By David

Two notable events occurred this week. In Auckland our swim team is about to complete their spring aerobic build up. Yesterday’s main set was 10,000 meters swum either as 100×100 or as a 10 kilometer straight swim. Jessica, Abigail and Sarah completed the set. Sarah did it as 100×100. Jessica and Abigail did the straight swim. They were good efforts; Abigail because she’s only 14 and Jessica because she got through the swim in 2hrs 11min 48sec, an average of 1.19 for each 100. With Nikki having done 100×100 last build up we now have a core of four swimmers who can swim respectable distances during the aerobic period of their training. After fifteen weeks that’s progress.

On the other side of the Pacific the draft heat sheets for the 2010 Pan Pacific Championships were published. So who is going to win and lose? How is the New Zealand team going to fare? The table below shows our picks for the medalists in each event.

Our guess is that the USA will miss out in the men’s freestyle. We expect Cielo from Brazil, Park from Korea and Mellouli from Tunisia to dominate this stroke. Peirsol will come right, as he usually does, and take control of the men’s backstroke. Kitajima will shrug off a quiet patch of form and win the breaststroke sprints. The men’s fly and IMs will be a Phelps’ benefit. In the IMs Lochte will keep Phelps honest, but when the roll is called the Olympic Champion will be too good for the man from Florida. The women’s events will be more fragmented. The Americans will do well in freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke and the Australians will control the women’s butterfly and IM. We are picking the Americans to dominate both the men’s and women’s relays; but then it hardly took a genius to work that out.

The format of the meet favors smaller nations like New Zealand. Only two swimmers per country can swim in a final. The limited number of countries attending gives most countries a real shot at placing someone in the top eight. And, as they say, once you’re in the final anything can happen. In 1991 Toni Jeffs, Anna Simcic and Phillipa Langrell came home with Championship medals. Two years later John Steel, Trent Bray, Danyon Loader and the men’s relay were placed at the Kobe Games. Danyon Loader and the men’s relay teams won medals again in Atlanta in 1995. And finally Trent Bray and the relays won medals in the 1997 Pan Pacific Games in Fukuoka, Japan.

I was coaching Toni in 1991 when she won the Edmonton Pan Pacs bronze medal in the 50 freestyle. New Zealand track coach, Arch Jelley, helped me put together her final six weeks of training. It seemed to work. Toni was behind two good Americans, Jenny Thompson and Angel Martino in a time of 26.21 which, I think, was a New Zealand record.

We say Trent Bray’s 1997 bronze medal in the 200 freestyle was final because after 1997 New Zealand entered the “modern era” of performance pathways, state funding and imported foreign coaches and in the three Pan Pacific Games since then New Zealand has won nothing; not a medal of any description. Even with the advantage of only two swimmers from each nation in a final, at Sydney in 1999, Yokohama in 2002 and Victoria in 2006 the New Zealand’s National Coach hasn’t been able to coach a medalist of any sort. That’s thirteen years of funding and swimming talent for nothing. I see the coach’s son is now telling the country’s largest newspaper, the New Zealand Herald, that he wants to be the National Coach, coach an Olympic Champion and see swimming become New Zealand’s most successful sport. Time will tell but, if as we suspect, New Zealand does not win a race in Irvine, California there is a very long way to go. It’s difficult to climb Mt. Everest when the slope on Auckland’s Harbor Bridge is causing you problems. New Zealand is certainly starting well behind where it was in the early 1990s. We have centralized ourselves to death. Certainly the PR media access of the current North Shore regime is far in advance of their aquatic’s performance.

Let there be no mistake. The talent on this New Zealand team is huge. Bell, Palmer, Ingram, Burmester, and Snyders are potentially as good as any swimmers in the world. Culpability for the absence of a Pan Pac gold medal, if that is indeed what happens, will not lie at their door.