Heads roll in anticipation of swimming review

On the eve of Swimming Australia’s much awaited Olympic performance review, CEO Kevin Neil resigned last week.

It is not for me to canvass any ‘pushed or jumped’ scuttlebutt here, although I suspect that an expectation of damning findings about the London team’s behaviour might have felt like a heavy hand on his back at times. And that is a pity, because if a review had been ordered into the behaviour of almost any previous Olympic swimming team, similar foreboding might be experienced.

Even that paragon of geniality and gentlemanly deportment, Keiran Perkins, made the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald a few years back for once having brought a gun into the Olympic village.

The article, intended to gently mock Perkins’ credentials to publicly condemn the maligned Nick D’Arcy, qualified its headline by acknowledging the firearm was merely an air rifle. I once witnessed flick knives being drawn in anger in a swimmers’ dorm after an altercation over a female guest.

Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and in any case, it is unlikley the bristling was much more than old fashioned mammalian threat display. I have heard of another touring team where a female member had to be coaxed from the skirting of high rise accommodation after a liason ended badly.

I also recall seeing vomit splashing over a very shiny pair of shoes in a lift after a night out, then realising in horror the offending torrent was mine.

I glanced up apologetically to find the owner of the Florsheims was none other than Julius Patching, our Olympic chef de mission. How Patching even managed a condescending smile on that occasion, let alone overlook the incident in his official report; to his everlasting credit and my enduring appreciation.

My point here is that anyone brave enough to volunteer to be responsible for up to 40 of the nation’s most headstrong, self-opinionated twenty-somethings, in full bloom of health, hormone and hubris, deserves enormous sympathy.

Of course the behavioural findings of the review are going to be fairly adverse. But how authorities propose putting a lid on that simmering cocktail of exuberance in future teams will be interesting.

In terms of the medal tally, I can’t help wondering if James Magnussen had been just two hundredths of a second faster in his 100m freestyle final, we might not be facing an inquiry. How odd it seems that such a slice of time can pan out into such an expensive exercise.

I don’t want to sound defeatist, but with swimming being a middle-class sport and so much of the world aspiring to be middle-class these days, I wonder at times if we can any longer expect to be in the world’s top few powers. Once upon a time we had a huge advantage because every municipality had a 50m pool.

This was certainly the case when swimming was a summer only sport – it spawned names like Konrads and Rose and Fraser. But when it went year round, our northern hemisphere opponents gained a creeping advantage because every new pool they built had to be heated anyway.

It is still like that. And then there’s China. With about 80 times our population, and around five times that of the USA, there is inevitably talent there that would make Michael Phelps look ordinary.

While I am broadly sanguine about the behavioural aspects of the review, one or two news items in the post Olympic wash-up did concern me. One was the general acceptance of powerful sleeping tablets in swimming culture.

Since when did someone who’d clocked up 15kms in a day in the pool need any help nodding off? Search me. (A few years ago, Australian teams were criticised for their cavalier use of asthma sprays.)

Judging by the little ghettos of inhalers clustered at the end of their training lanes, it seemed as if most of the team were asthmatics). Worse still – regarding the sleeping pills – was that there was a degree of experimentation and recreational risk taking with them in London.

The other disturbing snippet was a claim that a coach turned a blind eye to the sexual harrarssment of a younger female member by a senior male swimmer.

With the head coach Leigh Nugent the only one of the London coaching staff not to have subsequently resigned, it is to be hoped that if such an incident did occur, it is suitably addressed by the review.