It’s such a shame NBC and the IOC have decided to hold the finals of the Beijing Olympic swimming events in the morning. It’s bad for athletic performance. It has no sporting merit at all. But the real shame is the impression it gives the rest of the world of the United States.

For four years the world has watched in horror as two American school yard bullies have thrown their weight around in Iraq. They were never brave enough to fight anywhere themselves but seemed happy enough to play chess with 3000 US and 200,000 Iraqi lives.

And now the bosses of NBC have decided the same arrogance should characterize their dealing with international swimming. At least that’s the way it looks. NBC wants morning finals; to hell with ethics, sport, performance or the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the boss of US Swimming has become a cheerleader for the arrogant ones. He’s claiming morning finals are an ideal opportunity to showcase the sport.

Two or three years ago I was in France with some American swimmers. As our bus pulled up outside our lovely, small French hotel, the owner rushed out and holding his arms out wide said to the athletes descending from the bus, “Bonjour!” One of the girls looked at him and said with disgust, “Doesn’t anyone here speak fucking American?” In their own way the White House tenants, NBC and the boss of US Swimming are just as guilty of impossible condescension.

But the real sadness of their behavior is that it isn’t the truth. Most of the US just isn’t like them. The majority are a humble, sincere, kind and generous people. Take a few examples from the masters who swim in our team. There’s Branden who as a sixteen year old high school junior swam 1.36 for 200 yards freestyle. He was a bit of a hippy sort of guy then and thirty years later, hasn’t changed a bit. He has every reason to be a bit superior. He was once a world class athlete and got a free ride through school because of it. But today he humbly swims in one of our age group lanes, helping out the young guys he can still beat; a thoroughly good bloke.

Then there’s Jonathan who has a brain as sharp as a butcher’s knife. He swam in college, graduated as a lawyer and ran a chain of stores somewhere in New Jersey. He has every reason to be elitist; by most measures he is superior. But he’s not. He’s the Secretary of our Club; he’s forever available to help our Club and our swimmers through all sorts of scraps. He understands a fair deal and sees to it that our team understands it as well.

And there’s Darcy. She too swam in college about thirty years ago; at Miami actually, when David Wilkie, the Olympic breaststroke champion, was breaking every female heart on their team. She’s tall, good looking, sharp and successful. And she’s not too bad at swimming either. In fact she’s the US Master’s Open Water Swim Champion. If you’re the best in this country, you’re bloody good. Good enough to be a bit “up yourself”. Not Darcy; she’s the one who brings cookies to practice, does PR for the Club’s Board and swims in the age group intermediate lane. I guess she’s figured out that real class can be good and humble.

These are good people. They have none of the White House egotism, NBC self-importance or US Swimming pride. You know what I’d like to see. Let’s get Branden to run the White House, Jonathan’s got US Swimming and Darcy can run NBC. You know what? Iraq would be done and dusted in six months, and swimming’s finals would be back to the evening by tomorrow night.

Decent people would do the decent thing.

Training camps are a part of sport, and of swimming in particular, that I do not understand. I’ve been to a number of these trips and I can recall with clarity which ones benefited my swimming and which did not. Any number of things can influence how an athlete performs, but I am on the firm opinion that the current format of training camps is far more detrimental to good athletic performance than it is beneficial.

There is a nasty, cyclical irony in the way training camps work. Coaches take their teams away, usually during state holidays and vacations, to numerous locations, in order to do what they do at home: train. National teams can usually get away with taking swimmers away at any given time, but college and club squads generally have to work around people’s school, university or professional schedules. The most popular time to take people away from their homes? Christmas vacation.

College teams follow a classic plan for camps. If a university’s semester or fall quarter ends on December 15, coaches will give their swimmers just under two weeks at home before demanding that they either return to campus or fly directly to the training camp’s location. The next quarter or semester will not start until around the seventh of January, and the swim team will spend about ten days at their camp.

The location of these camps provides the first strike. Many teams travel to exotic locations, especially since the U.S.’s Christmastime is during the winter. The Virgin Islands, Hawaii, Mexico and various other southern locales are immensely popular: College teams provide a noticeable source of income for local pools and hotels in these areas. The other popular location is the remote kind: given ten days in Fargo, North Dakota in January, there isn’t much else to do but train. Thus, athletes are either bitter because they’re in Miami and can’t spend all their time at South Beach like Miami visitors should, or they’re angry because they’re in Colorado in the middle of winter.

The next mistake about training camps is the training itself. Inevitably, the team has competed at a taper meet in November or December. The hard aerobic and anaerobic work they did during the fall has been tested at said meet, and they now have to prepare for the big conference and national meets of the spring. Coaches seem to believe that their athletes should be beaten back down by the longest, hardest training possible (Swim! Run! Lift!) over the Christmas break when they’re coming off a very short taper from the fall.

This seems to detrimental. A far more sensible way to spend the three weeks of Christmas vacation would be to recover from the first half of the season, nurture the freshness of a drop taper and prepare for the spring’s competitions. By this, I do not mean that swimmers should do little training: Recovery should involve a lot of aerobic maintenance swimming, a small amount of anaerobic work and a number of sessions that focus on maintaining speed. As it stands, the usual format of training camps involves a ton of anaerobic work, some speed work, and afternoons off as opposed to aerobic recovery. If the team has completed good, hard training during the first half of the season, there is simply no need for the ten days of hell in January. After all, the only people who swim slower than under-trained athletes are over-trained athletes.

Teams are often surprised when they perform better at their winter taper meet than they do at the important meets of the year (namely, conference championships and national competitions). Ten days of damage over Christmas can easily ruin the next three months for a swimmer, especially since the common theme is to have athletes return to campus two minutes before the next semester starts, have them continue full-time training and fly them to another location the very next weekend to swim a dual meet against another school.

The personal effects of a bad training camp can be equally undesirable. Rather than be a positive, productive experience, many athletes find themselves crestfallen and drained after a week and a half in a cramped hotel room, often with two or three other team mates. After a particularly unsavory training camp where my swimming was mediocre at best, I was accused of not having trained well enough on my own before the camp began. The fact that I’d worked as hard as I ever did before and during the trip added to my distress: The name of the camp’s location invokes a damp misery to this day.

This said, I’ve been to three good training camps, one of which definitely followed the above format. However, I’d learned a fair bit about how to handle myself by that stage, and I was very careful with how hard I pushed myself. I was also blessed with some very forgiving circumstances, such as the close proximity of my family.

I believe that universities’ winter vacations and the similar times used in other parts of the world can be made good use of. Exhibiting a sturdy trust in one’s swimmers, coaches could send their swimmers away for their holidays with either training sessions in hand, requiring that the swimmers report results via email, or they could simply require that swimmers report what their coaches at home have have them do. An athlete who doesn’t do the training that they should doesn’t deserve good competitive results; however, coaches find it hard to let their slackers drift, as inferior results reflect badly on them, too.

A second option is to have athletes return to campus ten days early. Living in their own apartments, this eliminates the discomfort of a four-person hotel room, the foreign grocery stores, the tiresome bus trips to and from the pool and the confusion of figuring out new facilities whilst tired from hard training. Athletes will always be bitter about returning to campus a week and a half before their classmates, but this scenario is a darn sight better than arriving back to school a day before class starts, sans text books, groceries and other essential items

The phenomenon of the training camp seems to be something that’s drifted down through the generations. As swimmers become coaches (which they often do), they bring this tradition with them. I ask you, however: If you do all the same things that people did in the past, won’t your athletes swim the same speed as past swimmers? I would love to see a development where coaches dispense with these out-dated pilgrimages, or where they revolutionise them in favour of sensible mid-season training practices. No matter what type of swimming you’re involved in, be it club, collegiate or otherwise, be very wary of training camps. They’re ingrained in our culture, but very seldom to they serve a good purpose, and we can find better ways of preparing for competiton.