By David

At Swimwatch we are well aware that many people view our criticism of Swimming New Zealand and Jan Cameron as negative and destructive. Their loyalty to the Cameron cause is short sighted and misplaced. It certainly does nothing for those swimmers currently working to forge a successful swimming career. Here is an example of what we mean.

Just like every meet in the world; just like our Open Championships, the Olympic Games have qualifying standards. In the past few days FINA have published their 2012 Olympic “A” qualifying times. That’s the times FINA says have to be swum to get into the meet. These times won’t win you anything. In fact they won’t even get you in a final. But they are the times you must achieve to be allowed to go to the meet. The table below shows the qualifying cuts for the London Games.

The next table shows the winning time for each event at the recent New Zealand World Championship Trials. We have shaded the boxes where the New Zealand winner managed to record a faster time than the FINA qualifying cut; a time that would allow them to go to the London Olympic Games. Not to win remember; but sufficient for them to start the race.

What this means is, that one year from the Olympic Games, New Zealand has three swimmers fast enough to swim in the event. Bell equalled the qualifying time, Melissa Ingram was half a second inside the time and Lauren Boyle was inside the qualifying time in both the 400 and 800 meters. Boyle’s 400 swim was a healthy 1.74 seconds faster than the Game’s standard.

In the other events New Zealand’s best swimmers vary between 0.3% behind the qualifying time and 4.6% behind. The average deficit between our national champion and the time required to catch the London bound Boeing 747 is a pretty daunting 2.4%. What does that mean? Well, the American Swim Coaches Association says that a swimmer who averages 3% per annum improvement is making very good progress. If that’s true, it will take New Zealand’s best swimmers ten months to bridge the gap between where they are now and the FINA cut times. But wait – we don’t have ten months. There are a thousand things wrong with averages, but in most of the swimming program New Zealand will not have a representative at the London Games.

What is certain is that one year out from the London Olympic Games to have just three swimmers inside the FINA qualifying standard is a disgrace. Cameron has had close to ten years and $15 million dollars of our time and money and all she can show one year out from the Olympic Games is three swimmers qualified to attend the event. Remember also that one of them Lauren Boyle has spent the past four years training in the United States, about as far from Cameron as you can get.

While Cameron has anything to do with New Zealand’s best swimmers we have no chance. The whole program is in disarray. Coaches don’t talk to each other, personal dislikes are aired in public, personal relationships get in the way of performance, participants lead inappropriate lifestyles, swimmers abandon the program and shuttle between coaches, the Head Coach gets left off the World Championship team – Cameron’s regime has it all. It should be aired as a Sky Television lunch time soap, “How the Cameron World Turns” or perhaps “Rosedale 632”. For those of you who don’t know, that’s the address of the Millennium Institute.

Cameron’s program is long on spin, full of slogans and devoid of results. The sign on the side of the Swimming New Zealand equipment container says, “Off to Another World Class Swim Meet”. Swimming New Zealand claim their goal is “Excellence in Every Pool”. SPARC uses the word “podium” as a verb, adjective and noun to describe what they expect from Cameron for their $15 million dollar investment. But it is all a fraud, “a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” For London, it is too late. SPARC waited far too long to review Cameron’s regime. They should have ordered their review of Cameron’s performance years ago when Swimwatch first started pointing out her shortcomings. I guess they thought they knew better. I guess they believed the spin. In many respects, SPARC negligence makes them as guilty as Cameron. And now, London is lost. Palmer and Boyle have a chance because they are well coached in the United States. Ingram’s prodigious talent may be enough to earn her a result.

But for swimming in New Zealand it is time to turn our attention to Rio de Janeiro. It is time to give New Zealand’s best coaches the power and the money that has been concentrated and lost in Cameron’s hands. This time SPARC needs to listen to what we are saying. They didn’t last time and just look at the mess the sport is in. Here at Swimwatch we guarantee that men and women like Duncan, Speechley, Hurring, Winter, Kent, Miehe, Bouzaid and a dozen others, given the resources and the power, will take up the challenge and in the spirit of Lydiard, Robertson, Allen and Laing will deliver New Zealand their podium finishes. These are good and honest people. They will not let you down.

It would be fair to ask, “How come Swimwatch is so sure New Zealand’s regional coaches can do the job for us in four years time?” Have a shot at looking at the problem like this.

Swimming in New Zealand has a longer and larger experience of professional coaching than any other New Zealand sport. Sixty years ago New Zealand had an established pool of professional coaches; Krause, Doig, Hurring (Senior), Parkhouse, Keenan and Hamilton. Thirty years ago Anderson, Brown, Naylor, Beaumont, Cotterill and Laing assumed responsibility for New Zealand’s swimming performance. They did a pretty good job. Four of their swimmers won Olympic medals or broke world records. And today the group we mentioned earlier in this article have taken over coaching the sport. No sport in New Zealand can match that depth and history of coaching professionalism.

So what went wrong? Well, Jan Cameron is what went wrong. She came along and sold Swimming New Zealand and SPARC on a Project Vanguard of coaching. Effectively she said if New Zealand gave her all the money and all the power and concentrated resources on Auckland’s North Shore, success was certain to follow. The sport would perform better if it was centralized and socialized. Swimming New Zealand bought into that idea and SPARC said they would pay for it. To our eternal credit, Swimwatch said it would never work. And it hasn’t. Swimmers flocked to the Millennium honey pot. They came from Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, Bay of Plenty, Wairarapa – from everywhere, chasing their swimming dream; believing Cameron’s spin and they won nothing. Of course they won nothing. The structure they had bought into was wrong.

What should Swimming New Zealand and SPARC have done instead? Instead of pouring money into the bottomless pit of the Cameron’s family employment agency they should have strengthened the structures that gave us world class swimmers like Loader, Moss, Kingsman, Jeffs, Kent, Winter, Simcic, Langrell and others. These swimmers were developed by professional coaches with no central money and no central power or support. The current structure needed to be improved and strengthened – that is certainly true. What it didn’t need was a Project Vanguard style take over by Cameron and her family. But that is what we got and the result is a mess of wasted talent and lost resources.

Where do we go from here? Well, we relegate Cameron’s High Performance Project Vanguard to swimming history. We ditch the whole thing. It’s time to move on. And we restore faith in the massive resource of coaching talent available to swimming in New Zealand. We invest Cameron’s millions in what Duncan is doing in Invercargill, Speechley is doing in Christchurch, Hurring in Wellington and so on. We strengthen our capitalist, federal structure of coaching. It is the philosophy that works in the United States. It is the structure that Lydiard used for running in Finland. It will work here as well. As we have said already – we will not let New Zealand down.

So there it is. That’s why we feel so strongly that the Cameron form of central control has been bad for New Zealand swimming. That’s why we support a return to a SPARC supported federal, free enterprise model. It is also why we stand so firmly against Project Vanguard being applied to the rest of the sport. Swimming New Zealand have made such a hash of running the elite program, why on earth would anyone consider for a second ceding them the rest of the organization.