Do our swimmers really need pimping?

Does Thomas Fraser-Holmes surf? If you didn’t know the aforementioned is one of our better-performed Australian swimmers, your answer is probably “who cares?”

Ditto, too, from many who did know, since the multi-syllable monikered medley maestro gets paid to swim, not to surf.

But to the growing band of minders and publicists newly tenured by Swimming Australia to aggressively pimp swimming’s tawdry image, TFH’s extracurricular talents suddenly matter a great deal. One of my spies at last week’s Commonwealth Games trials in Brisbane overheard a conversation on this very subject within the partitions of what might be called ‘Branding HQ’. It went something like this.

Publicist Pam: “So you’ve discovered TFH can surf. We could use that. Can you get footage?”

Publicist Sam: “He’s not too flash on a board because of all that pool time, but we can probably edit some basic moves.”

You see, any hobby, somersaulting pet or cute lisp owned by swimmers is now fair game for well-paid spin doctors in the battle to turn them into a swimming version of Happy Days. Fonzie now hangs at the pool, not the pool hall.

And no efforts to turn bone-tired swimming parents into latter day Mr and Mrs Cunningham are too shameless, as per the Games trials camera suddenly jumping all over Cate and Bronte Campbell’s mum in the stands and refusing to leave her. The woman posed with great dignity but eventually seemed a little pained by the epic attention.

A cutely crafted coverage cameo by new sprint king Cameron McEvoy posing as a budding mad scientist was actually quite funny, and Christian Sprenger’s much pastiched Dark Knight Rising couture crime made him look fashionably vulnerable. But you have to wonder how far swimmers will want to be poked and prodded to atone for the branding blemishes of their elders? Do they receive any overtime bonuses for the new scrutiny and compulsory multi-skilling on top of their meagre allowances?

Probably not… And there’s the rub.

It’s a big call, but I’m betting half the problem with the recent catalogue of depressed, zonked-out, misbehaving, obese, indecisive and denying swimmers is that their profile stress is vastly undercompensated.

I’m also guessing the current rehabbing of ‘brand swimming’ is keeping a few AIS staff in six figure salaries for a while. But I wonder if pumping that same lucre directly into swimmers’ pockets might not have the same effect. There’s nothing like the hip pocket nerve for behavioural modification.

I can accept the point that some of our recently retired swimming walking wounded have already made a modest pile out of their sport. But the continued health of their wallett is still tied to arcane expectations of a ‘healthy’ image, with umbilical dependence on their former identity.

This expectation must surely be a mind-numbing chore for swimmers who once dreamed of being set free of the monastic routines and cocooned personae of their youth. If only they’d been paid during their careers like footy players for actually doing their sport, rather than for how close they could adhere to a tired advertising cliche.

I say dump any dead wood in Swimming Australia and start putting our best swimmers on six figure salaries like footy players. And that’s just for performing in water and not on land, as a performing bear.

With four healthy footy codes in Australia, it is likely there are well over 500 players earning more than $100,000 a year. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to fund a ‘premiership-strength’ national swim team of 15 to the same amount?

No guarantees. They would have to measure up to a stringently monitered critera of international success. After all, most elite swimmers have clocked up the mythological 10,000 hour practice threshold at an age when their footy conterparts are lucky to be a third of the way there. They deserve it.

Smacks of socialism? Well, we’ve had ‘eastern bloc’ funding levels long since that Soviet-era concept became obsolete.