Archive for June, 2014

How Wrong Can You Be?

Wednesday, June 11th, 2014

By David

Yesterday a story was published on Swimwatch called “The Six Million Dollar Man”. And it was wrong – really wrong. Goes to show you; never believe everything you read on the internet. Because in the story I said that the departure of Lauren Boyle to train in Spain meant the only swimmer qualified to swim in an individual event at the Commonwealth Games, still training at Miskimmin’s Millennium Swim School was Matthew Stanley.

Cory Main is training with Greg Troy at the University of Florida. Glen Snyders decided that Dave Salo in Los Angeles was more to his liking. And Lauren Boyle was learning Spanish and training hard in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

But the error was Matthew Stanley’s whereabouts. He’s not at the Millennium Institute at all. I’m told he too has left the Millennium Institute to train with Dennis Cotterell on Australia’s Gold Coast. Every swimmer qualified to swim in an individual event has left or never been to the government’s swim school. Two million dollars a year Miskimmin spends on that place and it looks like all New Zealand’s best swimmers prefer to train just about anywhere else in the world. Close the bloody thing down. Send Lyles, Villanueva and Renford back to where they came from. What an unbelievable waste of the tax payer’s money.

Remember when Renford arrived in New Zealand and in a Radio Sport interview saved his most stinging criticism for the standard of New Zealand coaches. Well the swim school he’s running right now is no shining example of how to coach good or even average swimmers. The rate of good swimmers deserting the Millennium Institute must be the highest in the country. The rate individual qualifiers for the Commonwealth Games have gone somewhere else is 100%. I’ve said it before but – what an unbelievable waste of the tax payer’s money.

Perhaps Renford, Villanueva and Lyles should place an advertisement on the Swimming New Zealand website calling for interested students to apply for membership of the Miskimmin swim school. The way things are going being able to blow bubbles underwater should guarantee applicants a place on the Millennium team.

Anyway sorry Matthew Stanley – I did not realise you too had left to find better coaching in Australia. I must say I think you could have found the same thing back home in Matamata. I do hope before the taxi arrived to take you to the airport you had time to turn out the Millennium lights.

Posted in New Zealand | No Comments »

The Two Million Dollar Man

Wednesday, June 11th, 2014

By David

I wonder if Miskimmin’s SNZ imports, Renford, Villanueva and Lyles, are feeling the pressure. Two million taxpayer dollars will be invested this year in their Millennium Institute to prepare one swimmer for the individual events at the Commonwealth Games. More specifically I wonder if Matthew Stanley is feeling the pressure of representing the sport of swimming’s two million dollar investment – the Millennium’s two million dollar man.

You see, the other three individual event swimmers are training 6500, 8000 and 12,000 miles from the Millennium Institute. Cory Main had the good fortune to bypass the folly of Millennium membership and decided to further his swimming career with Greg Troy at the University of Florida. I hear Cory’s brother is about to join the same swim team. Glen Snyders and Lauren Boyle sampled the Millennium waters and decided that Dave Salo in Los Angeles and Fred Vergnoux in the Spanish Sierra Nevada mountains were more to their liking. The choice made by three of the four best swimmers in the country must be relevant. The location of New Zealand’s high performance swimming is certainly not at the Miskimmin swim school.

I was amused to read the following report on the Stuff website. It was based on an interview with Luis Villanueva, the SNZ High Performance Director. And this is what Villanueva had to say:

It’s Villanueva’s “preference that the country’s best now train in New Zealand. We have two high performance programmes with excellent programmes and excellent facilities and with good coaches,” he said. “They can be compared with those in the US or Australia.  But not in general to send our best swimmers to anywhere else, because we have programmes at the moment in Auckland and Wellington that can be very good for the development to international standards.”

What a load of rubbish. Who on God’s good earth does this guy think he’s talking to? Please don’t come to New Zealand and patronise us with a pile of Spanish mierda de toro. These words were barely out of his mouth when Lauren Boyle voted with her feet and fled from Villanueva’s “excellent programmes”. Looks like Boyle was not convinced. Events have conspired to make Villanueva look out of touch and silly.

And so, as far as individual qualifiers in the sport of swimming are concerned, New Zealand has a two million dollars per year organization preparing one individual event swimmer, Matthew Stanley. Just consider that, a CEO and his staff of a dozen or so, a High Performance Director, a Head Coach, an Assistant Coach and access to, what the SNZ website tells me are services in strength and conditioning, life planning, physiology, biomechanics and psychology, focused and paid to prepare one swimmer, Matthew Stanley.

Assuming Stanley makes the final of both his events at the Commonwealth Games; his twelve month’s preparation will have cost us about $4,500 per stroke. I would think that level of investment makes Matthew Stanley the most expensive swimmer in the world. When an investment costs that much, it’s pretty important for it to provide a golden return. If Renford, Villanueva and Lyles are not feeling the pressure, they certainly should.

Swimwatch has long viewed Miskimmin’s policies as a joke. His view that international results can be bought is about to be tested big time. On this occasion there are no distractions. Matthew Stanley is alone. He currently has the government’s multi-million dollar domestic investment in individual events at the Commonwealth Games all to himself. The validity of Miskimmin’s socialist policy will be determined by the performance of one man in Glasgow.

I am guessing there will be some readers who feel this view is unfair on Matthew Stanley. Some may be asking why should the full weight of Miskimmin’s policies be loaded onto Matthew Stanley’s shoulders. Why should he be called the two million dollar man?  After all he was not responsible for the three other individual event qualifiers choosing to train overseas. Remember though, it was not Swimwatch who put Matthew Stanley in this invidious position. He has become the figurehead of the government’s swim school because that organization costs us a fortune and he is the only individual event swimmers they’ve got. Responsibility for that lies with Miskimmin, Renford, Villanueva and Lyles – not Swimwatch.

We think Snyders, Boyle and Main have made good choices. If Swimming New Zealand had cared for the sport properly the three swimmers should have been able to prepare properly in a New Zealand club program. But given the neglect of a decade the decision to train overseas is understandable and sensible – no matter what Villanueva might spin.

Of course just as the performance of Matthew Stanley will be a test of the worth of Miskimmin’s centralized, socialist delivery of sport so will the results of Snyders, Boyle and Main be a test of the private enterprise, freedom of individual choice delivery of elite preparation. To be fair it would probably be more accurate to say that the performance of Snyders and Main will measure the worth of a diversified method of providing elite training.

Lauren Boyle is a special case. Her training in New Zealand since she left Cal Berkley has been a disgrace. Swimming New Zealand should be ashamed. Here they have one of the world’s best swimmers and the only good thing they’ve done is pay the girl. Apart from that she has had five different coaches, Regan, Villanueva, Sweetenham, Lyles and Vergnoux. Five coaches in four years, five coaches with five different water philosophies, five different dry land philosophies, five different personalities, five different everything. As I say, with abuse like that, no wonder she has gone off to Spain. It is a wonder she is still swimming at all. Whatever she swims in Glasgow will be a testament to her courage and the consistent and reliable grounding she received during four years in the Cal Berkley swim team. Boyle can’t publically say what she really thinks, but she must be pissed. And who among us would blame her.

The well-known swimming blog swimvortex.com has been to see Boyle in Spain. Here are some extracts from their interesting article.

The two, Spain’s Mireia Belmonte and New Zealand’s Lauren Boyle, are embroiled in a 10-week pact of pain in Spain, at the CAR center of excellence in Barcelona and up on high in the Sierra Nevada with Coach Fred Vergnoux.  

Belmonte and Boyle trained together last year for the first time, their experience on the way to and their results at the World Championships in Barcelona suggesting that it might well be a good idea to repeat the exercise.

Vergnoux tells SwimVortex: “Lauren came last year to train with us in altitude and this year she wanted to repeat the experience and extend her stay. The idea is to train together here at the national training center, compete together, and then go to altitude together. It’s a longer phase of preparation that she wanted to do with us leading into the summer meets, and both parties agreed to arrange this long training camp.”

Ten weeks in all, the heat of session-by-session reflected in the session they went the evening before leaving for Monte Carlo:

  • 6x 150 free + 50 fly best: all swim
  • 8x 100 free + 50 free best all pull+pad
  • 10x 50 easy + 50 dive max
  • 8x 100 free + 50 free best all pull+pad
  • 6x 150 free + 50 fly best

For Boyle, the challenge involves a small step up in meters covered and “probably a lot more weights lifting”, Vergnoux noted.

Both will race Mare Nostrum in Monaco, Canet and Barcelona in the week ahead. Both will race in the full flight of training. Says Vergnoux “Racing the Mare Nostrum under fatigue is the best situation that we can find in this point in time. Commonwealth and Europeans are still far away and racing will be a huge test of character.

“What I see on the daily basis tells me that both girls could race really well, but they will have to find a way of doing so being very tired and having no rest going into the meet.”

Boyle, a class apart back home in training, adds:

“For me, it’s good to train with a group of high-class distance swimmers because they push me to do better in training – and in return I also help them.”

And how do they communicate: English/Spanish/hands, etc.,? Says Vergnoux:

“A combo of everything! But we make sure Lauren is working on her Spanish!”

The first Mare Nostrum meet in Monaco was held last weekend. The table below shows Lauren Boyle’s results.

Event

Heat

Final

Place

200 Free

2.01.02

2.01.11

6th

100 Free

58.15

–

28th

400 Free

–

4.11.18

5th

From a purely competitive point of view the results are well short of Boyle’s best. However Vergnoux did warn us that was likely to be the case. Personally I’d be very pleased with 4.11 from a swimmer buried in the severe training schedule I imagine Boyle has right now.

Anyway New Zealand swimming at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games will be interesting on two counts. First, how does New Zealand compare with the other Commonwealth swimming nations? And second how do the results of the three swimmers who have chosen to prepare in a free market economy compare to the results of the one state sponsored, social welfare beneficiary. That will be a fascinating duel of ideologies – private enterprise V state control.

Posted in Europe, New Zealand | 1 Comment »

The Coin Has Another Side

Saturday, June 7th, 2014

By David

In my last Swimwatch story I told you about Julie Reiser; an American who gives the place a bad name. But, I forgot to mention an episode that said much about Julie Reiser. During the period when she was in full flight, determined to see me leave the Aqua Crest Club, she went into the pool office to tell the pool staff about their despicable coach. For some time she relayed the purity of her American lineage and pompously revealed how she was a proud member of, what I think was called, the “Daughters of the American Revolution”. We should not, she told the Pool Manager, have foreigners teaching our children to swim. Sadly Julie was not aware that the Pool Manager was born in Jamaica and was as much a British Commonwealth foreigner as I was. As soon as Julie left the pool I was told about her pure and virile racism.

People like Julie have given the United States a terrible name around the world. It is an interesting fact that only 20% of Americans have a passport. In New Zealand the figure is 75%. 80% of Americans have no interest in how the rest of the world lives; no care or knowledge of the world they so easily invade. I hoped President Obama would change the image of the “ugly American”. That was his promise. Unfortunately, recent events suggest the “ugly American” has changed him.

Of course in a country of 318 million there has to be some special people. And that is as true of the United States as anywhere in the world. Take a lawyer friend who swam in the Aqua Crest master’s program. Intelligent, probably to a Mensa level, fun, cosmopolitan, generous, kind – in every respect an interesting and decent person. Alison and I went to his place each year to watch the Super Bowl, an occasion that was as much fun as the game.

Two other members of my Florida adult fitness program were partners Suzanne and Stewart. They were fine people. People who did their county proud; far more than the F-111, aircraft carriers and right to carry arms so valued by many in the United States of America. Sadly, they have both died in the three years since I left Florida. But while we were in Florida they made Alison and I feel welcome and at home; frequently inviting us to dinner or lunch at their exclusive Florida Sailfish Club.

Both were fascinating people. Suzanne was born into a world of privilege and money. Whereas you and I might think mowing the lawns or drying the dishes were normal childhood chores, Suzanne’s teenage task was to look after the polo ponies. Her first husband was a lawyer who defended many mafia family members. His work was sufficiently valued that the family gave him a Caribbean island complete with house and landing wharf. Suzanne survived an airplane crash by swimming about a kilometre to the nearest Nantucket Island beach. She came to New Zealand for a couple of years, living with her daughter in Dunedin.

But the person whose background remained a mystery was Suzanne’s partner the quietly spoken, gentle man Stewart. Only this week have I discovered the fascinating company we enjoyed. Here is his obituary published in the Palm Beach Post. Stop, pause and reflect for a minute on the contrast between the life of this American and the classless chaos of Julie Reiser’s existence. As Sir John Walker once said to me, “Some people have class, others only have arse.” I’ll leave you to work out which was which.

The Palm Beach Post – Obituaries

James Stewart Cottman World War II Veteran James Stewart Cottman, Jr. former Baltimorean of Delray Beach, Florida Deceased July 8, 2013. Buried at Arlington National Cemetery December 9, 2013. Born January 18, 1925 son of the late James Stewart Cottman and Edith Russo Cottman. A 1941 graduate of Boy’s Latin School and 1948 graduate of Johns Hopkins University.

Volunteered for army duty in 1943 at age 18 and had a distinguished combat infantryman battlefield record in the African, Italian, French and German campaigns decorated with the Purple Heart for bullet wounds from a German sniper near Grosseto, Italy; two Bronze Stars for bravery and other unit citations and honors for which he was humble his whole life. He served 20 months on front line combat as a staff sergeant infantry squad leader in the 36th Texas infantry division.

He studied for his master’s degree at Columbia University’s Graduate Studies Department of Public Law and Government. He taught for one year at Park School before entering the State Department where he distinguished himself in a thirty year career as a Foreign Service Officer. He studied at the American University in Beirut and was initially a Middle East correspondent before involvement in United Nations negotiations assisting Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and President Eisenhower in the early 1950’s. He served as Vice Counsel and Second Secretary in the embassy in Bangkok, Thailand for four years and was well versed in Asian politics from his participation in the formation of SEATO.

Another assignment was served in the embassy in Bordeaux, France where he met and married a famous decorated World War II French Underground Fighter, the Countessa Marie Antoinette Fleurieu. He served in the embassy in Geneva, Switzerland where his work focused on NATO member associations and projects. He was fluent in French and German and was well appreciated for his knowledge and skill in exercising the proper protocol in foreign relations. His family loved him for his great sense of honor, his expressions on the rules of the game of life, his superior intellect and his limitless capacity to tell amusing stories and recite poetry. He was a member of the Colonial Warriors, Florida Chapter; a member of Alpha Delta Phi at Hopkins; a second lieutenant in the Maryland National Guard; baptized in both the Catholic Church and the Episcopal Church. He is survived by his brother Brooke Powell Cottman of Cecil County, MD, three nieces Cindy Cottman, Susan Brooke Cottman, Virginia Powell Cottman.

Rest in peace Suzanne and Stewart. Thank you for your warmth, your class, your friendship and your hospitality during eight years in the United States of America.  

Posted in Florida | No Comments »

Parents Behaving Badly

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2014

By David

I have been professionally involved in swimming for thirty years. As you can imagine I have experienced all sorts of parents – the good, the bad and the ugly. Most parents are reasonable people, concerned for the welfare of their children but prepared to give the coach the freedom to develop their children’s skills.

Some parents are very good. Swimwatch readers may remember a butterfly and freestyle swimmer called Nichola Chellingworth. She swam for New Zealand and was a multiple national champion and record holder. She was also one of the nicest people you would find in sport or in life. I coached Nichola for several years. Her father, John and mother, Anne were model parents: interested, helpful and concerned but who never invaded the coach’s area of responsibility. I am certain that the success of Nichola’s swimming career owed much to her parent’s common sense involvement.

Olympic relay gold medallist, Rhi Jeffrey, also had (has) an excellent father. Rhi’s swimming career has had more than its share of peaks and troughs; from the peak of the Athens Olympic Games to barely being able to break 30 seconds for 50m freestyle when she began training in New Zealand. Doug, her father, did an impossibly good job of steering a supportive and even path through it all.

Only my daughter, Jane, had better parents. Sorry – only joking!

Unfortunately, and it is a sad reflection on the human condition, my most vivid memories are of the bad and ugly parents. Here are my “Famous Five”.

One mother was responsible for recording the results of our club’s swimmers. About six months after a provincial championship I asked for a report on the championship results. I recognized an error in the report. Toni Jeffs was correctly shown as winning the woman’s 50m and 100m freestyle. However, I did not recognize the name of the swimmers shown in second and third. They were from another club. That was strange because I knew that the recorder’s daughter had been second in both races. In fact, it was the first time her daughter had been beaten by Toni. I called the recorder and asked her to check the results because her daughter’s swims seemed to be missing. Two months later I had not received a reply so I rang to see if the result had been corrected. I will never forget her answer. “No,” she said, “I remember those races clearly and my daughter never swam.” Would you believe it? History was changed because a mother could not bear the thought of her daughter being beaten. To this day, I would imagine, those results remain a fiction in provincial swimming history. And if readers are thinking Swimwatch may have made too much noise about the Wellington Region adding names to their minutes, it’s to make sure the sport avoids fiddling with results and times that we have seen in the past.

My next “parent behaving badly” is all too common. What made this example worse than others was the prodigious talent of her son. For the sake of this story we will call him Jason. He could swim. He could run. He was a brilliant gymnast. One Saturday Arch Jelley came to Wellington to take an athletic program being offered by our club. Jason was there obviously enjoying the drills and exercises; clearly better at them than most. Later that day I went up onto the slopes of Mt Victoria to watch the annual Vosseler Shield cross country event. This is a killer of a race; winding its way up and down very steep tracks through the Mt Victoria reserve. I was surprised to see Jason galloping along in front of the junior boy’s race. Later that evening I went to the Kilbirnie Aquatic Centre to watch our club take part in a Wellington Region interclub event. Jason was there again winning all the events in his age group; 400 freestyle, 100 fly, 200 IM, you name it Jason was in there and winning.

The following week I asked Jason’s mother to pop into my office for a chat. Gently I suggested that athletics, cross country and six or seven swimming races in one day might be too much; might be harmful in the long term. His mother looked stunned. Wasn’t I aware that her son had won all his events, his father already had the photos framed and displayed on Jason’s bedroom wall? Besides Jason just loved the whole day. I tried to find a way of saying that there are many things children might like but a parent’s job is to decide what was best not what was liked the most. Clearly my caution was having no effect. Why was I trying to ruin Jason’s athletic career? Why was I trying to stop him having fun?

The last time I saw Jason he was with some of his mates, about nineteen or twenty years old, overweight, unshaven, drinking a bottle of beer and smoking a cigarette outside the Wellington Railway Station. I guess he was enjoying that as well. However New Zealand had lost a sporting talent largely because his parents could not control their addiction to seeing their son compete and win swimming and running races.

My next “badly behaving parent” was probably the best and certainly the hardest working parent volunteer I’ve ever seen. He was a senior executive in a large international company. How he managed to find the hours he worked for the club was beyond belief. He was also a very courageous man. He won an award for walking into an oil refinery fire and turning off a leaking valve. You may be asking, how could such a man cause a problem? Well, his daughter was a very good swimmer and a huge amount of fun to have on the team; bright, funny, rebellious, hardworking, all the qualities I enjoy being around. But she misbehaved during an overseas trip to Europe and I decided some discipline was necessary. I banned her from a team trip to a meet in Kingston, Jamaica. The father took that badly and conducted a pretty vicious campaign to have me removed from the club. That failed and he ended up leaving the club. However during the turmoil one consistent theme repeated frequently in his many emails was that I was destroying his family. I thought it was a huge irony when, shortly after his email war with me, he left the family home to live with a married woman who was also an executive in the same large company. Never been quite sure how all that fitted in with me destroying his family. And for that he has reached third place on my list.

And, one away from top place comes Linda, mother of Jamie. Some people just don’t travel well: in Spain, they can be found on the lookout for McDonalds or a Subway sandwiches; in Turkey searching the internet for the nearest Burger King and beside the Rhine in Cologne complaining about the absence of Californian chardonnay. Well Linda was one of those. I took her and her daughter on a team to swim in the Mare Nostrum series five years ago. Why have those three meets caused me so many problems – they are relaxed but competitive events in some of Europe’s most idyllic locations? Anyway, a week before the first meet in Barcelona, Jamie got sick. I wasn’t sure what was wrong so along with Linda, I took Jamie to the doctor at the camp we were training at. He prescribed some antibiotics and told us to take the first meet carefully but Jamie should be fine for the second meet in Canet.

The day before the Barcelona meet I told Jamie I had scratched her from her longer races but had left her in the 50m freestyle. She could swim that event, but only if she felt up to the task. She said she wanted to swim and I agreed. Jamie swam. Her time was slower than her best but in the circumstances was a good swim; an indication of better things to come. Linda however could not handle the modest result. She carted Jamie off to various tourist attractions in Barcelona that afternoon and arrived back at our apartment announcing that she had spoken to husband and was on her way back to Florida the following morning. And that’s what she did.

The rest of the team swam the other Mare Nostrum meets in Canet and Monte Carlo. By the time we got home Linda had filed a formal complaint with the Florida Gold Coast Association claiming I had neglected her daughter’s ill health and had forced Jamie to swim the 50m freestyle. It was rubbish of course; especially when it was pointed out that the same Linda that was saying Jamie was too sick to swim 50m had carted Jamie around Barcelona for hours looking at tourist attractions. Linda’s complaint also said that I had sent, the sick Jamie, down to the shallow end of the Barcelona pool to practice turns. That lie was easily rebutted. The Barcelona pool doesn’t have a shallow end. It’s the same depth all over.

Florida Gold Coast dismissed Linda’s Mare Nostrum complaint. But Jamie was taken to another club. It was sad. Jamie was a tremendous talent; at 12 and 13 years old one of the best in the United States. In 2014/15 she should have been on a full scholarship to a good Division One program in a school like Auburn, Texas, Stanford, Florida or Georgia. Instead, I see, she has settled for Florida Atlantic University swim team in Boca Raton. Jamie had the potential to swim for her country and never will. That can be the price kids pay when parents behave badly.

But the winner, comfortably out on her own, is Julie Reiser. Where to start – loud, brash, aggressive, opinionated, with scant respect for the truth. I always thought Julie Reiser was the custodian of many of the qualities that much of the world hate about the United States: an American who gives the place a bad name. Ironically she used to promote a “Made in America” certification website. If Reiser is an example of domestic production, it may be best to stay with “Made in Mexico”.

She was on the committee of my Florida club. She complained about everything. Nothing was good enough. While I was there Ozzie Quevedo (currently an Assistant Coach at Auburn) broke the Master’s world records for 50m and 100m butterfly. Obviously I gave the swims prominent mention in the club newsletter. At the next Board meeting Reiser dismissively said, “You’re not taking credit for that are you?” As she was speaking I noticed Ozzie walking into the pool. I called him over and asked if the training he had done with the club had helped his world record swims. “Of course it did,” he said. Reiser never forgave me for that well-earned public put down.

She bombarded the members, the committee and my family with emails accusing me of all sorts of bad behaviour, sometimes highlighting sentences in her emails in red, bold font to apparently make a stronger point. Picking up on the incident with Jamie in Barcelona, she used that as a launching pad to destroy everything we had built at that club over the previous four years. She claimed financial indiscretions that never happened and were proven false, as well as personal attacks that seemed to come out of the blue. I actually to this day have no idea why. Her own children seemed happy; she herself had seemed happy at the club for quite a while. It was a thriving, growing community of swimmers, from 50-second Long Course 100 freestylers to kids who were learning to kick with kickboards. I never before believed that someone who simply shouted the loudest for longest could actually win, no matter how bad or wrong or untrue their claims. However, Julie Reiser proved that screaming at the top of her lungs while other people tried to quietly reason was the best course of action to get your way. It was a highly distressing time for a lot of people involved in that team, many of whom not only ended up leaving the team, but moving away from the area. One or two very promising athletes ended up leaving the sport entirely – moves I do not think would have happened when they did if Julie had not taken down their swim team.

Not much happens at that pool anymore, at least not in the way it happened before mid-2009. The destruction of the team that once existed there is almost solely Julie Reiser’s doing, along with the people who listened to her at Palm Beach County.

To give you a feel for how bad her accusations became here is an email I got yesterday from one of my better Florida swimmers.

“Hi David! Just read the article Jane posted. It is nice to know that people reap what they sow. We always believed you and knew you and Alison had nothing to do with any of that. To this day XXXXXX and I still talk about how bad we feel that you were falsely accused. It’s too bad they had to be a part of the team. Hope you know how much the rest of us loved having you here! Definitely glad her sins found her out :) I’m sure this news puts a smile on your face! Hope you are doing well!”            

The “news”, we will get to later in this post…

Things got even worse when I discovered Reiser had asked the club to invoice her boy’s training fees as a single amount and call it a gym membership. I investigated further and discovered she was claiming the cost back from her then-employer who offered gym memberships to the staff as a corporate perk. I told the employer. I was not happy to be accused of financial mismanagement, only to find that my accuser was defrauding her employer with my coaching programme. Julie was sacked and left the swimming club.

But you may be wondering, what is this mention of Reiser’s sins all about. Well, with that history imagine how I felt when I read the following headline in the Boca News last Friday.

Made In USA Founder, McCline For Congress Director Reiser Jailed

by BocaNewsNow.com Staff • May 19, 2014 6:20 pm

Julie Reiser

Julie Reiser, Courtesy Palm Beach County Jail

There may be some Swimwatch readers who want to read more about the most recent events in the life and times of Julie Reiser. Here is the link: http://bocanewsnow.com/2014/05/19/made-in-usa-founder-mccline-for-congress-director-reiser-jailed/

That has to be kama. Perhaps even schadenfreude. Or as a friend of mine from Florida said today in an email on the subject – “Four greatest words in the English language:  I told you so.”

Amen to that.

Well that’s my Famous Five. Pray God it never grows to become the name of another well-known Enid Blyton series, “The Secret Seven”.

Posted in Florida, New Zealand, United States | No Comments »

Newer Entries »