The appointment of Gary Francis to the position of Targeted Athlete and Coach Manager is welcome. There is huge potential for the position and the person to benefit swimming in New Zealand. In a previous Swimwatch post we explained why that potential will only be realized if Johns and Cotterill get out of the way and let Francis do his job. To the extent that Johns and Cotterill define and control the way Francis goes about his job, to that extent Francis will fail.

Why? Because the people telling Francis what to do have no idea about swimming matters. No matter how good Gary Francis might be, if Johns and Cotterill order him to follow policies that do not work, then Francis will fail. For many years New Zealand swimming has seen what happens when good people try and make bad policies work.

Swimming New Zealand spent a dozen years and $28million on trying to make the Millennium Institute centralized training program work. It failed, not because every coach or manager that went there was incompetent or stupid. In fact some of the coaches that tried and failed were very good – Ansorg, Cameron, Reagan and Power for example. No, SNZ failed because good people were given an impossible brief. The policy was wrong.

Administrators like Miskimmin, Baumann, Byrne, Renford, Cotterill, Johns, Coulter and Layton insisted that knowledgeable and able swimming people must make their centralized program work. And when it didn’t they blamed the coach and went off looking for someone else. And when he failed they did the same thing again – over and over; ten times in fact. They were simply incapable of understanding that their policy was the problem. No matter how good the coach, a square peg simply will not go into a round hole.

Terrifyingly there are signs that the same pig-headed ignorance is already happening with the new Targeted Athlete and Coach Manager appointment. Here is what the Swimming New Zealand announcement of the Gary Francis appointment says.

“Francis will take lead responsibility for fostering and managing positive working relationships with SNZ’s soon to be announced targeted athletes and coaches.

The Targeted Athlete and Coach programme is a new initiative that will form part of the refreshed SNZ High Performance Strategy that will be communicated to the swimming community shortly. The strategy will aim to provide support, guidance and leadership to identified targeted athletes and coaches regardless of where they live and train.

 “It will be great for SNZ to have someone of Gary’s experience and ability join the team and work closely with our targeted athletes and coaches.”

I take this to mean that Swimming New Zealand is about to comb through the names of New Zealand’s swimmers and coaches and prepare a list of the ones they consider the best. Gary’s job is then to go out and “provide support, guidance and leadership to identified targeted athletes and coaches regardless of where they live and train.”

But there is a serious flaw in that plan; a flaw that will ensure that Gary Francis and New Zealand swimming will continue to fail. The flaw is in the preparation of the list. It is impossible to pick winners like that.

For example Lauren Boyle would never make the Swimming New Zealand list. In age group competition she was always back in fourth of fifth place. Toni Jeffs would never have been on their list. She barely qualified for age group championships. Peter Snell couldn’t win his high school sport’s 800 meters. Johns would skip his name in a heart-beat.

In order to confirm that impression I prepared a list of the winners of every event in the 2007 and 2010 National Junior Championships. This means that in 2017 the swimmers were between 17 and 22 years of age. So there were two questions – how many of the junior national champions from 2007 and 2010 were still swimming in their late teens and early twenties and how many were swimming at the same championship winning level?

With the exception of Corey Main and Paige Schendelaar-Kemp none of the big multiple winners are still swimming. And second there were a couple of winners who were huge margins ahead of the competition. Katie Hohaia won her 100 meter breaststroke by six seconds. In 2010 she must have been the toast of national swimming. I can imagine she was the first name on the national coach’s list of “great kids”. But her success was not enough. She joined the 80% who leave the sport.

Swimming New Zealand’s lists ignore the fact that 80% of the great kids are going to be nowhere near a swimming pool in six years. That is an inconvenient truth that needs serious attention.

Dr John Mullen, editor of the “Swimming Science Research Review”, conducted a study similar to my New Zealand analysis. Mullen looked at swimmers at a much higher level than those in my New Zealand analysis. His study examined 87 swimmers who had competed in the 2008 Junior World Championships and evaluated their performance in the 2012 Olympic Games. Of the 87 swimmers, 66 swimmers (76%) did not participate in the Olympic Games. Of the 21 swimmers (24%) who did qualify to compete in the Games, no one won a medal and just 3 (4%) managed to qualify for a final.

The table below summarises and compares my New Zealand Junior Championship study results with Dr Mullen’s Junior World Championship results.

The studies looked at very different levels of competition; one local and the other international. The findings however are remarkably similar. The data confirms that in both studies about three quarters of the swimmers retire from swimming after their success at a junior event. About one quarter make it through to the senior ranks and about 5% are successful.

There may be some who find this opinion less than persuasive. But we should learn from the example of Johanna Konta currently 9^th in the in the world tennis rankings and 2017 Wimbledon Championship semi-finalist. At 14 years of age she was told by Australian Tennis that she “lacked the requisite talent and potential” to be a champion. Carl Lewis, who himself was ranked fourth in the world as a junior, was convinced. He said, “There is no correlation between a childhood success and a professional athlete.”

Scientists at the American Aquatic Research Centre in Boulder, Colorado agree. In one study they scanned the hand joints of every member of the American Olympic swimming team. Their purpose was to determine what portion of the swimmers had been early developers, on time and late developers. Evidently the rate at which the hand joints close can measure an individual’s physical maturity. Of the forty athletes tested only two had matured early, five had matured on time and the majority were late developers.

Take Ashley Rupapera for example. In 2006/07 she was amazing; at 14 years old she claimed her second New Zealand national age group record with a 100IM time of 1:05.30. In the Junior Championships she entered 13 individual events, swam in 22 races and won four gold medals and two silver medals. I don’t know what Ashley is doing today. However, sadly, it does not include elite New Zealand swimming.

There are 5,660 competitive swimmers registered in New Zealand. Every one of them should be on Swimming New Zealand’s targeted list. We have no idea where the next Loader or Jeffs is going to come from. Any list shorter than that is bureaucratic nonsense. It will mean nothing. Any list shorter than that means Gary Francis will join a long queue of good people trying to fit a Swimming New Zealand square peg into a very small round hole.