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Will the Aussie swimmers take a mentor to Rio?

Emma McKeon is set for a huge World Championships. (AAP Image/Dave Hunt)
Roar Guru
30th April, 2016
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Soon we will find out if the Australian swimmers taking the plane to Rio in a few months will have an official mentor.

Regardless of the outcome, the broad notion of a mentor deserves attention.

Firstly, are there any clear-cut duties which differentiate a mentor from other support roles, of which there are now many? Today’s elite young competitors need merely wander off into the stands for a moment of nourishing solitude, to find a an approaching psychologist gently inquiring if they are OK.

Secondly, is there evidence to show mentors have a performance enhancing effect on team dynamics? Retired coach Laurie Lawrence held similar international postings, with several swimmers finding his flamboyantly jingoistic, yet well intentioned antics a distraction.

Finally, if there were ever a team not in need of a set of broad ex-swimming shoulders to lean on, this might be it. Bristling with geeky goodwill, brainy bonhomie and experience in the Campbell sisters, McKeon siblings, Jess Ashwood, Cam McEvoy, Mack Horton and Mitch Larkin, it is the diametric opposite of its swagger burdened London predecessor.

Parents pondering the perfect peers for their teenager’s international debut would be delighted with this “team in a generation”.

In fact, if there is comforting or support networking to be done in Rio, it might be these media and career savvy characters to dispense it, not receive it.

Which is as things should be, because it took Australian swimming long enough to begin nurturing the pointy end of its international swimming arsenal, the swimmers. Those reforms corrected the entrenched privileging of officialdom through the amateur era, when team management and chaperoning were considered a deserved junket for voluntary service.

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In the decade before the 2000 Sydney Olympics, vastly increased public resourcing decided coaches played too big a role not to cede them a significant say in funding direction.

That direction has now given us, at any one time, scores of different coaches to have hopped on a plane full of kids in Australian tracksuits.

Lastly, there seems to have been a recent resource bias to swimmers, partly to acknowledge the special circumstances under which they develop. Without putting too fine a point on it, one team psychologist likened aspects of a swimmer’s childhood to a cult, so frequent and rigid are their calls to diligence.

If there was mentoring to do in this Rio swim team, chances are it has already been done, thanks to these recent advances in pastoral attention.

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