What does strike me as strange is that before this announcement USA Swimming had three crucial roles they were hiring for. One is the CEO, with Tim Hinchey’s long awaited sacking. Then there is the National Team Director who will oversee that entirety of the “wet” side of the operation. Finally there is the National Junior Team coach.
Earlier this week I posted a podcast with three-time US Olympic coach Greg Meehan. It’s worth listening to. There’s two things I want to comment with regards to the podcast.
One of the many advantages of working for yourself is that you can change directions fast. Last spring, I reached a point where it was time to make a change. One of the reasons that I work for myself is because it allows me the latitude to spend time engaging more with people in all corners of the swimming world.
Yesterday, Swimswam posted an editorial advocating that the US join the rest of the world and go to swimming meters. Now, I haven’t read that article, but I’m going to respond to it because this is the internet and it’s incumbent for all of us to just spout off without having considered anyone else’s point of view. Before I could do that, Steve Schaffer said it best in a facebook comment:
Several weeks ago, shockwaves reverberated across the Danish Swimming community. Pia Holmen, the top official in Danish Swimming for roughly the last twenty years, had to resign in disgrace, after an official government investigation found her leadership during that period lacking (link in Danish).
Alas, on a lot of teams “negativity” is, in effect, banned. Athletes interpret that they must silence any kind of negative self-talk or negative commentary about what’s going on. In the past six months, I’ve had numerous athletes confess to me that they had negative thoughts they couldn’t silence. Each and every one of them was terribly embarrassed by this.
I love the way that Hosszu shuns norms of swimming by going out and racing a lot and giving it her all at every meet she attends. She is probably the best example of a professional swimmer out there, somebody who is world class and shows up ready to compete year round.
So it pains me to criticize her, but with the announcement that her boyfriend will be her registered coach for the European Short Course Championships
Like me, you’re probably getting deja vu from Chuck Wielgus’ disastrous representation of American swimming from a decade ago. To give Hinchey credit, he at least appears to be slightly ashamed that he hasn’t even read the code of conduct for the organization he heads. Wielgus would have been incredulous at the suggestion that he was in any way supposed to know what was going on.
I’ve spent my fair share of time fired up about what gets venerated in the sport I love. The International Swimming Hall of Fame is home to Paul Bergen, Laszlo Kiss, and Jack Nelson (who despite some reconsiderations about Diana Nyad, is not off the hook.)
When I was young my family would spend most of the summer in Denmark. Around age 14, I started to get serious about swimming, which made these long trips a bit of a problem. So I joined up with the local team and started practicing.
By the second summer I had friends on the team. As I was about to enter my senior year of high school, 2001, I was well into swimming nerd-dom.
So I was shocked when I brought up Michael Phelps and my friend Emil deadpanned back to me:
“He’s totally on drugs, right?”.
I was shocked, offended, angry and more than a little defensive. How could he! Michael Phelps was totally legit (by the way in case of any ambiguity, this is something I still believe) When I recovered, I learned something pretty important. Your perspective on who is and who isn’t clean in sport has a lot to do with what passport you hold.
YES! OF COURSE!
NO, HOW COULD YOU SAY THAT?
I wrote about the doping sanction and subsequent retirement of Conor Dwyer last week, but only tangentially. Beyond how we have very different empathy for him despite a blatant violation of the rules, there’s another couple really important angles to this story.
The first is to disentangle the question of whether “America” swimming has a doping problem. There have been several prominent doping violations at the elite level of American swimming, ranging from being a total dumb dumb head (Ryan Lochte) to Dwyer’s big cheat.
Part of the problem in discussing this is that it’s clear that there are really two lanes for athletes doping. After all, doping controls are not completely inept, and therefore it takes coordination and resources to evade detection.
One way to do this is through a state coordinated program. There is ample evidence that both China and Russia have such systems, and I’m not going to get into the weeds of that conversation here. There are likely others but those two are by far the most prominent.
The second lane is one where on an individual level, there is sufficient money on the line. The slow growth of “professional” swimming unfortunately also increases the monetary incentive to dope, even as the newfound ISL has tried to address that with its zero tolerance policy towards dopers.
The second path is what we’re likely to see more in the US. I’m not so cynical that I believe that an NGB is actively coordinating a doping program. Although, when you consider everything else they are willing to ignore and obfuscate, it’s not surprising to find out that a coach like Alberto Salazar in Track and Field was able to operate so blatantly for so long.
That is to say, if we have such bad actors in swimming, I have little faith in the authorities to root them out.
There’s one more big thing to discuss here, and that is some paradoxical logic I see around this topic, particularly in swimming. Somehow, there are many Americans who believe wholeheartedly that doping is a huge problem, and that cheating is rampant and confers a significant competitive advantage.
And yet, the United States dominates in swimming at any international competition they go after. Do we truly believe that everything we do is so much better than our competitors that despite their cheating we still win?
I still remember the first Olympic Trials I ever watched on TV in 2004. During the course of the meet, swimmers training at Stanford conspicuously wore patches on their arms. It drew some scrutiny at the time, and both Stanford coach Richard Quick and this blog’s favorite (s) swimming boss Chuck Wielgus bristled at any question of a doping violation. If the patches were just what Richard Quick said, where did they go?
It went barely without mention when swimming legend Matt Biondi was named in “Game of Shadows” the book about doping mastermind Victor Conte. According to the book, Biondi was a client of BALCO, the company that Conte used to provide “undetectable” performance enhancing drugs to athletes. It’s hard to imagine that Biondi was the only elite swimming athlete in the talent rich Bay Area that availed themselves of Conte’s “cutting edge” approach.
Sadly, it’s not only “elite” athletes who have felt strong enough motivation to do this in the US. One of the great shames of my coaching career was in my second year as an assistant at Penn. An athlete all but admitted steroid use to us (the coaching staff). You know what we did? Nothing. We closed our eyes and hoped it wasn’t true. I’d like to think I’d handle it differently if I got another chance, of course I probably would be even more ostracized than I already am.
Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of American swimming is that we are so successful, so dominant that a collective groupthink justifies, ignores or condones all sorts of horrible behaviors. We’re good at pointing the finger outwards but much harder to reflect on our own problems.
Last week, I watched two stories grip the swim coaching community. One was a story of doping, and then ultimately retirement. 30 year old Conor Dwyer, a decorated international swimmer for America, was revealed to have had testosterone pellets injected into him
Last week delivered the “bombshell” that the FBI is investigating USA Swimming, particularly around the captive insurance scheme they operated (the USSIC) but also in regards to their handling/intimidation around sexual abuse complaints.
Many people are enjoying the youtube series “Darkhorse” with Shane Tusup and Ilaria Cusinato. I am not one of those people. Through five episodes I had completely avoided it. On episode six, a friend texted me and finally broke my will.
