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.
Far too late, I’ve realized that I’m sad that Roush has left the post. I’ve been one of ASCA’s biggest critics- mainly because of Leonard, who long since leveraged the American coaching community for personal gain. Still, ASCA continues to play an important role for not only coaches in America but coaches around the world
Part of the reason came down to simple arrogance. I felt like I had heard and read enough about Gibney that there would be little to gain from listening to a re-telling of the “same story”. The other part was a bit of fear. I knew it would be heavy listening, and I was worried about what it might stir up in me emotionally to listen,
I think that USA Swimming will cease to exist within the near future. The reasons why can be found by pouring over any number of things I’ve written over the past decade plus. But, in case you don’t want to pour over my poorly organized collection of writing, here’s a brief summary of why I think this:
Make no doubt about my position here. Debra Grodensky, Suzette Moran, Tracy Palmero and three other anonymous women deserve their day in court. They deserve to have their stories heard and ultimately I think they deserve restitution for what has been done to them and USA Swimming’s complicity in their abuse.
People who know me know that long before our current crisis I was firmly against training trips, or training camps, or getting on an airplane to go another place to swim. However, if anybody is looking for an easy budgetary cut for the upcoming season, provided you typically budgeted for such a trip, my advice is to CUT CUT CUT.
College swimming, especially Men’s college swimming, was already in a precarious position. In many athletic departments, even Division 1 programs, teams were understaffed, coaches were underpaid and scholarships were underfunded. Many athletic directors judged their swimming and diving programs with absolutely no skin in the game.
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).
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.
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 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.
In the case of (former) Indiana Associate Head Coach Mike Westphal, I found out his fate after one of my coaching friends jokingly texted me that he would “squash” me. Confused, I ended up getting him on the phone.
But I digress, this blog post is not about all that. I was speaking with someone (vague stories are all the rage now) who was curious about why a certain international team was essentially getting their PR done for them by a certain Swimswam “reporter”. I’ll explain all the scare quotes later, I promise.
