What Happens When Swimming Officials Lie

By David

You may recall a recent Swimwatch post in which we mentioned an official who, at the Auckland Relay Championships, reported that a person on our team was coaching swimmers to lie about their names in order to avoid disqualification. When something as dishonest as this official’s allegation occurs it is difficult to know what procedure to follow. Is it best to move on and forget the whole thing? Perhaps a protest should be made to the Meet Director? Just about always I am at a loss to decide what action is best.

In the case of the Relay’s event I decided to mention the official’s bad behaviour on Swimwatch in the hope that the publicity may make her think twice before initiating unfounded gossip in the future. Many have said that was not the best solution. Few have suggested a better alternative.

I place no weight in the argument that officials are unpaid and are therefore shielded from criticism. We have a right to expect good behaviour from officials irrespective of whether money is involved. Doing something for free does not put officials above the law. Nor does it offer protection from criticism when the law is violated. The Auckland CEO and a few coaches are the only people paid to be at most Auckland swim meets. They are not however the only ones expected to behave properly.

There is a Region on New Zealand’s East Coast called Hawke’s Bay/Poverty Bay. It is a real paradox. Poverty Bay is an area that has two clubs and two coaches, Enterprise, coached by Gary Martin and Comet, coached by Greg Meade. In this area, officials are welcoming, honest and fun to be around. Two hundred kilometres south and the behaviour of officials is toxic. Jane has mentioned in earlier Swimwatch articles, a senior official, Gwenda Cowlrick, ripping Jane’s photograph off a pool notice board, accusing her of sleeping with a newspaper photographer twice her age and the Region’s chairman filing a police report that our car had been abandoned in the pool parking lot.

Swimwatch reported recently that the current Chairman felt it was acceptable to question the decision of a Hawke’s Bay swimmer who recently left her Hawke’s Bay club to join our club in Auckland. Well Mr. Bone, that is not good behaviour. I also heard an official from Hawke’s Bay suggest that our club was so unreliable we would not turn up to meet swimmers arriving on a bus.

When bad behaviour occurs it is difficult to know whether, or how, to respond. Almost always I decide to bring it out into the open. It is a sure fire way of becoming hugely unpopular but fresh air is also very cleansing. Dishonesty and gossip thrive in dark places. Silence gives bad people a license to continue being bad.

It’s simple really – if being outed is a problem, don’t misbehave in the first place. Don’t lie, bully or intimidate swimmers. That’s not what you’re here to do.

In a similar vein, why is Ross Butler a member of the most recent Swimming New Zealand Steering Committee? He is an official who is behaving badly. Rule 10.1 of the Swimming New Zealand Constitution says:

10.1 The board shall comprise of: (a) Six elected Directors. (b) The elected Directors may appoint up to two appointed Directors on the basis of specific knowledge or skills, for a term no longer than two years. Upon expiry of that term the Board if it thinks fit may reappoint such Directors for a further term.

What does this mean? Well as far as Ross Butler is concerned here is what Swimwatch reported in an earlier post.

The current Interim President, Ross Butler, is an appointed Director on the Swimming New Zealand Board. In that capacity Rule 10 says that he is only allowed to be on the Board for “a term no longer than two years” plus a further term of (it does not say but implies) two years. That’s four years in total. Ross Butler began his term on the 3rd November 2005. On the 3rd November 2009 his time was up. Two years later and he is still here. The Constitution says he should be long gone. The guy responsible for preserving the organization’s rules is in breach of the Constitution.

So what should be done in a situation like this – when a rogue Director defies the Constitution and refuses to leave the Board or stand for election? Imagine Prime Minister John Key deciding that a national election was unnecessary. In principle that is exactly what Ross Butler has done. But, who is responsible for the outrage? Well, it’s not Ross Butler.

Responsibility lies with those who let Butler’s membership of the Board continue when it was time for him to leave, but it also lies with Butler himself.

Responsibility lies with the people who told outrageous lies about my daughter and my wife, and tore up my daughter’s photograph, as well as with the people who knew about it and did nothing.

Responsibility lies with the officials who told swimmers that their coaches were unreliable or undesirable in an effort to hurt the swimmers.

Butler got away with his bad behaviour because the Regions of Swimming New Zealand were negligent, even though he should have never behaved so badly in the first place. Swimwatch may be censured for highlighting bad behaviour. The alternative is for the conduct of people like Butler to go unchecked. While Butler put himself on Steering Committees and appointed Olympic Game’s managers, the Regions did nothing. It is disgraceful. There is no merit in Regional people telling me how badly Butler behaves if you continue to let it happen. Jim Swanson is about to sit on a Committee with a person he should be removing from office.

Swimwatch offer no apology for applying the disinfectant of daylight to problem officials. Not when the alternative is to accommodate the deception of officials like Ross Butler.

  • I am so tired of hearing about the shitty things that officials to do swimmers.

    When I heard about the Hawke’s Bay official who claimed West Auckland were so unreliable that their swimmers could expect them not to turn up to meet them off the bus, my heart sank a bit further. It sank when I heard about the disgraceful behaviour of the Auckland official who lied about the relay swimmers. It’s still happening. I’ve been gone from New Zealand swimming for over nine years, and these poisonous little people are still doing what they do.

    As far as I know, the same people are doing similar things to those I mentioned in the comment, linked to above, to this day. You’re going to let your regional officials behave like that and call it good?

    How damn hard is it to drill this into your heads? That is NOT all right.

    The people who officiated our meets at Washington State and in the Pac 10, all the way up to the NCAA championships, didn’t do that. Many of them were also volunteers, but they behaved themselves. I became friends with the guy who disqualified me for an illegal butterfly kick in my first Pac 10 conference championships 100 breaststroke (a kick which is legal now, damn it ;) ). He was fair. I knew it. I treated him with respect and he treated me with respect for the following four years during which he watched my breaststroke starts and turns.

    And there were far fiercer rivalries there than there are in the regions of New Zealand. Only once did my coach ever mention the hint of a possible official bias: we were going to race our arch rivals, the University of Washington (whose team sadly no longer exists due to funding cuts). My coach quietly told us to be extra careful with our technical stuff, as we’d be judged by Seattle / UW officials.

    She needn’t have said it, as the officials were as fair as ever. And we’re talking about an infamous state rivalry. The similar rivalry in Oregon is called the Civil War. “Civil”, perhaps, being the operative word.

    And we wonder why the US produces star athletes. To start with, they aren’t being stifled by their officials. New Zealand will continue to lose swimmers while it tolerates this behaviour.

    But it’s not just about producing good athletes. It’s about being a decent person and a responsible adult. Swimwatch receives a few hundred unique visits a day, at the very least. Usually, it receives more. They are nearly all visits from New Zealand. I have to think that the officials who engage in this bullshit have read about their disgusting behaviour, or have been told that they’ve been written about.

    Stop doing it. Start behaving like the officials in a country whose swimming results you want your country to emulate. Sure, there are going to be parochial, small little people in the US who’ve done similar, but those people aren’t given power at a high level. New Zealand is such a small place, I don’t believe you can afford to let those people behave like that at any level of the sport. New Zealand doesn’t have the buffer of population on its side.

    Once you decide it’s okay to lie about a swimmer, you justify lying about other things. You end up justifying the sort of lies people told about me.

    If your goal is to aid swimmers in their careers, you are not doing anything to achieve that goal by making swimmers’ lives harder or unpleasant.

    If your goal is not to aid swimmers in their careers, you should not be an official.

  • chhill

    Jane – its not fair on the rest of us officials either – a few crappy officials giving us all a bad name! I work my backside off most weekends and do so quite happily most of the time clocking up the K’s going up and down the pool. I had one incident a while back where I had to pull an official off the pool because of their bad behaviour, which was so bad the kids were crying and it was threatening to turn into a brawl. The way officials are assessed needs to be looked at, and most certainly any meet director needs to have some reasonably strong people management skills.
    As for Ross – surely he is aware of the inappropriateness of his appointment. Clearly he has the hide of a bloat of hippos and sees himself as a knight in shining armour charging in on a white stallion (hippo) to save SNZ single handedly. Does he live in a soundproof rose-tinted bubble? Maybe someone could remind SNZ what the organisation was created for in the first place, which is facilitate between regions, co-ordinate national meets on behalf of the swimmers and regions, and support our national representatives at international meets. They seem to have developed an overinflated idea of their importance and what they should be doing, creating a monster with an army of support staff that is totally out of touch with the grassroots and completely overlooks their fundamental purpose: looking after the swimmers’ interests.
    Surely SNZ belongs to its members, not the other way around???