Rowing, cycling and swimming have all fallen under the spell of Peter Miskimmin. His autocratic control has tied funding to servile acceptance of his centralized training policy. His job was to support sports realise their plans. Miskimmin, illegally in my view, interpreted that as supporting sports that implement his plans. The three sports had a choice; either accept centralised, single-site control and be paid or reject sporting centralization and be poor. The power of money was ruthlessly used to exercise policy control.

In the case of swimming it never worked. Many millions were spent. A dozen coaches came and left. No Olympic medals were won. New Zealand’s best swimmers (Boyle, Snyders and Stanley) begged to leave the program. One disaster followed another in a never-ending story of failure. For years Miskimmin maintained the fiction that his policy was fine. Swimming had not employed the right people to implement his perfect plan. Slowly, way too slowly, the penny is beginning to drop. No, it is not the people; it is instead Miskimmin’s flawed policy that is wrong. We are not quite at that point yet. We still have Neanderthals on the Board who are desperately searching for ways to make Miskimmin’s ideas work. But the end is getting close. There is very little left for the policy retards to defend.

Rowing too has also had its revolution against Miskimmin’s policy dictatorship. In December 2015 Dick Tonks told Radio Sport he was “finished” with the national body. You may recall that Tonks is one of the most successful coaches in New Zealand Olympic history, winning five gold medals with the likes of Drysdale, Rob Waddell, and Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell. He was a five-time Halberg Awards Coach of the Year and led crews to a total of 25 World Championship medals – including 13 gold. But clearly he had a guts-full of Miskimmin’s sporting stupidity. Sadly, of course, no matter how good the coach; no matter how right his cause in an argument between money and sport, money is going to win. It always has in swimming and it did in rowing. Dick Tonks, the world’s best rowing coach, was down the road.

And today we read that cycling is a mess. Swimming New Zealand scale coaching changes have struck the Cambridge cycling high performance program. Oh, like Swimming New Zealand cycling is dressing their problems up as progress to a bright new future. But the veneer is transparent. Here is what the Stuff report said today.

Wow, does that say what I think it says? Coaches were packing their bags and leaving “DURING THE COMMONWEALTH GAMES”. That’s a new low even for a Miskimmin run program. Swimming has at least waited for the Air New Zealand jet to reach New Zealand before sacking another coach. It looks like the Gold Coast was close enough to home for the cycling coaches to desert the program.

It is off the subject but I see Cotterill and Johns have a linguistic mate in Cycling New Zealand’s high-performance director Martin Barras. Barras, like Johns, is obsessed with ending sentences with the unnecessary qualification “a closer look at our needs going forward”. It is a ridiculous add-on that devalues everything else they might have to say.

However back to the swimming style revolving door that passes for staff retention at cycling. When Miskimmin first began to spread his centralised poison into cycling, Justin Grace, the superbly good sprint coach couldn’t stand the way things were being run and packed his bags and went to coach in France. After one year there he was poached by the British Cycling team. Grace went on to become their head sprint coach. The team came away from the 2016 Rio Olympic Games with nine medals, including four gold.

And now the coach who replaced Grace in New Zealand, Anthony Peden, has had enough and has resigned. Peden was a successful coach. Since September 2013, he guided the men’s sprint team to success with three world championship titles, an Olympic silver medal at Rio and 14 Commonwealth Games medals – including back-to-back golds in the team and individual sprint. On the 6 o’clock TV News a cycling sport’s scientist suggested that the departure of Peden was just one of about sixteen staff to leave in recent months.

Miskimmin run sports, it seems, will soon be competing with each other for the highest staff turnover. The competition will be close. I see that the Cycling New Zealand chief executive Andrew Matheson has followed the Swimming New Zealand lead on what to say at times like this. Peden was a major loss for the organisation. His position would be advertised almost immediately.

“We’ve put in place a short-term fix (cycling too must have a coaching intern) while we look to advertise this role. Anthony has built a world-class program and there is some depth looking forward, so I expect there to be considerable interest in the role.” Like his high performance mate he too is “looking forward”. That is so good to know. The only phrase cycling has missed is that their search for a replacement will be world-wide. I’m prepared to bet any reader a dollar that the replacement will be foreign. With these “going forward” types replacements always are.

In all these Miskimmin run sports a monkey with a foreign passport will always get picked ahead of the best local coach; just ask Tonks, or Grace, or Hurring or Bouzaid. Eventually the centralized dictatorships fostered by Miskimmin will be found wanting. Eventually diverse and state supported private enterprise will take its place. Eventually – but in the meantime Miskimmin will have spent millions and ruined the swimming, rowing and cycling coaching prospects of some very good people.