By David

High school swimming in the US is bloody incredible. I shouldn’t really say that. I have no idea what high school swimming is like in most of the US. However, one of our team members comes from California and he swears high school swimming there is full of fruit-loops. In Florida, there is no doubt about it: high school swimming is a wonder to behold. Normally sane people plot and plan with all the intensity and deception of planning an international invasion. Others, who, I admit, were a bit odd before the high school season began, go way off the normal behavior chart. Just about everybody involved is in need of some expert guidance. For psychologists, here is a new world of opportunity. I can hear it now,

“What field of psychology did you specialize in at University?”

“Florida High School swimming syndrome (FHSSS), it’s a rapidly growing specialty, offering attractive long term prospects of employment.”

You would hardly believe some of the things that happen down here. I know a coach who demanded another team be stripped of their points because a swimmer was incorrectly entered and the entry changed to the correct event after the close off date. Instead of a little sporting good will, the bloodhounds were released to search and kill. That episode amused me as the coach’s email concluded with that well known phrase, “I do not want to hurt the swimmer.” They all claim that just as they give the order to fire. It reminds me of people who hide behind “constructive criticism” when all they want to do is bash somebody. I’m told that it took a series of late night phone calls, meetings with secret handshakes and a retina security scanner to sort that one out.

I was watching a high school meet the other day. They had a single timer per lane. One of the timers got involved in a conversation and clearly missed the swimmer finishing in her lane. She wrote something on her timing pad. I hope it wasn’t the swimmer’s time.

Parents also exhibit FHSSS. I’ve seen some who insist on sitting in the same spot at each year’s championship. Finding someone else in their chosen place is reason enough to send them into rehab. I’ve heard parents demand trespassers move. Nervous? They are scared out of their minds. Before a high school championship, your average parent’s voice is an octave higher and 20 words a minute faster than at any other time. I was taken to dinner by the parents of one high school swimmer and offered a Caribbean cruise if I could get their daughter into the State Finals. I declined the offer but said I’d do my best. Coming to morning practice would have been more help than a Caribbean cruise.

High school championships also witness the acme of championship screamers. No matter how vocal they are, it is still true; a swimmer with their head under the water can’t hear a word. Edit from Jane: breaststrokers and possibly butterfliers can hear noise intermittently. But – ah – I never was quite able to catch what you all were saying, sorry.

One coach I know is in the habit of preparing a schedule of the area’s best high school times. The effort is enormous. The NFL could learn a thing or two about collecting statistics from this guy. The whole thing is meaningless. High school events are swum in pools that have the latest starting blocks, in pools too shallow to have any starting blocks, in meets that have one manual stopwatch per lane and in pools that have touch pads and the latest in electronic monitoring. The variation in conditions makes a mockery of his labor. Another edit from Jane: When my college team went to race a rival team during my senior year, the coach had posted all of our times and their times in a spreadsheet on the notice-board, separated by event. If our times were the fastest, they were highlighted. This struck me as weird. I already knew who was faster than me and who was in my general price range.

More square inches of newspaper copy are published about high school “stars” than Dara Torres and Rhi Jeffrey combined can muster. It’s a drug – an obsession – that I prefer to leave to others. Sanity demands no less.

The strange thing is you don’t find this kind of obsession at US national meets. In Indianapolis, for example, it was all good old fashioned competition. I win, you win, I lose, you lose; now let’s have a beer and enjoy the rest of the night. The difference is chalk and cheese.

Why is that, do you think? Perhaps it’s because the coaches, swimmers, parents and officials who get to the Nationals have experienced wins and losses, victories and defeats many time before. They have maturity on their side. They realize the futility of high school counter espionage. High school insanity isn’t needed because it doesn’t work. Whatever it is, I can’t wait for the US Short Course Nationals to roll around. It will be December by then and Florida’s bloody high school swimming will be done with for another year. Thank God for that.

By David

I own three guns. I have an old Diana .22. I have a much more powerful ex-army .303 and a pretty basic single barrel shot gun.

The most used and reliable is my .22. My Mum bought it for me in the late 1950s from the Ohakune Dairy Company. I notched the stock to record each animal I killed. I can’t remember the total number of cuts but I do remember passing 1000 sometime around my seventeenth birthday. The primary victims were the region’s wild goats. My domestic chore was to shoot two goats each weekend to feed our dogs.

Strangely my crowning memory of this rifle did not involve killing things. We had just finished Sunday lunch. My mother always cooked a leg of lamb on Sunday and served it with mint sauce, roast potatoes and best of all green peas from our garden. After lunch my father wandered off with his fly rod to spend the afternoon fishing for trout in the Hangaroa River. He seldom caught anything but enjoyed the solitude. An hour or so later I set out to find and shoot two unfortunate goats. As I wandered along, I felt the call of nature and started to pee over a cliff down into the Hangaroa River. Below me I heard a scream, “What the hell are you doing?” I believe the question was rhetorical. You are not going to believe this, but in 25 miles of river bank I chose to pee in exactly the spot occupied by my father. It took me weeks to convince him my aim had not been deliberate.

The .303 is not as well used but did assist in the killing of 30 or 40 deer and about the same number of wild pigs. There could have been many more pigs but knifing them to death was considered a preferable method. It did less damage to the meat and better bled the animal. Occasionally I shot goats with the .303. My Dad did not approve of the .303’s excessive fire power being used on these small animals. I think the more expensive bullets were his main concern.

For years my father would not allow me to use the .303’s magazine. He believed that by having to hand feed each bullet into the gun I would waste less ammunition. Looking back on it, he was probably right. For a short time, after I was allowed a magazine, it was like world war three out there. I did once score a moral victory over my father’s frugal views on ammunition. I shot a goat and walked over to the carcass to find two dead goats lying side by side. My bullet had passed through the neck of one goat and into the chest of another. I still remember shooting my first deer with that gun. A mate of mine, Kahui Duncan, and I fired at about the same time. The deer dropped but we only found one bullet hole. Kahui swears it was his; I know it was mine.

The shot gun is virtually unused. I found sitting for hours, waiting to shoot a duck, pheasant or turkey, boring beyond belief. Besides the hopelessly unsophisticated skill involved in pointing a gun like this in the general direction of a fleeing duck and blasting it out of the sky never appealed to me. The fact the current US Vice President finds it an attractive sport explains a lot about his behavior in Iraq.

When the use of guns has been so much a part of ones early life the thought of using them for anything illicit is abhorrent. A reliable friend of mine told me a story of a swim coach in the Caribbean who got on the wrong side of the island’s drug underworld. Two enforcers turned up at afternoon practice and sat tapping their palms with loaded hand guns. Guns at practice, every mothers dream. I bet no one skipped lengths that day. It is interesting to compare gun statistics between New Zealand and the United States. Internationally New Zealand has a high level of gun ownership. Twenty percent of Kiwi households own a gun; a figure that is beaten out of sight by the forty-one percent of armed US households. There are 0.22 homicide gun deaths per 100,000 people in New Zealand, compared to 6.24 shooting deaths in the United States; 2500% more, not a good figure.

Any of my Florida swim team reading this, need not be concerned. The coach’s arsenal is safely locked away in his mother’s home, 8000 miles away in New Zealand. Happily, there doesn’t seem to be any use for guns in Delray Beach, Florida.

By David

If you type “Toni Jeffs, New Zealand” into Google and go to the eighth item on page two you will find an article written by Joseph Romanos. It was published when Romanos worked for the New Zealand Listener; a magazine that was all the better for his presence. However the magazine’s new editor, a woman called Pamela Stirling, fired Romanos and replaced him with someone called Paul Lewis, whose writing is at best sporting froth compared to the substance provided by Romanos. I taught Stirling’s son to swim and understand that her knowledge of things sporting is pretty limited; a view confirmed by her selection of Lewis ahead of the erudite Romanos.

In this particular article Romanos discusses the fate of athletes who have missed selection for Olympic Games’ teams. In particular he highlights the Australian swimmer Ian Thorpe, the New Zealand freestyler Toni Jeffs and the American hurdler Harrison Dillard. While it may be necessary for the USA to have strict selection criteria, Romanos argues that New Zealand and Australia need to be more flexible. In his last paragraph he says, “New Zealand and Australia aren’t the US. Competitors good enough for the Olympics should be selected. Poor rules should not exclude them.”

I agree with the Romanos’ view. A number of fine New Zealand Olympic results have been achieved by athletes who were “not-good-enough” to be on the team. Norman Reid who won the 50km walk in 1956 and Peter Snell who won the track 800m in 1960 could both be said to be in that category.

Whether Jeffs could have been another we will never know. I see her swimming career has come to an end. The Dominion Post reports that “Mr Garlick, 54, and his partner Toni Jeffs, 38, a former Kiwi representative swimmer, have a four-week-old son … Toni has finished swimming and we haven’t got a lot of ties here now.”

I was responsible for Jeffs’ coaching from 1989 to 1995. In that time she competed in the Barcelona Olympic Games, she won bronze medals at the Pan Pacific Games and the World Cup finals (today called the World Short Course Championships), she was fourth and sixth in two Commonwealth Games and second in the first Oceania Swimming Championships. Since then she has been third in two Commonwealth Games and has missed selection for the Atlanta, Sydney and Athens Olympic Games.

Prior to 1995 Jeffs career owed much to generous patrons, Arthur Lydiard and Brian LeGros. Track coaching legend, Arthur Lydiard, contributed the training principles I used to guide Jeffs’ training. White House strip club owner and gentleman, Brian LeGros, provided a bucket-full of money.

Lydiard invested hours of his time working on the conversion of his track training to swimming and in particular sprint swimming. Appropriate aerobic, anaerobic and speed training were carefully calculated, tested and confirmed. Every week, almost every day, for three years, at an average cost of around $400 a month we discussed Jeffs training. Lydiard later recorded our association in his biography, “Arthur Lydiard, Master Coach”. Get yourself a copy, it’s an interesting read. Mistakes were made and were always acknowledged. I have no doubt that the longevity and successes of Jeffs’ career owe much to the meticulous conditioning inspired and guided by the world’s authority on that subject.

LeGros’ money was hard earned and was a financial life-line. I recorded the following appreciation of his willing support in my first book, “Swim to the Top”.

“Brian has financed Toni, Nichola Chellingworth and me with considerable money and has asked for nothing in return. His business might not be to everyone’s liking but his compassion and care for me and my swimmers has been unstinting and often unheralded; as has his financing of Disneyland visits for terminally-ill children, his provision of free accommodation for mothers and children stranded during an inter-island ferry strike and his weekly visits to Porirua Hospital with sweets and cigarettes for a mentally-disturbed young man. He could show his detractors the true meaning of charity. A fine and generouos man. I count myself lucky to have been his friend.”

The contribution of these two men may not be well understood. The fact one was primarily a track coach and the other worked in a “leper” industry may have contributed to their exclusion. Perhaps and hopefully this article will partially redress any inequity and provide some deserved and overdue recognition.

By David

Some of you may recall that twice before this website has expressed concern at the behavior of national drug agencies. This is what we said.

“Beware though; when you are debating getting tough on the drug cheats, don’t create an out-of-control agency whose behavior may be worse than the original problem. Power corrupts and absolute power … you know the rest.”

“All this is especially true when the evidence suggests the Agency is not doing its job properly. Mistakes, errors, omissions and you begin to wonder whether the cure is turning out to be worse than the problem. The Drug Agency’s performance should be subject to the same critical tests as everyone else to ensure its performance does protect sports people.”

The fidelity of our concern was confirmed yesterday when Tour de France winner, Floyd Landis, lost his arbitration doping case. By a vote of two to one the finding that Landis used synthetic testosterone was confirmed. Our principal fear however is not whether Landis used testosterone. Compared to other matters raised by this case, whether Landis is a cheat or not is unimportant. There are many in the drug police world who will claim that “getting their man”, that stripping Landis of his Tour title is a victory for us all. The CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency, Travis Tygart has already called the decision “a victory for all clean athletes and everyone who values fair and honest competition.” He may well be jubilant, but in our view there is little to celebrate.

The potential damage to every athlete “who values fair and honest competition” is not in the behavior of Landis. The real dangers are the mammoth inefficiencies, deception and disgraceful behavior of the testing laboratory and US drug agency. Don’t take my word for it. Read the arbitration report. Upholding and dissenting arbitrators agreed on one thing. Aspects of the testing protocol and hearing procedures were a shambles; for example.

The initial test for testosterone is a relatively simple procedure called the T-E ratio test. The French Laboratory (LNDD) so badly handled this easy test that the results were inconclusive and could not be used. Authorities had to use the backup IRMS test, acknowledged as very complicated test, requiring a high level of technical skill. The obvious question is, if the laboratory could not get the T-E ratio test right, why on earth should we believe they can manage the much more complicated IRMS procedure?

The panel of arbitration also found that the chain of command in controlling the urine sample was inadequate. The way the test was run on the machine, the way the machine was prepared, the lack of appropriate laboratory training and the “forensic corrections” done on the laboratory paper work were all said to be below standard. The arbitration report concluded this section as follows, “If such practices continue, it may well be that in the future, an error like this could result in the dismissal” of a positive finding. For all of us that is real scary stuff.

The USADA did not emerge unscathed. Their attorneys went after Landis’ character with nasty and unnecessarily mean aggression. The liberties they took in evidence discovery would never have been allowed in a regular court. Without question the USADA were out to get their man. Their every action smacked of scoring a win, a blood lust to strip an athlete of his title and his career. National drug agencies have legislative, administrative and judicial powers and, without appropriate checks and balances, they exercise them badly. In this case the USADA has acted almost as poorly as the New Zealand agency did when it prosecuted Trent Bray after his sample had been mistakenly left on a laboratory shelf, in the sun, for two weeks. One day national drug agencies may see their role as working with athletes in a “fair and honest” search for the truth: one day, but not just now.

Why should all this be a concern? Imagine this, you have just been asked to take a urine drug test. As you wait for nature to take its course, reflect on the Landis case. Will the laboratory staff, who test your sample have been properly trained, will the laboratory screw up the test, will the machine they use be set up properly, will it be clean, will your paper work be changed? And if by some chance one of the readings is out of line, those nice USADA people, asking for your sample, will they come after you, walking roughshod over the conventions of natural justice, bent on ending your career and your good name? Is there any possibility of them helping you determine what has gone wrong? Yes, there is good cause for concern.

You may not be able to cross your legs in the hope of good luck at that moment, but I’d certainly cross my fingers. The Landis case says you may need a bit of luck.

1. Run in the mornings. This won’t work for everyone, but I have no motivation to do anything after work other than lay around. It’s also usually cooler in the mornings, which is a plus if you’re dealing with a season other than the middle of winter. Running in the heat sucks a lot.
2. Listen to music. There is no need to be discerning in your musical tastes. My running playlist is an embarrassment, to say the least. However, time seems to pass a lot faster when it’s passing by in four-minute intervals. Also, as the majority of swimmers know, music can be great for getting one “pumped up.” Being non-pumped-up is a fantastic way to run like crap and return home quickly.
3. Don’t run circuits. If you’re going to run six miles, run three miles away from home and then turn around. Trying to run circuits that take you back home before you’re done only increases the likelihood that you’ll quit half way through. If you’re three miles away from home with no money and no car, you have to get home somehow and walking takes a long time. If you’re also running in the morning, you don’t have the time to walk home.
4. Give “injuries” time to recover. I kind of hate using the word “injury” as it implies that you’re a very important professional athlete. However, if your knee, hip, ankle etc hurts, rest it for a few days. Even using correct form, running is pretty hard on your body. You don’t want to be going through hip reconstructions at the age of twenty-six because you kept pounding sidewalks while your hips were out of shape.
5. Go running on Mondays. It’s very hard to go on Tuesday if you started the week by sleeping in.
6. Imagine your results. Did you ever think about winning races and qualifying for meets while you were swimming? When it hurts really badly and you want to give the hell up and take up eating pancakes, think of yourself looking hot at the beach. Vanity and motivation go together like filet mignon and red wine.
7. Get a dog. Yeah, this one isn’t going to work for everyone. However, having a high-energy dog is a good way to get yourself out the door, as you know that the dog will be bouncing off the walls if you don’t take him running.