By David

Swimming New Zealand has a new CEO. His name is Christian Renford. He’s Australian. A couple of weeks ago he did a radio interview on his first eight weeks in the job. The journalist involved was, ex New Zealand tennis player, Lee Radovanovich. And Radovanovich was superb. With deceptive calm he quietly asked Renford all the questions that needed to be asked. More importantly his questions subtly exposed trickery and softly laid bare deception.

The interview needs to be listened to carefully. I’ve played it six times and am only now beginning to appreciate Radovanovich’s skill and Renford’s confusion. For any who think that the recent changes at Swimming New Zealand are more than window dressing, this interview will correct that sad misconception.

I was interested in Renford’s opinion on one core issue. What were his views on the relative merits of the centralized delivery of elite sport compared to a diversified federal structure? Thanks to the talent of Lee Radovanovich we found out how the new CEO of Swimming New Zealand views this subject. It seems that the policy that has failed New Zealand swimming, that has been proven not to work, is not about to change any time soon. The message from this interview was that the old failed centralized delivery of elite sport will not change. But this time, according to Renford, a new clutch of foreigners will do it better. Renford says it was never the policies that were wrong. The old policies just weren’t applied well enough.

Like those who have gone before him – Christian Renford is wrong. And he is about to spend millions proving it to us all over again. If that sounds harsh, see what you make of these extracts I have taken from the Radovanovich interview.

Recognizing that the term “centralized” delivery of swimming has lost favour in New Zealand Renford prefaced his comments on this subject with the claim that swimming is a “combination between a centralized and a decentralized model”. Being as swimming in New Zealand is now as centralist as any Soviet Republic, I wondered what on earth Renford was talking about. Had the smell of chlorine gas already affected his judgement? But then he explained. We he said “Need to make sure that (the centralist elite program) is supported by a decentralized development pathway that underpins the centralized model”.

So there you have it. In his own words the new CEO of Swimming New Zealand sees the function and role of every club coach in New Zealand as a provider of swimming talent to his coaches at the Millennium Institute. Jeremy Duncan, Paul Kent, Horst Miehe, Jonathan Winter, Donna Bouzaid, Greg Meade, David Wright and many others exist solely to nurture and pass on New Zealand’s best swimmers to David Lyles on the North Shore. Jan Cameron would be proud. Another Australian is selling her brand of snake oil.

Except Renford’s brand of centralized delivery is about to make Jan Cameron look like an Adam Smith of sporting liberalism. This is how Renford explained his socialist doctrine to Lee Radovanovich. “We need to be realistic where we put our funding. A very targeted focus can achieve on the world stage. We need to be a lot more targeted than what we’ve been in the past.”

Would you believe it? New Zealand has imported another Australian and this one, unbelievably, thinks Jan Cameron was too liberal. He wants to be even more targeted; more elitist. And ironically, Renford is another foreigner who will fail because of it.

Renford continued his Millennium empire theme when he discussed the appointment of new Head Coach, David Lyle. This is what he said. “His skill set is well suited to what we have at the moment, a relatively targeted program. It’s why we hunted him (Lyle) down, was his ability to work with individual athletes as opposed to leading an overall program. His one-on-one ability with individual athletes is something that we needed; was the shining light we saw coming from his direction”.

Surely the picture is beginning to emerge. The money, the new coach and the rest of us involved in New Zealand swimming are all about supplying and paying for a Miskimmin, Baumann, Renford empire of half a dozen swimmers at the Millennium Institute. This is not about finding another Loader in Dunedin or Simcic in Christchurch or Jeffs in Wellington or Moss, Kingsman and Hurring in Auckland. Stuff the “overall program”. This is about a few pampered swimmers and the bloated egos of the Millennium’s swimming bureaucracy. This is about paying whatever it takes to promote Boyle, Stanley and Kean in a desperate attempt to vindicate the socialist dream and state welfare lifestyles of the aliens who now run sport here. Of course the pressure of it all will prove too great and three more fine swimming talents will likely give up the fight as unfulfilled and barren as Burmester, McLean, Ingram, Norfolk, Kent, Fitch and others were, that went before them.

Sadly, Renford then made a really pathetic attempt to justify the state plundering other coach’s swimmers and putting them into the Millennium Institute. This is what he said. “By putting the best athletes together they are available to push themselves. We need to make sure the best are surrounded by the best and they can continuously push themselves.”

Renford needs to do some serious study or get off treating us like idiots. That sort of rubbish devalues himself and his position. There is no evidence to support the view that a group of good athletes training together perform better than an individual on their own. In fact the data on the winners of Olympic championships seems to support just the opposite. Would Phelps have been better if he had trained with Lochte? Almost certainly not. Was Loader disadvantaged by training on his own in Dunedin? No. I know of a dozen world class swimmers and track athletes who would go out of their way to avoid training with athletes of a similar standard – Ovett, Foster, Wright, Rudisha, Weir. Besides which, if training together is such a brilliant idea – how come Renford followers have been doing that on the North Shore of Auckland for seventeen years and still haven’t won a cracker. One of the first and most basic rules of good coaching is “It’s training not straining.” Putting the best in close proximity carries with it the huge risk of violating that imperative. When will they learn that Millennium Institutes, centralization and targeting in the two mainstream individual Olympic sports of swimming and athletics do not work?

Clearly sport in New Zealand is not about to experience a Christian revival. Swimming’s second coming is going to have to wait for its saviour on another day.