Archive for February, 2022

WHAT ARE THE RULES?

Wednesday, February 16th, 2022

In the last few years swim meet flyers have included an anti-doping condition. It is usually simple, something like,  

All participants must agree to comply with the Sports Anti-Doping Rules.

That seems clear. The sport has a set of anti-doping rules. Swimmers must agree to abide by those rules. Avoid any substance on the banned list and all should be well. Oh, if life was only that simple. While the rule is clear the administration of the sport’s anti-doping rules is a pig’s ear, marked with confusion, double standards and deals done in the dark corners of power.

Every swimmer must agree to abide by the anti-doping rules. But in making that commitment swimmers potentially enter a world of administrative corruption.

For example consider the implications of the Russian 15 year old ice skater, Kamila Valieva who has tested positive for the banned heart drug, trimetazidine, and has been cleared to continue competing by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). The Court gave her a favourable decision in part because she is under 16, known in Olympic jargon as a “protected person,” and is subject to different rules from an adult athlete.

“The panel considered that preventing the athlete to compete at the Olympic Games would cause her irreparable harm in the circumstances,” CAS Director General Matthieu Reeb said.

The Russians have got away with it again. The implications for swimming are huge. Next week the Waikato Championships are being held in Hamilton. 128 (60%) of the 215 swimmers entered are under 16. What does the CAS decision mean for them? Is it okay to get out the hypodermic needle and juice up knowing that CAS will rule that any sanction will cause “irreparable harm”? Are coaches really free to bring a cabinet full of pills to the pool for their under 16 swimmers, knowing that WADA and Swimming New Zealand label them “protected persons”?

It is an awful nonsense. The very young who need protection most are free to do what they and/or their coaches like. Either the IOC, CAS, Swimming New Zealand and WADA are intent on stamping out drug use or they are not. I got an email yesterday from one of the most highly respected coaches in New Zealand sport. This is what it said:

Hi David

I see that the IOC have decided that certain athletes can still compete in the Olympics even if they have tested positive for a prohibited drug. It would be interesting to discover the reasons behind this disgraceful decision. The IOC should be charged with complicity with or attempt to cover up an anti- doping rule violation by an athlete or other person. The IOC should be doing everything in its power to deter and detect dopers and holding dopers to account. The decision by the IOC encourages doping to the detriment of all clean athletes.

The email is absolutely right. The Swimming New Zealand meet condition clause, “All participants must agree to comply with the Sports Anti-Doping Rules” means nothing. If you are under 16 and doped up to your eyebrows, that’s just fine by those who run sport.

But it is not only young swimmers affected by administrative incompetence. Remember the Trent Bray case where the lab left his sample on a shelf in the sun for six weeks before testing. It took Trent years and thousands of dollars to clear his name. Even my daughter, Jane, was tested at the Nationals in Dunedin, only to discover that the sample tested in Australia had a different number from the sample she signed for at the meet. She asked for an explanation and was told, “Oh, sorry the paperwork got lost in Auckland during transit, so we had to allocate a new number.”

That sort of mismanagement is not good enough. Athlete’s careers are at stake. New Zealand authorities need to sharpen up their administration and world authorities need to mean what they say, when they tell us the goal is to eliminate drugs from sport. Otherwise stop insulting us with that ridiculous drug clause in your meet flyers. It means nothing.

YES, I’M A RACIST

Monday, February 14th, 2022

Several years ago, I spent a year in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, coaching swimming for the Saudi Arabian Swimming Federation. I do hope the swimmers involved learned something about the sport. Certainly, I learned something about myself – yes, I’m a racist.

That realisation began on my first day in the Kingdom. I had an appointment at the Jeddah Pool to meet the city’s three best swimmers. Eyad, Yammen and Loai were to form the heart of my training group. I had very low expectations. Saudi is not a country known for its swimming success. I expected three small, swarthy Arabic guys to appear. Three men better suited to racing camels across the Saudi desert than competitive pool swimming. Little guys with thin, wiry bodies totally unsuited to competitive swimming were about to appear in the pool meeting room.

But no, by any world standard, in walked three big guys, all well over 6 foot, with muscles to burn. Physically they would fit comfortably into any American University swim team photograph. Where had they come from, my brain asked? Why was my expectation so different from reality? Things were not as I imagined. The only answer was racism. It was time for me to learn something about this place and its people.

Thirty minutes later we were in the pool. Surprise number two. These guys could swim – pretty bloody well in fact. They needed some professional coaching. I could see that. But their talent was without question. Their feel of the water was first class. Being brought up in a desert Kingdom did not mean their swimming skills were non-existent. Racist impression number two needed revision.

Realisation of a character flaw this serious comes as a shock. I had long considered myself to be a relatively broad minded liberal. After all I had coached some of the world’s best female athletes. Rebellion against the prejudice faced by women had been key to that success. I had learned from being challenged by Victoria University lecturer, Alan Ladlaw, who, when I told him about females training as far as John Walker, asked me why I felt it necessary to compare their training with a man. I learned and never made that mistake again. But perhaps that experience was my weakness. Perhaps that had made me smug – self-confident in my liberalism. Could I be liberal in one area, but a racist conservative in others? Saudi taught me the answer to that was, yes.

I next confronted my personal racism when I was invited to eat out in a local restaurant. Would it be clean? What would the food be like? Should I drink the water? Was I risking food poisoning or worse? How racist can one person be? The reality was we ate at a local Applebee Restaurant. The facilities, the food and the service were better than many I had used in ten years coaching in the United States.

But probably the greatest challenge to my western prejudice came when I trod on a nail walking across a strip of desert between my hotel and the pool. It got infected and Eyad’s father, who is a doctor, said I needed hospital treatment. Here was a real challenge. Coaching talented swimmers and eating at Applebee was one thing. Putting my life in the hands of a Saudi hospital was a different thing altogether. Every prejudiced fiber in my being was on full alert.

Again, I was wrong. The facilities were first class and spotless. My treatment by doctors and nurses was exceptional. Caring and concerned they gave me the appropriate vaccinations and tablets. They dressed the wound every second day for three weeks. In a month my foot was as good as new.

I should have known my treatment would be first class. Eyad’s father had looked at the foot and immediately recommended hospital treatment. But I knew and trusted him. And so I should have. He received his medical education and degree in Syria’s leading medical college. Medical education has had its problems in Syria since the war began. Before that, however, Syrian medical training had earned huge international recognition. They were teaching medicine there long before the west thought to do the same. And in the case of Eyad’s father the history of a first-class education shows. Caring, kind, knowledgeable, a stickler for detail and never one for shortcuts – all the qualities you expect in a good doctor.

He said to me early in my stay in Jeddah, “Don’t walk outside in the mid-day sun.”

I asked, “Why not?”

He said, “David, look in a mirror at the color of your skin. Does that look like it needs to avoid the hot Arabian sun?”

The hospital treatment he recommended showed the same qualities. My Jeddah experience forced me to recognise my racist views. It was good for me. If I passed on as much about swimming as I learned about my own unconscious blind prejudice the year next to the Red Sea will have been well spent.  

RIGHT WING MORONS

Friday, February 11th, 2022

It would be difficult to dispute the proposition that the right wing of political discussion has a monopoly on stupidity. Everyday some right-wing air brain in the United States provides the world with examples of how the moron’s work. Trump of course leads the way. Drinking disinfectant to cure Covid. Dropping nuclear bombs into tornadoes. Exercise should be avoided. It depletes the body of finite energy reserves.   Praising George Washington for “taking over airports” during the 1775 Revolutionary War. The Wright brothers flew the first airplane in 1903. Windmills cause cancer. And America’s new F35 fighter was totally stealth. “So, when we’re fighting, they can’t see us.” 

While Trump may lead, his followers are close behind. This week a Georgia Republican congresswoman and supporter of Donald Trump has been mocked online after she confused the name of the Gestapo with a Spanish soup.

Marjorie Taylor Greene accused Democratic leaders of “gazpacho” tactics on Capitol Hill during an angry rant on One America News on Tuesday. Greene described the Washington jail housing US Capitol riot suspects as a “DC gulag” before accusing the House Speaker “Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police [of] spying on members of Congress”.

The representative from Georgia quickly became the butt of jokes on social media for confusing the cold tomato soup from Andalusia with the Third Reich’s feared secret police, the Gestapo.

Let’s dedicate this day to all right-wing gazpacho lovers. I hope they will have a great day ahead.

But the United States is not alone. New Zealand has its share of the mentally challenged right. Some readers may have seen the ex-TV news reporter, Liz Gunn, at parliament yesterday screaming into a camera, “Send reinforcements. This is war. This is war.” Clearly there is a job for her in the Washington DC gazpacho.

But one bloke, whose wife was in Wellington yesterday, had a Lotto win. She told television news she was going home to get a divorce because her husband had just had a Covid booster shot. Gives a whole new meaning to the government’s poster that says, “The vaccine that keeps us together.”

But the pinnacle of sensible political discourse came from the woman who held up a sign saying, “Love is the answer”, while screaming that a TV news reporter should be assassinated. The gazpacho could do with her as well.

But these New Zealand examples are mere foot soldiers. Do we have our version of Trump? Yes, indeed we do. Every morning on News Talk ZB Mike Hosking incites discontent. He feigns innocence. But is as stupid as Trump and just as dangerous. Yesterday, for example, Hosking did an item on the government’s planned unemployment insurance. His conclusion was that because the rich, like him, were going to pay for the planned insurance and the poor were going to get the benefit, New Zealand was now a “communist” country.

Now that is incitement. Dozens of the disaffected hearing that rubbish will join the ranks of those protesting in the grounds of Parliament. Hosking is stupid. He is wrong. Communism means control of the means of production, distribution and exchange. New Zealand is a million miles from anything like that description. The company Hosking works for proves that point.

New Zealand has 557,680 private business enterprises, an increase of 1.7 percent from February 2019. The number of paid employees in these enterprises was 2.3 million, up 1.2 percent from February 2019. These enterprises had 593,590 business locations, 1.6 percent more than in February 2019. That demographic is hardly the stuff of a communist takeover. Jacinda is no Stalin.

But tell a lie often enough and Hosking will get an audience of believers. I have no objection to the vomit Hosking spews, as long as New Zealand treats him like the absurd clown he has always been.  

WITHOUT REASON

Wednesday, February 9th, 2022

Mark Reason has written an opinion piece, published on the Stuff website today. I’ve read it twice and cannot understand what he is trying to say. I especially struggle to believe that Stuff decided to publish this rubbish. True to form, its publication reflects the eroding standard of Stuff’s journalism. What started off as a “Daily Telegraph” is inching its way ever closer to “The Sun”.

Reason seems to have two confusing goals. One is to praise the performance of Zoi Sadowski-Synnott. And two is to tear into the IOC for selecting China as the location for the 2022 Winter Olympics. Reason goes overboard to a point usually reserved for British comedians on the Costa del Sol.

Imagine what Billy Connolly would make of this Reason gem.

Her black suit twirled against the bright blue sky of China as she took us higher and higher and higher, a New Zealand freebird flying for joy.”  

You might think that would be enough clap-trap praise for what was in fact a hard-headed, well-trained professional at work. But Reason is in full flow. He is not about to be stopped. His beat goes on.

“The women’s slopestyle event was a return to innocence. When the New Zealander finished her final winning run she was engulfed by the other two medallists.”

“A return to innocence” – but was it really? Was it any different from Lotte Miller of Norway assisting Claire Michel of Belgium after the finish of women’s Tokyo Olympic Games’ triathlon or Gianmarco Tamberi, of Italy, embracing fellow gold medallist, Mutaz Barshim, of Qatar, after the final of the men’s high jump at the same Games or Saiah Jewett, of the United States, and Nijel Amos, of Botswana, shaking hands after tripping each other in the Tokyo men’s 800-meters. 

The history of sport is littered with good people doing good things. Zoi’s moment was one of them. But for Reason to put it into some Paul on the road to Damascus category is ridiculous. You might think the comparison with the biblical story of Paul is an exaggeration. But how else would you describe this Reason masterpiece?

“And then as we look to the heavens in despair, we see Zoi against the blue, taking us higher and higher, soaring above the dirty brown hillsides so naked of snow.”  

Best of all Reason tells us that after Zoi was “engulfed by the other two medallists”,

Their smiles bounced off the white of the snow.”

How does Reason know that? If they were smiling, the smiles were well hidden under a pile of bodies. For all we know they could have had a Mike Tyson dental grip on their competitor’s ears.

Even though China’s hillsides are “dirty brown” Reason does acknowledge China has “bright blue sky” and “white snow”. It seems that is all China has going for it. Reason’s effusive praise of Zoi Sadowski-Synnott is matched by his condemnation of everything Chinese, or in Reason hyperbole, these wretchedly hypocritical Olympics”.

The application of Reason’s twisted lens would see every country in the world banned from hosting the Olympic Games. Here is how Reason describes his Chinese obsession.          

“These are The Unfriendly Games. – The sight at the opening ceremony of the president of the IOC Thomas Bach bowing three times before the Chinese leader Xi Jinping and then rubbing his hands together like Uriah Heep was nauseating.”

Was Reason nauseated when the IOC President bowed to Queen Elizabeth in 2012? After all, her close relatives were responsible for the international slave trade, the world trade in Chinese opium, the Boer concentration camps and the Indian famine that her first Minister described as “their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” Would Reason have asked for the Games to be taken from London if he had known the Government was about to put on boozy parties while 158,000 people died from Covid disease?

Was Reason’s nausea brought on by the IOC decision to host the Olympic Games in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Atlanta? The United States is after all the world’s expert in oppression. Just ask an African American in New York about systemic racism. Just ask the citizens of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The My Lai massacre alone should have been enough reason. Add to that the American mutilation of war dead, water-boarding, rape and several foreign programmes of torture, interrogation, and assassination. Remember the seven children murdered by an American drone six months ago in downtown Kabul. Did that bring on any Reason Olympic nausea?

My point is only that Reason’s analysis is shallow to the point of juvenile twaddle, demonstrating a stunning vacuum of intellectual resources. I know seven-year-olds capable of better logic. I mean Reason’s comparison of the IOC President’s use of a wall analogy to the ice wall built to host the snowboarding is pathetic primary school point scoring. The Stuff editor surely must have lost her red pen.

And as for the scorn Reason heaps upon Beijing’s security. He would do well to remember that the Olympic record for the amount of security is still held by his home capital of London. Some razor wire surrounding the Olympic facilities” hardly compares to London’s 17,000 armed forces staff posted to the Games compared with the 9,500 troops Britain had in Afghanistan at the time. The security arsenal also included RAF Typhoon combat jets, surface-to-air missiles on rooftops and an aircraft carrier on the River Thames.

Blacklisted at the London Games were “objects or clothing bearing political statements”. Remember the guy who got sent home from the weightlifting for wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. Bet that won’t happen in Beijing.

None of Reason’s adulation or nausea makes sense. A week ago, I gave Stuff a D- for an article on the Games. Reason beats last week’s effort by a distance. A grade of F is the only option.

NOT FOR SALE

Monday, February 7th, 2022

I see the Stuff website has published an article written by Waikato University professor, Holly Thorpe. Her piece uses Zoi Sadowski-Synnott’s win in Beijing to make political points regarding sport funding and women’s sport. For years I have fought against the opinions expressed by Thorpe. Olympic Gold medals and women are not for sale.

Indeed, the errors, weaknesses and omissions in Thorpe’s writing are frequent. Thorpe’s thought process is confused and wrong. Writing a reply that makes sense of her jumbled disorientation is not easy.

But her principal proposition seems to be that High Performance Sport New Zealand’s (HPSNZ) money bought Sadowski-Synnott’s success and even more money is needed for the success to be repeated. For example, Thorpe says, “As a result, the funding has slowly been growing, our freestyle snowboarders and skiers are showing New Zealanders that these are sports that we can truly excel in.” There it is again that false link between money and sporting achievement. That dependence, that weakness.

Thorpe goes on to say that some, historical context helps us understand the broader significance of this latest golden moment.” What a ridiculous thing to say. New Zealand’s “historical context” proves exactly the opposite of her money for medals argument. New Zealand has won 144 medals at the Olympic Games. Of those 76 (53%) were won before Sport and Recreation New Zealand ever existed. New Zealand has won a total of 53 Gold medals. Of those 29 (55%) were won before Sport and Recreation New Zealand ever existed.

Of the 76 medals won before Sport and Recreation New Zealand came into being 29 were gold medals (38%). Since 2002, with all Sport and Recreation New Zealand’s money, New Zealand has won 68 medals, 24 of which have been Gold (35%). And so, with all that money, quality has in fact declined.

Even the argument that all New Zealand medals since the formation of Sport and Recreation New Zealand are the product of Sport and Recreation New Zealand money is not true. Many medals have been won since 2002 with minimal Sport and Recreation New Zealand cash assistance – for example Nick Willis, Tom Ashley, Natalie Rooney and the women’s Rugby Sevens.  

Even the argument that snow sport in New Zealand has improved as a result of Sport and Recreation New Zealand money is suspect. Certainly, there has been more money. Sport and Recreation New Zealand gave Snow Sport $347,500 in 2012. By 2020 that had increased to $2,507,586. Thorpe argues that the increased investment led the improved performance. My argument would be that the improved performance led to the increase in funding as Sport and Recreation New Zealand desperately sought to share in the limelight.    

Now I am not saying a government investment in sport is bad. I am saying the dependency and causal relationship between money and success, proposed by Thorpe, is weak, wrong and without merit.

And so too is Thorpe’s second proposition that the improved position of women in sport has been brought about by Sport and Recreation New Zealand’s money. For example, Thorpe says, “When we fully support our female athletes–we can show the world that our Kiwi sportswomen can indeed fly high!” The full “support” she is talking about is, of course the government’s money.

Thorpe’s attitude is a disgrace. I am so pleased my daughter was never taught by Thorpe. Instead, Jane earned her education in the tough world of American University sport. Sure, she was well paid to play. But every dollar was earned by her performance as a tough, independent, stand-alone woman – not some female beneficiary dependant on government handouts. Thorpe should not be encouraging the current culture of the female beneficiary. Women are better than that. They are not for sale.

Thorpe should know better. She even talks about one of her friends, Pamela Bell, who competed in the Nagano Olympics (Japan) in 1998. Thorpe praises, “Pamela and her incredible determination to self-fund her competition circuit through setting up her own snowboard clothing company called Fruition.” In that Thorpe is right. Bell’s courage and determination is Zoi Sadowski-Synnott’s heritage and message. Bell’s participation and Sadowski-Synnott’s Gold are not the products of a beneficiary culture.

I have coached several fine female athletes including an Olympic Gold medallist, a World Championship’s Bronze medallist and nine other women who have won national titles and represented their country. I would be distressed indeed if the beneficiary dependence promoted by Thorpe was the message handed down by the Beijing Gold Medal. As Thorpe says, “There is a ripple effect from such achievements, and Zoi will be a role model for many.” I do hope that the beneficiary culture promoted by Thorpe is not included in the ripple.

Consider the list of women who won Olympic medals before Sport and Recreation New Zealand existed – Jean Stewart, Marise Chamberlain, Vicky Latta, Annelise Coberger, Lynley Hannen, Nikky Payane, Lorraine Moller, Barbara Kendall, Leslie Egnot, Jan Shearer and Sally Clark. The “ripple effect” of these women in one of strength and independence, not dependence on bureaucratic handouts. I am also certain strength and independence to take on the world is the Zoi Sadowski-Synnott message as well. That is what Thorpe should be teaching, but she is not. Depending on a larger handout is an insult to her gender.

And finally, this story has a personal side. My wife Alison ran for New Zealand and the United Kingdom. She was also a national champion of both. She ran in the World Championships, the Commonwealth Games and the Montreal World Cup. Her New Zealand national 1000m record stood for 36 years from 1979 to 2015. Alison ran through that tough era of East European drug cheats. It took character to compete in a world full of cheats. But New Zealand women, like Alison, Anne Audain, Barbara Moore and Loraine Moller had that character. They had no drugs or Sport and Recreation New Zealand money. Their example is Zoi Sadowski-Synnott heritage. I hope it will also be inspiration for future generations of women athletes, rather than the handout dependence promoted by Thorpe.