By David

Occasionally Swimwatch receive suggestions on the content of its articles. Recently a good friend suggested Swimwatch should highlight the perilous state of New Zealand’s country schools. The suggestion had merit. Rural schools all over New Zealand are being closed. Not so very long ago the children of farming families could ride a horse or walk to their local rural school. Now they spend an hour or more in dusty school buses travelling to schools in regional towns. I went to one of the rural schools. It had three rooms, three teachers, a dental clinic, a shower block, an orchard, a vegetable garden, a tennis court and a rugby field. The education must have been fine. Three of my Te Reinga School mates ended up graduating from University with me. Fortunately Te Reinga is one of the surviving rural schools. Only two of the class rooms are in current use, but a filtered pool has replaced the Hangiroa River as the location of the school’s swim lessons. I decided the continuing health of my old school meant it was best to avoid using Swimwatch to discuss the plight of other, less fortunate, schools.

A second email this week suggested Swimwatch should tell the story of Bethany Hamilton. Now that’s a story well worth telling. She’s a Hawaiian born surfer who ran afoul of a 14 foot tiger shark while surfing at Tunnels Beach, Kauai. The shark took off her arm. Bethany recovered and is back surfing and winning some pretty big competitions. I recommend having a look at the u-tube clips of her performances. She’s bloody amazing. She says holding her balance with one arm is not a problem. It did take her two or three shots to get the hang of standing up again. The surfing world has taken her to its heart. You can tell that by the way their magazines refer to her as “the one arm surfer chick” or the “blond and tanned hottie, decked out in a yellow bikini and toting her surfboard”. On the world’s beaches such sexist praise is reserved for only the most respected subjects. Next time you don’t feel like going to your local heated pool for practice because you’ve got a cold or hurt a bit from weights, spare a thought for Bethany and get yourself down to the pool.

And so, instead of a social commentary on New Zealand’s education woes or a story of huge personal courage, I have chosen to discuss the ultimate rich man’s self-indulgence; America’s Cup yachting. The most recent 2010 challenge is even more egotistical than normal. Instead of the customary round of Louis Vuitton races to find a finalist to sail against Alinghi, this year it’s just Team USA and Alinghi playing with each other. Instead of the traditional 12 meter single hull race boats, this year the competition is between two space age multi-hull behemoths. Each boat is 90 feet long and 90 feet wide. Their masts rise 180 feet above the deck. That’s about 50 feet higher than the tallest mast on the 920 ton Cutty Sark. Instead of a best of five final, this year it’s the best of three.

Some things have stayed the same; some things about the America’s Cup never change. The competitors appear to be incapable of agreeing on anything important about their event. As usual the New York Supreme Court has had to decide on the rules and dates of the 2010 competition. Team USA’s fixed wing sail still hasn’t been approved and will clearly be the subject of litigation long after this year’s three races have been sailed. Of great pride to the small nation I call home is the number of New Zealanders in the two teams. Both team captains, Russell Coutts and Brad Butterworth, are New Zealanders. I met Coutts at a New Zealand Sportsman of the Year dinner a few years ago. He seemed extraordinarily quiet. Mind you he didn’t need to say much. His sporting feats say it all really; Olympic Champion, America’s Cup Champion, World Champion and Admirals Cup Champion. In the world of sailing there is not much left for Russell Coutts to win.

Alinghi has five other sailors from New Zealand in their crew. Team USA has nine New Zealanders working to get the Cup back to America. They’re all tough buggers. Men like Dean Phipps, Andrew Taylor, Ross Halcrow and Murray Jones have been winning America’s Cup races for the last fifteen years. I’d trust them anywhere. They are proud athletes, caste in the mold of Hillary, Walker, Meads and Sutcliff. You want someone to win a race for you? These guys know how to do that. The whole event is close to being a race to decide whether my team of New Zealanders can beat your team of New Zealanders.

All this begins with the first match on 8 February 2010. Historically the 8 February has already seen some fine aquatic moments. In 1983 Eric Peters set a sailboat record of 46 days for crossing the Atlantic and in 1985 Michael Gross swam a world record of 7:38.75 for the 800 meters. Wherever New Zealanders are competing on that day; whatever event is involved, Swimwatch wish them well. A just and fair conclusion: one that avoids a trip to the State Supreme Court in search of justice.

By David

Snap is not a particularly impressive word. It’s too short and clipped to mean anything important. Words like parliament, serendipity and monarchy are impressive words. That’s why the Queen is a monarch and not a snap. For me however snap is personally significant. Its meaning was reconfirmed this week when I noticed an interesting article on a New Zealand news website (infonews.co.nz) describing what it called “possibly the biggest art event ever to be held in Italy”. It interested me because the event was being held in Cassino, Italy on May 15-29 to commemorate New Zealand’s involvement in the Battle of Monte Cassino 66 years ago.

It went on to say that “Kiwi artists who have a connection with soldiers who fought in Cassino will be first invited to take part. The dates mark the liberation of towns in the area during World War 2 and are Cassino’s “busy time” of the year with veterans groups, commemoration services and unveiling of new memorials.”

It would be stretching the truth to say I was a “Kiwi artist”. The truth is I was excused art at Wairoa High School in favor of going to the gym to do weights. I thought my pictures of a dagger with a snake twisted around the blade were not too bad. I drew pretty good trees as well. I don’t know how many trees they’ve got at Monte Cassino but I’m sure I could do a fair job of putting their image on paper. Probably not good enough to merit an invitation to the Monte Cassino art show though. However if my pictorial skills aren’t up to standard; does writing count as art? I’m not the best writer in the world. There are dozens of writers that drive me mad with their easy word skills. Roger Robinson’s writing is a rare example of classic prose. Jane is better than average too. Most Swimwatch readers will have picked that up already. Quite often I try and copy her sentence construction, grammar and vocabulary skills. Roger and Jane would certainly count as “artists”. But, for the purposes of this article, I’m going to assume I’d make an invitation to the final, albeit in lane eight.

You will notice that the other criterion to join the exhibition is to “have a connection with soldiers who fought in Cassino”. Here, I am on firm ground. My Dad was at Monte Cassino in a tank. Actually he wasn’t in a tank for very long. A German shell shot up his vehicle shortly after he arrived there. In a book called “Albanete – lost opportunity at Cassino” my Dad describes his exit from the war.

“It was while looking at the possible route that we were hit. Regaining consciousness I saw that my arm was bleeding heavily and must have a tourniquet quickly. I looked up to see Joe Costello gazing through the turret at me. How he wasn’t hit is a mystery. Steve was slumped over his 75mm, bleeding badly from his back and head. Tom Middleton was lying on the floor, having fallen off his seat by the wireless. With difficulty I managed to traverse the turret by hand to enable Jack to scramble through to apply the tourniquet.

This applied I told Jack to try the motors. It was with a prayer on our lips he pressed the starter. The left engine roared into life to be followed by the right immediately afterwards. With his head out of the driver’s hatch, the better to see and get maximum speed Jack drove out through our own tanks, which were still pounding away at the enemy, to the forward Casualty Station.”

Repairing the damage cost my father his right arm and eye.

Forty five years later a lot had happened. My parents had married in a pretty elaborate ceremony in New Zealand’s First Church. I was born and my parents had divorced. My mother remarried and I lost contact with my father. He did pay for me to spend my senior year at high school in Thorp, Wisconsin and to attend New Zealand’s Outward Bound School. When Jane was twelve our swim team decided to have a summer training camp in Blenheim. My father lived there; it was time to re-establish contact. It was time for him to meet his granddaughter.

Just before we left for the camp I had an accident with a knife and cut two of the fingers on my right hand. It wasn’t all that bad but did merit eight or nine stitches and an impressively large bandage. Two days later we arrived in Blenheim. A barbeque had been arranged at my Dad’s home with his second wife, my half brother and sister and their families, all of whom I had never met. Jane seemed fine but I was pretty nervous as I walked up to the front door and rang the bell.

My Dad opened the door and paused for a moment studying the oversized bandage on my right hand. Ever so slowly he extended his only arm, his left arm to my left arm, gripped it firmly and said, “Snap”.

By David

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with “Google Analytics”, its near cousin “StatCounter”, or any other web stats / analytics package. I’d never heard of them until Jane visited Florida in September. However the void in my computer knowledge was not particularly surprising. A few years ago when we were setting up Swimwatch, Edward Yardley, the technical brains behind the venture, nearly wet his new corduroys when I called Google “Goggle”. For a swim coach I thought it was a perfectly understandable mistake. With his degree in computer science, Edward thought I’d helped Noah build the ark.

These statistics and analytics programmes tell you all about the visits to your website each day – how many, where from, how often and what they put into their computer to end up at Swimwatch. I have say, it is bloody amazing what some people ask Google to find. I mean most visitors are sensible and stick to “Swimwatch” or “swimming news”. You probably don’t know that Swimwatch ranks on page one of Google for “swimming news”. How’s that for SEO status, right up there with the BBC, ESPN and the New York Times. And if you don’t know what SEO means, you were probably helping Noah as well.

However there are some strange buggers out there who Google all sorts of stuff. Someone wanting “Ian Thorpe naked” arrived at Swimwatch the other day. They weren’t looking for our story on Thorpe’s swimming feats. Instead they were after a site that boasted a picture of Thorpe’s head on the unclothed torso of Mr. Puny America.

It is a mystery what anyone finds on Swimwatch to justify looking for “sexy swimmers team girls pictures” or “uploaded images female swimmer” or “the seven hottest female swimmers of all time“ or even “naughty Indiana girl pictures”. Those four occur quite often from all over the world. The four most recent inquiries using those referrals came from the United States, or to be more precise Cambridge, Massachusetts, Westport, Indiana, Union, New Jersey and San Diego, California. Our reader in San Diego must have found what he was after. He spent a constructive 21min and 49sec reading two of Jane’s posts. Sadly he appears to have had little interest in my literary efforts. I do not want to give the impression that the United States has a monopoly on strange Swimwatch searches. Just today someone from Lane Cove in New South Wales, Australia felt the need to find out about “swimmer red Speedo hard photo”. I doubt there is anything on Swimwatch that would satisfy this Australian fantasy.

Some of our swimmers get more than their fair share of attention. Rhi Jeffrey and Jane Copland are the most popular. Both have personalities well suited to managing their internet attention. In fact their popularity on a swimming website, well after both of them have retired, speaks volumes for their larger than life personalities. While searches for Rhi and Jane may be understandable and even normal, there are some strange ones as well. For about a week recently our best female swimmer was Googled every day by someone in Maryland. The swimmer has never been to Maryland, doesn’t know anyone in Maryland, but clearly has a determined admirer up there somewhere.

There is one interesting national characteristic. Google searches for “coach yelling at athlete” almost always come from the United Kingdom. There is obviously a whole lot more distress about this subject in the UK than anywhere else. The Brits clearly have a thing about being yelled at by swimming coaches. Americans, who revere their swim coaches, initiate very few searches on the subject. It seems that the most concern in the UK is centered in the south. For example, today’s inquiries came from Bristol, Coulsdon in Surrey and Martock in Somerset. Parents and swimmers north of Manchester and in Scotland are not nearly as concerned about a few poolside verbals.

I was delighted to see that a Google inquiry for “Ohura Beacon Wanganui New Zealand” was directed straight to Swimwatch. The Ohura Beacon is a flight navigation beacon on the west of New Zealand’s North Island. It played an important part in my life. Twenty six years ago, at 9000 feet almost directly above the beacon the engine of my Piper Arrow burst an oil pipe and stopped. A little south of Ohura I found a friendly paddock and managed one of my better landings. I wrote about the incident in a Swimwatch story. It looks like Google enjoyed the story and are now directing all aviation inquires about the beacon to our blog. I wonder how many Air New Zealand captains have discovered an Arrow’s forced landing instead of the technical details of the Ohura Beacon.

Other fun searches that have ended up at Swimwatch include “empty pool” from someone who lives in Gin Gin, Queensland, Australia: a strange request from a strange town. A search from New Delhi, India asked “is it possible to swim in New Zealand in May?” Someone from San Jose, California wanted the opinion of Swimwatch on “cotton chicken candy nuggets”. None of these are as odd as the reader in Valdosta, Georgia in the United States who wanted our opinion on the “monte food mart in Wellington New Zealand”. It would not be fair for us to comment. We left New Zealand before Del Monte arrived. I have relations however who tell me the stores aren’t too bad: where I come from that’s pretty high praise.

It is off the subject but you may be interested to know that in the past four days Swimwatch has received 500 visits from 40 different countries. That number, spread around the world is bound to result in readers with all sorts of emotions and motives. I even heard of a reader last week who said we had insulted some of her friends. Of Course that’s not true: just Google it – “insulted my friends” – see, I told you, no mention of Swimwatch.