My one meeting with former athletics golden girl Betty Cuthbert – at the 1972 Munich Olympics – left me with mixed emotions.
Still only 17 myself, and in the peak of swimming fitness, I was completely taken with her unpretentious charm and impish candour. Yet I was left saddened and unnerved to find her in a wheelchair on that day. She’d recently been diagnosed with MS and was hard pressed to stay on her feet for long.
How could this be, I remember asking myself, when only one Olympics separated the end of her career from mine? Was it possible there was some Faustian price to pay for all that glory and youthful triumphalism? Or was there a scientific clue pointing to years of training grind?
My father’s generation routinely referred to MS as ‘the athlete’s disease’, so I’d also been primed for such maudlin speculation by a science-geek schoolmate’s regular taunting that all highly repetitious exercise ‘fried’ motor neurons – whatever that meant!
As the years went by I came to accept that bad things could indeed happen to good people for no reason at all, and bad health could insidiously strike down seemingly bombproof constitutions. It seemed as if health was as unpredictable as fate’s other franchises like wealth, happiness and longevity.
When it comes to swimming, quite possibly the exemplar of high-repetition training, many catch-phrases have been coined for the downside of the quotidian laps needed for success. One that comes easily to mind is ‘black line fever’. Observers are also quick to point out the stark paradox of swimmers training enough kilometres to circumnavigate the globe, while travelling no further than 50 metres.
It poses the question of a disconnect between swimming’s claims of furthering young people’s lives while chaining life experience to a radius of 25 metres in their most vital decades. I’m not suggesting laps between Australia and New Zealand as an antidote, but does a highly constrained lifestyle have implications on swimmers’ capacity for a more vernacular response to life’s later, more nuanced ‘speed bumps’?
Having said that, I am aware that recluses and hermits can live to a ripe old age in confines considered inhumane for a dog. But those privations are usually the considered choice of an adult mind.
Yet I am also suspicious of easy explanations for the recent spate of maladies afflicting our great and lesser stars of the pool. There have always been examples of post-career swimmers behaving like fish out of water for reasons which may be pathological, rather than environmental.
My own favourite ‘one-size fits all’ explanation however, to account for the current crop, is the relative loss of esteem they must experience whenever it is pointed out that they earn less than many hundreds of professional footy players. Footballers are paid for what they do well, while swimmers on the other hand – and only the very best of them – have a short ‘use-by’ marketable period in which they must convince sponsors they can personify all kinds of inane advertising cliches. Dancing bear syndrome!
The combination of media predation and a frantic search for post-swimming interests to replicate the cocktail of daily hormonal and career highs can be a hard ask. I repeat here my previous assertion that our international ‘premiership grade’ swim team should be tenured with an annual salary equivalent to a premiership footy side.
Even $200,000 per annum for our ten best swimmers should not be considered excessive compensation. They might even extend their careers for such lucre – giving them more time to navigate a post-career existence, or post-existence career as some have caustically quipped.
Imagine the whoops of joy coming from the clutch of on-the-cusp 17 and 18 year olds about to penetrate that stratosphere! The motivation benefits alone would compensate for an axing of any ‘deadwood’ admin jobs to pay for such a scheme – jobs which are currently thought necessary to keep our swimmers on their toes for the next Olympics.
Olympic sport was once all about glory and then the good grace to retire and shut up. But that was when the media hadn’t woken up to its consumers’ insatiable hunger for personality-based news coverage, and was guided by an arcane decency which will never be seen again.
mushi
Guest
But lets look at your over arching thinking seems to be swimmers need to be given the freedom of choice to pursue their dreams, but then also have the government funded backstop to ensure that pursuing their dreams comes with only temporary sacrifice. I do not see what makes them so special as to warrant that compromise free existence. They had MORE opportunity than the average person and made their choices. A swimmer makes sacrifices to get to the Olympics sure, but please don’t for a second try and convince me that it is a noble selfless sacrifice for the good of the nation. It is done from ego. It is done to show the world just how good the man in the mirror is each and every single lap. They want to be the best, they want to break records, they want to win medals, they want to beat people. For some it also comes with fame and fortune but it begins at its heart as a selfish pursuit that you are dressing in the gown of national service. Paying them triple to quadruple the average wage at 18 is highly unlikely to provide additional motivation than their ego. If it does then you have the most irrational person in the world who trained every morning for the past 5 plus years for seemingly no reason. I would keep that person away from firearms. Studies have shown offering tangential reward changes the focus of workers. So in all likelihood you just paid more public funds for worse swimmers. Look around the world the post career struggles of entertainers (that is what professional sports is – entertainment) moving from being elite to an also ran is a psychological struggle. Simply paying them more is unlikely to do much to offset that struggle.
mushi
Guest
I do think we'd be better off cutting back on Olympic funding (not completely as i detest a binary view on these things). I remember Seoul as a kid and everyone seemed really chuffed with the three golds there. Plus now that it is a "global arms race" the effectiveness of the money has greatly reduced. I would also argue that you are potentially confusing rabid "nationalism" with rabid "economic rationalism" though they often go together in leaders minds.
marcel
Guest
Swimming needs to look at people like Alessandro Del Piero, Roger Federer and learn that an elite athlete does not have to be boorish and consumed with self entitlement like the obnoxious bunch of twats we've produced in the last 10 year's.
Baz
Guest
"Black line fever"?? Oh the poor darlings....all those emergency room nurses seeing carnage every day, those police officers dealing with horrible domestic violence issues and those soldiers in Afghanistan wondering if the next step they take will be the one on a land mine should all take pay cuts to help ease a swimmers retirement plans???? Please.
brad cooper
Guest
Thanks. Both good points. In a purely commercial/capitalist society, only entertaining sports would provide participant remuneration, (though I'm not sure footy codes are totally exempt from government funding). I really wouldn't mind if government cut all funding. Then sport could revert to a more recreational ethos. Swimmers would go back to doing just 5 one hour sessions a week and keep their school grades up and have something useful to do after swimming. We would go hoplessly at the Olympics (as we did in Montreal when Steve Holland was our only medal winner), but we could hold our heads up high for opting out of the 'sporting arms race' that is nationalistic Olympic triumphalism. Do the international prestige benefits from Olympic sport justify the current level of funding? Even the most rabid economic rationalist-leaning governments seem to think it does, so it looks like public funding is here to stay. If that's the case, swimmers who have likely put more of their lives into training than most other elite sportsmen should be able to train while 'getting ahead in life' - instead of putting their lives on hold. Yes, it is their choice. But I guess their heads are filled with all sorts of locker-room cliches about risk taking, and coaches are only too willing to urge them to "just do it", as the ads say. The ongoing problems swimmers are experiencing with post career choices may boil down to the necessity of a higher level of 'pastoral care' by sports authorities. Coaches and administrators may need to intervene by putting a cap on swimmer training committment at critical points in a youthful career. Cheers.
mushi
Guest
Footballers get paid or the entertainment revenue they generate. Not for the hours worked to get to the level they are or their "eliteness" It is like saying that actors down at the local theatre should be on 10m per season of a production as they put as much into their craft as hollywood A list actors actors.
Paul D
Roar Guru
No-one's holding a gun to their head and making them swim. I don't wish to come across as insensitive, but I find it hard to sympathise with the tone of this article. Plenty of professions create incredibly stressful situations and lead to burnout. Saying that swimmers need special retainers or money (at taxpayers expense) because swimming is a tough sport mentally isn't going to wash with many people. When you see Huegill and his missus doing coke at the races, I doubt you're going to elicit much sympathy from John Q public who can't afford a posh suit, a ticket to the races, or a bag of coke for that matter.