I see the New Zealand Herald is reporting a spat between Dame Valerie Adams and some nobody TV reality actor called Louise Wallace. Their subject was female obesity. In a revelation that will surprise no one I agree with Adams. The Wallace defense is that she really believed the insults she made about women who wear clothes sized 16 plus. Of course, she did. Anyone educated in the closeted and privileged Epsom, St Cuthbert’s College, is taught that their opinions are superior. The hurt they inflict is deserved because, as St Cuthbert’s old girls, they know best. Their school motto of, “By Love, Serve” means little to Louise Wallace. St Cuthbert’s are even too embarrassed to include Wallace in their list of “Prominent Old Girls”. That’s odd, I would have thought Wallace represented the school’s values perfectly.   

Adam’s, as she always has, showed herself more than capable of holding her own. She suggested Wallace needed to be educated on the human body and realise the amount of damage she was doing by making comments like that on national television. “So, size 12 is normal but size 18 is not [punch emoji]. Uppercut yourself because what you’re saying is disgusting.”

Game set and match to the South Auckland Southern Cross Campus, me thinks.

No one can coach swimming around the world for forty years without coming across the occasional weight “problem”. Here are my three responses when weight becomes an issue.

• Check the Training

The weight issue may not be an athlete’s problem. Perhaps you, the coach, are the problem. Perhaps the training the swimmer is being given is not properly balanced for the stage of their preparation. Is the swimmer being provided with the correct mix of aerobic, anaerobic and speed training? A problem with the recipe can cause a badly baked cake.

• Check the Group

When I have decided to check a swimmer’s weight, I never pick on one swimmer alone. I select a group and say we (including me) are going to weigh ourselves twice a week to check that “we are not losing too much weight”. Excessive weight loss can be an indication of over-training and/or an early indication of poor health. With this as the reason, I have found swimmers happily weigh themselves, without any of the guilt that goes along with putting on weight.

Sure, I accept the reason is deceptive. But it is a harmless deception and avoids the guilt problems associated with picking one person out as a “Wallace inspired” fatty.

And best of all swimmers are not stupid. When the twice a week weight checks are showing a steady increase in weight, they will self-regulate their food. There has never been a need for me to comment.

• Turn it into a Game

On two occasions, with the right sort of personality, I have turned weight-loss into a competition between the swimmer and the coach. Could the swimmer beat me in getting down to pre-selected target weights? In both cases the swimmers could not wait to get training done to see whether their daily weight loss beat the coach. One of the swimmers was an Olympic Gold medallist who, I am sad to say, beat this coach out of sight in the weight-loss game. It did us both good. She even wrote the daily score on the team whiteboard. Soon others were joining in to see if they too could beat the coach. I had to control that a bit. Too much lost weight can be bad.

However, there was no guilt or shame associated with watching your weight. At least that was a positive.

And so, by employing these three techniques I have never encountered an overweight problem. I think it would be difficult to accuse any of my swimmers as being fat. When it mattered, Toni, Nichola, Jane, Alison and Rhi were never overweight. One Scottish international said he had seen, “more fat on a butcher’s pencil,” than Alison at her best. None of that result involved the blind, conceit or cruel guilt of Louise Wallace. “By Love Serve”? What a bitch. Dame Valerie Adams called Wallace’s opinions disgusting. Amen to that.