One week ago the FBI issued indictments against seven Russian state officials on charges of illegal computer hacking. The officers, and by implication their government, were accused of hacking the doping records of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and included the theft and publication of many athlete’s private medical and doping histories. Clearly the information was intended to ruin the reputation of non-Russian athletes and was taken in retaliation to WADA’s attempts to sanction Russian state cheating.

Of equal concern to the behavior of the Russians is the deadly silence from WADA.  This is how the WADA reaction was reported on the Swimvortex Facebook page.

It is a very valid question. Clean athletes should not be forced to compete with Russian cheats. Russian cheats should not be nurtured and protected by the Russian state. Just because the President of Russia spends endless money on IOC and WADA junkets does not excuse his disgusting behavior. WADA has failed in its core responsibility to protect sport from the cancer of drug use.

But the face of WADA’s neglect lies closer to home than the WADA head office in Montreal, Canada. You see the new President of Swimming New Zealand (SNZ), Dave Gerrard, is also the Chairman of the WADA TUC Committee. Gerrard’s principal responsibility is to set the rules for athletes who find it necessary to take drugs for legitimate therapeutic reasons. Russian cheating and crimes are by no means therapeutic. However Gerrard is a senior member of the world’s leading drug agency and has a responsibility to ensure WADA acts properly.

Gerrard’s duty is further enhanced by his responsibilities to New Zealand swimming. I see he was interviewed last week on Radio Sport. He was full of ideas about the need for better coaching, improved learn-to-swim and the importance of competition in Australia. He was however remarkably silent on a subject that is already his responsibility. Not one word about Russian cheats or what he was going to do to sanction the representatives of the Russian state. I find it very difficult to have any respect for someone who happily criticises honest New Zealand coaches and stays silent about cheating Russians – especially when the job that rewards him handsomely, both as a WADA Chairman and the SNZ President, requires him to deal with the cheats. In my opinion Gerrard should clean up his own act before he starts poking sticks at hard working New Zealand coaches.

And it is not as though Russian cheats don’t affect the sport in New Zealand. Yes, of course I know that New Zealand swimming is struggling to keep up with world standards. Swimmers in New Zealand have enough problems with the sport’s rubbish New Zealand administration. It is unacceptable for their task to be made even more difficult by state sponsored cheating.

Dave Gerrard could improve the average New Zealand SC Champion’s world ranking by an average of eleven places just by doing his job. The table below shows the winner’s time for every event at last week’s New Zealand Short Course Championships. The next column shows the 2017/18 world ranking of that time. The fourth column shows the number of Russian cheats with times faster than the New Zealand winner. The final column then shows where the New Zealand Champion would rank if Dave Gerrard was actually working in the best interests of the sport in his home country.

As you can see the action of banning Russian swimmers would not only be the right thing to do but would improve the average world ranking of the New Zealand champion by 11 places from 93 in the world to 82. I accept this is still a poor result, but at least it would be fair. For a few events (200 men’s back, men’s 100 and 200 IM, women’s 1500, women’s 200 back, women’s 200 breast and women’s 100 IM) the improvement is very significant.

And so before Gerrard cracks on about New Zealand coaching it would serve him well to make sure he has done all he can to improve the world performance of New Zealand swimmers. Right now that is far from the case. In my opinion his WADA performance is hurting New Zealand swimmers badly. Doing nothing while cheats prosper is as bad as cheating yourself. Before Gerrard sounds off about New Zealand swimmers or their coaches he needs to accept the biblical order, “Physician heal thyself.”