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Integrity?

By David

Swimwatch readers may recall that in our last post we referred to a lie posted on the Swimming New Zealand website. This is what we said:

The sort of thing they are expert at was laid bare this weekend when the three of them held a High Performance Distance Training Camp. Swimming New Zealand ran a news item on their website announcing the camp. The item included the following description of the Millennium coach, Mark Regan:

“who also coaches Denmark’s Lotte Friis to a Beijing Olympic medal in the 800m freestyle in his role as coach of the Danish national squad.”

That statement is deliberate dishonesty. Swimming New Zealand members are being conned, duped and deceived by their leaders. A casual Swimming New Zealand member reading that would be led to the conclusion, “We are lucky to have that guy Regan in New Zealand. He coached a Danish swimmer called Friis to an Olympic medal.” But he didn’t. That’s a lie. Lotte Friis was coached by a chap called Paul Wildeboer. I went to a conference in Florida where he spoke about the training program he used to prepare Lotte Friis for the Olympic Games and World Championships.

There are two versions of this story floating around the Internet. One contains the lie; the other does not. However, the version of the story that does not contain Regan’s Danish distance coaching exploits is only available on the Swimming New Zealand website, here.

Other versions of the story–which was syndicated as a press release on or before January 25–can be found here.

There are various other differences between the syndicated story and the one Swimming New Zealand displays, such as the number of swimmers attending the camp: it decreased from 22 to 15.

Unfortunately, Google no longer has a record of the press release in its original form on the Swimming New Zealand website. Its cache dates from January 28th, after the story was apparently changed. The original was published on January 23.

But why, Swimming New Zealand, were these mistruths allowed to be syndicated as a press release in the first place? And should the corrected version of the article not be released now, since the omissions it makes are so important? As you can see, the new version of the story only appears on Swimming New Zealand’s site. They did not re-release it with the corrected information.

In a few days the SPARC investigation into the affairs of Swimming New Zealand will get underway. Out of that study we may end up with an organization that does care where we want to go and how we are going to get there; an organization that is honest with its membership.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 at 2:37 am and is filed under New Zealand . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • the decision of SNZ to correct their own website but leave the version sent out to the world’s media uncorrected is stunning in its dishonesty. After all Marion Jones was jailed in the USA; not for taking steroids but for lying to the FBI. Her cover up was the crime. As it is in this instance with SNZ.

    We are evidently not the only ones who think so. Here is an email I received today from a friend I used to swim with many years ago. He was a better swimmer than me then and writes a more pointed description of SNZ’s behavior than me now.

    “Thank you for your insightful views and your efforts to keep swimming in New Zealand honest. I do not always, and often in the past have not agree(d) with Swimwatch’s tone or views. I surprise myself but I am now finding myself agreeing with more of what you are saying than not. Thank you for raising the issue of attribution once again yesterday (as it relates to Mark Reagan and Lotte Friis) – like many I do not know all the details about who coaches who and when Mark Reagan first came to NZ we heard about his success in Denmark and were certainly led to the view that he was responsible for that. Maybe he was but as you have so succinctly pointed out he could not claim to be Lotte Friis ‘coach’ as she had another coach already. We here in little old New Zealand could not have been expected to know that and were it not for your excellent ‘conscience pricking’ we may have been none the wiser. This brings me back to your previous article about Lauren Boyle and Hayley Palmer and the excellent coaches they are working with. When Jan C was doing the commentary from Delhi she frequently mentioned (obviously to strengthen the claims of her own high performance programme) that Lauren Boyle was swimming with ‘Head Coach Mark Reagan at the Millenium Institute’ with only very fleeting reference to the fact that she was or as she implied ‘had been’ at the University of California under the outstanding, but unmentioned Teri McKeever. I was feeling a little bit as though I was out of order in feeling uncomfortable about that until I read your article and realised my discomfort was simply about the injustice and dishonesty associated with claiming credit which belonged to someone else. As far as I know (and you can confirm this I am sure) Lauren Boyle has been swimming at Cal with Teri McKeever for the past four years and I think is still swimming there. It sounded very much to me as though Jan C was trying to convince us all in New Zealand and I guess more importantly everyone at SPARC that their programme was really successful because look, Mark Reagan coaches Lauren Boyle. Surely SPARC do not buy this rubbish? Isn’t that grossly dishonest to claim someone else’s work as your own? Didn’t Helen Clarke get herself into trouble because she claimed a piece of artwork as her own when it wasn’t? Isn’t that fraudulent to try and encourage financial support from someone like SPARC on the basis of your success when really the success is due to another great coach somewhere else? I would be interested in your thoughts.”

  • michael mc

    They are a fraud hopefully SPARC sees through them.