The current Swimming New Zealand Constitution was adopted in 2012. It was the brain child of Sport New Zealand’s CEO, Peter Miskimmin, and his appointed surrogate Chris Moller. Although the Constitution was adopted by a General Meeting of Swimming New Zealand, there is little doubt that its acceptance was an old fashioned coup d’état. There was no subtlety in this autocratic and overt seizure of control. Moller even told the General Meeting delegates to accept his recommendations in their entirety or have nothing at all.

The Constitution has failed the sport. Some may find that claim difficult to accept. But consider this next table. The numbers do not lie.

By these seven relevant measures, the performance of Swimming New Zealand since the new Constitution has declined by an average of 20%. It is a disaster. Add to those numbers the competitive failure of the organization and there is not a lot to cheer. With the exception of Lauren Boyle there is no good news.

The Regional delegates who were around in 2011 and are still attending Swimming New Zealand General meetings in 2017 should be ashamed of themselves. They have sat around for six years and watched the business decline by 20% and have done nothing to reverse the devastation. In my opinion delegates like John Mace, Mark Berge, Simon Perry, Bronwen Radford, Keith Bone, Dianne Farmer, Stephen Fryer, Wayne Rollinson and Nevill Sutton have fiddled while Rome has burned.

Now they should take steps to correct the decline. The 2012 Constitution has had its chance and it has failed. It is time for a change. There should be a new Constitution. In general it should bring democracy back into swimming.

Here are the specific changes to its constitution I would recommend Swimming New Zealand adapt.

1. Abolish the Appointed Board Members.

The decision to introduce appointed Board members has failed. The two Chairmen since 2012, Brent Layton and Bruce Cotterill, have been appointed members. In my opinion their product knowledge has been insufficient to manage the organization. Many of the errors made have been the result of simply not understanding the sport. In addition, one or two business failures in Cotterill’s past would have given me sufficient reason to oppose his appointment to the Swimming New Zealand Board.

2. Introduce Democracy to the Board Selection Process.

The new Board should remain as six members but the method of their selection needs to change.

• Three members should be voted for by delegates at the Annual Meeting.
• One member should be voted for by all officials registered as officials on the Swimming New Zealand member’s register.
• One member should be voted for by all coaches registered as coaches on the Swimming New Zealand member’s register.
• One member should be voted for by all competitive swimmers registered as competitive swimmers on the Swimming New Zealand member’s register.

The purpose of this recommendation is to make the organization more democratic; more accountable to the membership. It is important the key stakeholders (competitive members, coaches and officials) are each represented by a dedicated Board member. The change will also ensure there is an improved knowledge of swimming on the Board.

3. The Number of Regional Delegates should be determined by Number of Members.

The number of delegates eligible to vote at a General Meeting should be calculated on the number of members in each Region. There should be one delegate per one thousand members. Regions with under one thousand members get one delegate. Regions with over one thousand members get one delegate per whole one thousand. This recommendation is also designed to make the organization more democratic and accountable to the membership.

4. Board Membership should be Gender Neutral.

Given that about 60% of the swimmers taking part in the sport are female it is important that women are properly represented on the Board. This means that three of the six Board members must always be female and three male.

5. The Swimming New Zealand CEO should be on the Board.

The CEO should always be a Board member. He or she should not have a vote but in every other way should attend and take part in the Board decisions.

6. The Chairman should be selected by the Board.

Once the Board is elected its first business should be to elect a Chairman. In the event of a tie the member’s delegate and the coaches’ delegate and the official’s delegate will each have a second casting vote.

7. Board Minutes will be published.

The minutes of all board meetings will be published on the Swimming New Zealand’s website. If some issue is personally confidential the Board can move into committee and the record of that portion of the meeting can be omitted from the published minutes. Once again this measure is recommended to improve democracy and the transparency of the Board’s business.

8. Re-Election.

Two Board members should resign and, if they wish, stand for re-election each year. Board member’s terms should be limited to eight years.

9. No one should be excluded from Board membership.

There should be no ridiculous rules that exclude employees or coaches or club or regional committee members from being on the Swimming New Zealand Board. I imagine these rules were included in the 2012 Constitution to avoid conflicts of interest. However good people are being lost because of them. There are adequate meeting rules to cover conflicts of interest without excluding good people with sound swimming experience from serving on the Board.

You may be tempted to think that these recommendations are extreme and unnecessary. If that is your view, scroll back to the top of this post and read again the performance of the current Board. Do you really want membership to drop by another 25% in the next six years? Do you really want income to drop by 15%? Do you really want New Zealand’s swimmers to fail at world swim meets? Because that is the legacy of the way we are doing things right now. Change is needed and while these ideas might not be perfect, the drive towards more democracy and more accountable leadership is long overdue.

                                                   The Te Reinga Falls – Just below my Hapua training pool

According to the Swimwatch analytics report one of the most popular pages readers visit is the “About Swimwatch” page. I suspect visitors are new readers wanting to find out about the self-opinionated being that writes this stuff. The page needs updating. I will get around to it one day soon. In the meantime here is a description of how I first got involved in swimming.

Through primary school and high school I lived in the small East Coast town of Te Reinga. Te Reinga is about half way between Wairoa and Gisborne on the 100 kilometre inland road. There is not a lot at Te Reinga. There is no pub, no shop, no movies and no swimming pool. There is a marae, a school, some houses, fertile bush for hunting pigs and deer, a river and a spectacular waterfall.

In summer I played in a section of the Hangaroa River we called the hapua; a Maori word meaning lagoon. The river was quite wide, about 25 meters, and slow moving. I remember those times with great affection. We had a mud slide, a rope swing and a plank of wood we called a diving board. Occasionally we held Olympic or Commonwealth Games, racing across the river. Of course I never did any training. I didn’t even know that town kids had clubs that prepared for races by swimming every day.

When I was twelve, between primary school and high school, my parents decided we would have a two week holiday in Auckland. It was time to see the big city. I have no idea why, but my mother asked if I would like to go to a swim school and learn to swim properly. That appealed to me no end, and so I arrived at the Parnell Baths ready to swim with the Paul Kraus squad.

The first morning was a disaster. I had no idea what I was doing. I had no understanding of the hieroglyphics on the training board. All I remember was blindly following and trying to copy the guy in front of me. That was not all that easy. Goggles were yet to be invented and so even seeing what the other guys were doing became difficult as the chlorine took hold of my unaccustomed eyes.

At the end of the session I told my mother about my problems. She explained to Paul that her backward child was in need of help. That afternoon Paul patiently explained to me what the training board meant. And I was away. The two weeks were brilliant. I loved every minute. Who the hell wanted to see Queen Street when you could spend all day at the Parnell Baths?

I arrived back in Te Reinga armed with half a dozen of Paul’s training sessions determined to continue my training in the hapua. It was more difficult than in Parnell especially standing up in the mud on either side in order to turn around. Chlorine was not a problem anymore but when it rained the silt in the water could be just as annoying. However I got through the summer and went off to high school, to what was going to be my first swimming competition – the Wairoa College junior swimming championships.

And would you believe. Paul’s training worked. I won the bloody thing. Not only that I set a school record in the 33 yard breaststroke and 66 yard freestyle. See, I thought, you don’t need swimming pools and stopwatches, or training squads and coaches. The hapua on a nice day and this swimming business is easy.

But then I had a stroke of good fortune. My mother bought me a copy of Arthur Lydiard’s new book, “Run to the Top”. Instead of doing homework I sat in my room and studied every page. At the end of it I knew that I didn’t need a coach. All I needed to do was convert Lydiard’s running schedules into swimming and, in the hapua, I could swim to the top.

It took some time, and a lot more lost homework, to convert Lydiard to swimming but eventually I had a plan. I joined the Wairoa Swimming Club and for three years trained by myself on most days in the hapua. I say most days because when the river was flooded the current and silt made swimming difficult. On those days I ran whatever Lydiard schedule was the equivalent of my swimming translation.

My competitive results were modest in terms of the national champions I have coached but from a river in Te Reinga, on my own, I look back and am pleased. I continued to win in the college sports. I got second in the North Island Secondary Schools Championships, I qualified for the national championships and I won five medals in the Hawkes Bay Poverty Bay Championships.

More importantly I managed to swim up the narrow channel below the Te Reinga Falls and swim under the falls and into the cave on the other side. The swim was an ancient Maori warrior’s test. The cave was said to be the home of Hinekorako, one of very few female Maori Gods.

But I decided that further progress meant taking on the big city. It was time to swim for the Comet Club in Gisborne. I asked my parents if that would be okay and they approved. We drove to Gisborne and met Greg Meade and his coach mother, Beth Meade. By luck my swimming life was about to be influenced by one of the most knowledgeable and best people in New Zealand swimming. And that’s how the swimming thing all began.

The Commonwealth Games are getting close. In two months athletes from seventy countries will be competing in eighteen sports for 274 gold medals. I have been fortunate enough to help athletes attend three Commonwealth Games; two in swimming and one in track and field. The last two months before a Games are a testing time.

Politically I don’t have a lot in common with Olympic silver medallist and world record holder, Dick Quax. He is too right wing for my taste. I have often wondered about his politics. His conservative views never seemed to fit with the nature of the person that I knew. My experience of the person was of a superb athlete who was both kind and generous. On several occasions he used his world record holder status to arrange for my wife, Alison, to compete in the big European track meets. He was also a hugely entertaining dinner guest. His collection of track stories was second to none.

For example on a trip to communist Poland Dick convinced John Walker and Alison to give him some of their USA dollars. He had met a guy who was offering many more Polish Zlotys than the official exchange rate. Dick disappeared down a dark Warsaw alley and returned carrying a bundle of local money. As he unwrapped the money, to give John and Alison their share, they realized the bundle of Zlotys was actually two or three Zlotys wrapped around some newspaper cuttings. The con-man was gone and New Zealand’s best runners were not going to catch him.

Dick Quax emerges from the dark Warsaw alley.

After the track meet Dick and Alison were stopped at the airport and prevented from leaving. Payment of a bribe was demanded. I’m told the look on the officials face was worth gold when Dick offered his American Express card as payment. Clearly American Express is not what the officer had in mind. After arguing for a day, Dick and Alison were finally allowed to make their escape on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt.

One other interesting story came out of the same Polish trip. As the airplane taxied into Warsaw airport John Walker said, “This will be interesting. It’s our first visit to a communist country.” The three runners agreed but Coach Arch Jelley said, no, he had been to Russia before. That was news to Alison, John and Dick. “When was that?” they asked.

“Well,” said Arch, “in World War 2 I was a navigator on a Royal Navy submarine escorting convoys to Murmansk.” No wonder Arch stays calm during international track races. It probably takes quite a bit to match the stress of time spent under the Arctic Ocean during a war.

Perhaps Dick’s right wing views began when a communist con-man cheated him out of some USA dollars and a Polish airport official demanded a bribe. Whatever the reason he is a strong conservative voice on the Auckland Council. But I am still confused by the apparent disparity between Dick Quax the person and Dick Quax the politician.

However putting all that to one side some of the best sporting advice I have ever received came from Dick Quax. Prior to the Barcelona Olympic Games Toni Jeffs had just won a bronze medal in, what was then, the World Short Course Championships. She was favoured to do well in the Olympic Games. About two months before the Games I was talking to Dick and he said, “Be very careful in this last two months before the Games. Journalists need to write stories about the Games but there is no sport to write about. They will look for scandal.” If I was interviewed, Dick went on to say, I should talk about what Toni had done in the past. I should predict nothing. Just use vague expressions like, “She hopes to do well,” or “She will be trying her best.”

It was good advice. Leading up to any Games the headlines have little to do with sport. Relationships, drugs and injury take pride of place. It is all about who’s suffering heartbreak from a failed relationship or who is battling through injury or who is having to choose between competing and the birth of a child. Drug stories are always prominent in the last few weeks; who is suspected of cheating and how they are going to get caught.

Sadly I ignored Dick’s advice. I spoke to a dozen sport’s journalist about training and times and the possibility of success. We hosted a farewell party with 150 guests, a three course dinner, speeches and a stage show. A gold carpet was laid across the floor leading to a gold lectern. And it was all recorded by three television stations one flown in from Australia. Broadcasters Peter Williams and Mark Sainsbury were there, reporting on the event.

When things at the Games did not work out, for reasons I have often discussed in Swimwatch, journalists were quick to use my words against me. I don’t blame them for that. They were doing their job. I do blame myself though. I was not smart enough to follow the caution offered by Dick Quax.

And so two months to go before the Games is a time for caution. The motto for the 2018 Commonwealth Games is “Share the Dream”. But take the advice of Dick Quax. In this last few weeks don’t share your dream publically in the nation’s newspapers.

A recent Swimwatch post discussed the potential problems associated with the plan being prepared for the new Targeted Athlete & Coach Manager, Gary Francis. Steve Johns said he was going to prepare and announce a list of the selected swimmers and coaches. Gary Francis would then focus his attention on these individuals. They would be cared for with all the attention and resources available to the national federation.

And it will not work. And here are the reasons why.

Selecting a privileged cliché of swimmers is no different from what Swimming New Zealand has been doing and has failed at for the past fifteen years. Their centralized training program cost over $20million and failed. The only difference this time is that the selected swimmers will not be forced to transfer to a Swimming New Zealand coached program in Antares Place. Selected swimmers will be able to stay with their home clubs and coaches. That is certainly progress. However the multitude of elitist problems associated with selecting a privileged cliché will remain. Apart from location, all the stuff that characterised and killed the old centralised program will be present and will kill the new initiative.

There are two serious problems associated with Federation selected training lists. The first is a condition that Arthur Lydiard described as the “New Zealand disease”. Swimmers get ideas above their station. They get treated like Olympic champions without having anything to back it up. The incentive to improve is killed. There is no need to improve. They are already getting the publicity and the rewards of success. The “New Zealand disease” is serious and it is deadly.

When Toni Jeffs was swimming at her best she was frequently stopped in the street to sign autographs. The New Zealand disease was close at hand. I remember telling her to let me know when she was stopped in London’s Knightsbridge. Then I would be impressed. Keeping an athlete’s feet on the ground is vital to their success.

The New Zealand disease was rampant in the Swimming New Zealand centralized training program. The swimmers had been selected. They received unique uniforms and constant special mention in the papers and on the internet. Medical and massage services were freely available. They paraded around the pool like prize peacocks. At one National Championships Jan Cameron even had Swimming New Zealand build a mini stage for members of Millennium squad to sit on. It was disgusting and it was fatal.

The way Steve Johns is talking it will not be long before those on this list are infected with the “New Zealand disease”. The results will be equally disappointing; not to mention divisive in the clubs that have selected and non-selected swimmers. And the fault will lie with Johns and his mates who, in my opinion, have no idea what they are doing.

But just as damaging as the “New Zealand disease” is the second problem inherent in Steve Johns’ list. There is an extraordinary high likelihood that Steve Johns’ list will miss New Zealand’s best talent. The history of New Zealand sport is littered with athletes who have come from small country communities and have matured late. These individuals would be missed by the Johns’ selection process. For example Johns’ plan would miss Peter Snell from Opunaki, Murray Halberg from Ekatahuna, Toni Jeffs from Whakatane, Jack Lovelock from Reefton, Dick Taylor from Timaru and Johnathan Winter from Carterton. For exactly the same reason that Jan Cameron’s centralized swim program missed Lauren Boyle, Natalie Wiegersma, Liz Van Welie and Mark Herring this new list will miss many of the next generation’s best swimmers. Good national federations have long since given up trying to pick winners like this. They are no good at it and it does not work. But Johns and Cotterill will go ahead and try anyway; as though fifteen years of banging their head against a brick wall wasn’t enough.

So what should replace the old centralized training program?

Well a few years ago Swimming New Zealand had a very good motto. It said, “Excellence in every pool.” The only problem was while that was their motto; in practice they were pouring all their attention and resources into one pool on the North Shore of Auckland. In my view Swimming New Zealand should go back to, “Excellence in every pool” and this time they should mean it. Why? Because none of us have any idea where the next Danyon Loader lives. It might be central Auckland but it could just as easily be Westport or Wairoa.

There are 165 clubs in New Zealand. That means Gary Francis’ business has 165 branch offices. The Head Coaches of the clubs are his Regional Managers. The work that needs to be done in New Zealand is to maximize the effectiveness of each branch office. This should be done by selling the clubs a combination of duties and incentives. The duties should involve the preparation of an annual performance plan. What are the club’s swimmers going to achieve in the next twelve months? Each month there should be a short report on progress against the plan. And the incentives should involve assistance with travel costs, involvement in camps, advice on training problems, access to the National Training Centre pool and medical and massage facilities and the provision of a legitimate and free coaching education program. I would use ASCA for that.

In the past couple of weeks I have received two emails from parents asking for my opinion on their son’s training. They were dissatisfied with specific aspects of their children’s coaching. If what was reported to me was accurate they had every right to be concerned. Both coaches seemed to be making serious mistakes. Who knows; perhaps both these boys were potential champions. Perhaps both were in the process of being lost because a coach did not know any better. What Swimming New Zealand needs is a program that avoids this loss; that prevents this waste.

And they won’t do that by picking a group of thirty or forty swimmers from about 20 clubs and focusing all their efforts on that elitist group. They won’t do it because the next champion is probably in one of the 145 clubs that their program ignores; just like it has been for the past fifteen years.