By David

The Herald on Sunday and the Sunday Star Times this weekend published stories on high performance swimming in New Zealand. Critics may be able to write off the concerns expressed in Swimwatch as trouble making or an unhealthy obsession with disrupting the national swimming organisation. Their excuse-making is beginning to look increasingly frantic as week after week the main stream media reveals the shambles that is high performance swimming in New Zealand. Here is a selection of quotes from this week’s offering.

From the Sunday Star Times first.

Top swimmer Moss Burmester has retired from competition rather than continue to fight a national body he believes no longer has the athletes’ interests at heart.

“The [Swimming New Zealand] environment is not conducive to the swimmers being able to perform at their best,” he said. “There’s a lot of mistrust in there.”

Burmester says several of his national team-mates are scared to make public their disenchantment, for fear of losing their places in the squad and Sparc funding.

And then, from the Herald on Sunday.

He (Regan) is believed to have been stressed in the head role position, especially during the Commonwealth Games, culminating in an offer to step aside. Regan did not return calls yesterday but sources said he did not receive the level of autonomy he expected after starting in January. One described him as realizing he was “another puppet in the regime”. Another said Regan was “not a happy camper”.

Sources said the initial move to have Regan stay post-Delhi was to present a settled facade so SNZ would be guaranteed Sparc investment when the contestable funding and individual performance enhancement grants (PEGs) were considered last week.

However, swimming still remains under scrutiny given it is the only one of six targeted Olympic sports not to bring back a medal from Beijing. The pressure that comes with that is cited as evidence of a “culture of fear”.

It’s about time Swimming New Zealand supporters realised that their sniping at critics of Cameron’s mismanagement is causing harm. It must be getting increasingly difficult for them to argue that all is sweetness and light when a very senior and successful coach and an equally prominent swimmer disassociate themselves from the Cameron regime. I don’t know that either Burmester or Regan has ever read or even heard of Swimwatch. I certainly don’t think people of their calibre would have their views influenced by what has been written in this column. They are both independently successful and strong men quite capable of making up their own minds. Like Swimwatch however they clearly have concerns about the direction of Swimming New Zealand’s High Performance Program.

At Swimwatch we think Cameron should go. Her credibility is shot to pieces. If she really cared for the swimmers trying to swim well in London she would leave now. She is quoted in the Herald as saying, “It is still my passion to see us produce Olympic medalists.” If that’s true, for the love of God, she should hand in her note of resignation tomorrow morning. And if she chooses to ignore our best advice, then the CEO of SNZ, Mike Burn, should ask her to clear her desk. He won’t of course. He’s scared stiff; a central player in the “culture of fear”. Cameron’s departure would emphatically advance the cause of international swimming in New Zealand. It would give the sport’s Olympic program a chance of success; the ultimate shot in the arm. One only has to look at Cameron’s response to Head Coach Regan’s discontent to understand why the best option for swimming in New Zealand is for Cameron to gracefully leave the building.

The Herald report makes it clear Regan did not receive the level of autonomy he expected. He was not able to influence coaching throughout New Zealand as he would have liked. Here at Swimwatch we agree with that. What we disagree with is Cameron’s reaction. She had two choices. She could have recognized Regan’s concerns and stepped back to encourage the national involvement he so clearly craved. That would have been a good management decision. Instead she did the only thing she knew. She restricted Regan to coaching inside the Millennium Institute’s perimeter fence. Any national role would be for her alone. In other words she reverted to type; to what she knows best; she concentrated power. Far from “producing Olympic medalists” the prospects of good people trying their best to do New Zealand proud in London just got worse.

I am aware of those who claim Swimwatch is long on criticism and short on constructive solutions. Well, first of all, recommending Cameron’s resignation is a constructive solution. In this instance there is no merit in applying a band-aid. The problem is too serious for that. The plight of some very good swimmers and the future funding of the sport means decisions have to be taken that are decisive, innovative and bold. For a number of years I traveled around Europe watching New Zealand’s finest runners compete. I stayed in hotels with Walker, Quax and Dixon. There was an air about those men that quietly let you know they were the best in the world at their trade. Many years later I was fortunate enough to be the personal coach of an Olympic swimming Gold Medalist and a Master’s world record holder and a Venezualan Olympian. Those athletes had the same aura; not arrogant or brash, just a quiet almost gentle confidence that when the chips were down they would win you a swimming race. In Europe two years ago Melissa Ingram had the same deep seated mature quality.

New Zealand’s Millennium Institute swimmers have none of that today. They look and act scared. They resemble an elementary school class crossing the road. They are not confident men and women out there to beat the world; quietly determined to take the world’s best swimmers apart in two years time. No, someone has dominated the life out of them. I wonder who that could be?