a Commonwealth Games heat swim is not going to be successful.

Real competition is required to practice the skills of racing hard. Some things just cannot be replicated in a training pool. Experience suggests that between four and six quality competitions are needed to achieve peak results. It normally takes four meets for the swimmer to adjust into full racing mode. When I was coaching Toni Jeffs she toured Europe twice and broke New Zealand records in meets five and six; Anna Simcic broke her world record in meet five; and Danyon Loader broke his in meet five. Fewer “warm-up” races would have seen New Zealand missing out on two world records and five national records. So four races is the minimum warm-up required and six is even better.

The table below shows the starting, mid-tour and end of tour times of several New Zealand swimmers who were on one of the tours with Toni Jeffs. All of them performing best at meets five and six:

The experience of track athletes confirms the importance of a well-planned series of warm-up competitive events. The table below shows the number of races some of New Zealand’s finest runners competed in before running their best times.

As you can see the experience of some very successful competitors suggest strongly that a well-planned pre-main event program of races is important.

And so how does the current New Zealand team’s pre-Games program compare. We already know that the preparation has been disrupted by Swimming New Zealand’s incompetence. A pre-Games camp has had to be split in two because Swimming New Zealand fiddled with the relay entries and then couldn’t count to 11. But has the federation compensated by planning an exciting series of warm-up events? The table below shows the competitions swum by each team member in February and March; in other words the competitions swum in the eight weeks prior to the Commonwealth Games. Because Corey Main, Georgia Marris and Samuel Perry are in the United States their information may not be accurate. I have attempted to find the events Perry and Marris would have swum by looking at their school events.

As you can see there is a huge difference between the competitive program followed by the athletes shown at the top of this post and the race program offered to this Commonwealth Games team. I hope I’m wrong, but in my opinion, and with the exception of Samuel Perry, the team lacks hard race preparation.

Samuel Perry’s February and March schedule has included races for Stanford University against USC, Cal, Pac12 and NCAA Div1. He should arrive in Brisbane hardened and race ready. Compare that to others on the team whose two events have been a Roskill Club Level 1 Meet and the Auckland Age Group Championships. Those events hardly compare with the Pac12 and NCAA Div1. With the best will in the world a Roskill Level 1 Meet and an Auckland Age Group Championships are not adequate preparation for a Commonwealth Games.

In a final act of lunacy Swimming New Zealand decided to program the National Open Championships three months after the Games have ended. In a piece of blatant vandalism, the one domestic event that could have offered some much needed competition was deliberately removed. Has someone in Antares Place set out to make life as difficult as possible for this team?

We will of course soon see what happens but at this stage the evidence suggests that the Swimming New Zealand parent body has let this team of swimmers down. The selection process was a farce, the pre-Games camp is a shambles, the debate over relay and individual events is causing conflict and the warm-up race program appears to be inadequate. The signs are ominous. In my opinion, if the worst happens, responsibility for the team selection, for the camp, for the event selection and for the pre-Games schedule lies squarely at the door of Cotterill and Johns. This one is down to them. They should be rewarded for the successes of the team. They should be fired for its failures.