Harder to stand out in a crowded pool

Date:  August 11, 2012

Jake Niall

Senior sports writer for The Age

ONE former champion, Susie O’Neill, questioned the Australian swimmers’ work rate. Another, famed butterflier Geoff Huegill, smelt a lack of ”team spirit”, noting that one swimmer, Jessica Schipper, had spent the last night of the Olympic competition at the pub, rather than in the stands cheering for her submerged compatriots.

All manner of explanations for the London calamity have been put forth and doubtless Swimming Australia will find more when O’Neill and former head coach of the swim team Bill Sweetenham head up its inquisition into our sinking performance in the pool.

Australians find it hard to accept anything less than a clear second placing – overall – to the Americans in swimming. At our apogee in Melbourne’s 1956 Games, Dawn Fraser, Murray Rose and company eclipsed even the Yanks, winning eight gold and every freestyle event.

But what Australians ought to understand about our swimming ”failure” at London in 2012 – one gold, six silver and three bronze medals – is that the major reason for our modest results was not James Magnussen’s nerves, bad tumble turns or training stuff-ups. What ails Australian Swimming isn’t what our swimmers aren’t doing; it’s what the rest of the planet  is  doing.

Swimming, like tennis, was a sport that Australians dominated, in large part because we were among the global minority who took it seriously, or had sufficient people with access to pools (and the ocean). In tennis – in which Australia peaked in the 1950s and ’60s – there were the Americans, the Aussies and the occasional French champion. Few Wimbledons, US Opens or Davis Cups were won by anyone else.

In the course of the ’70s, prosperous Europeans began to flood the tennis market. In time, South Americans would have their day and post-Communist Russia would take up not only rackets, but racquets.

Lately, the Spanish have developed a grip on clay courts and east Asia is steadily increasing its interest in the game.

Australia doesn’t have the vast numbers of people playing tennis compared with all these places. And it no longer enjoys superior expertise, in terms of what might be called secret tennis business. Thus, we struggle to have more than two men or women inside the top 100, aside from a brief renaissance from 1997-2002, when Lleyton Hewitt and Pat Rafter were at their peak.

”Tennis went from being a Commonwealth sport to an Olympic sport,” said one Tennis Australia official yesterday. ”Swimming, that’s what they’re going through – the same thing.”

Like tennis, swimming was owned by the Americans and Australians, with a few European interlopers (the brief East German ’70s domination was drug-induced). But, as the global economy has raised material living standards and brought pools to hitherto dry nations, the competition has ramped up significantly. State-sponsored programs, along the lines of the Australian Institute of Sport, have likewise sprouted across the globe.

In London, the most pertinent number wasn’t Australia’s one gold and nine other swimming medals. It was that 17 nations won a swimming medal.

The Chinese collected an ominous haul of five gold (for a total of 10 medals), which, unsurprisingly, has been viewed with traditional Aussie suspicion. Less noticed were Japan’s 11 medals, because, like us, the Japanese struggled for gold (eight bronze, three silver). Exotic countries such as Belarus, Korea, Lithuania and Tunisia all won medals, along with France’s impressive four gold. The Netherlands, South Africa and Hungary each won a pair of gold.

The discussion of Australia’s poolside ”Paradise Lost” is remarkably similar to the annual hand wringing that occurs in tennis here. Should swimming follow the tennis path, we will hear more and more moaning and CSI work from former swimming stars, some of whom will seek to take over the board/coaching/administration of a sport that, admittedly, can always be done better.

Another parallel between the two sports was the outbreak of protectionism on the issue of coaching. In tennis, Australians have long been the game’s answer to Austrian ski instructors, having lent their tennis nous to the likes of Boris Becker, Roger Federer and Ivan Lendl. As swimming heads down the same lane, we hear the pathetic plea to prevent our swimming coaches from teaching the Chinese how to beat us.

Australian swimming can be fortified but not a fortress. It will fare better in future than Australian tennis, simply because we remain a coastal country in which most kids are taught and encouraged to swim. Unlike tennis – which doesn’t have mass participation – the swimming culture will not recede.

It’s just that we’re swimming in a much wider, more crowded pool these days.

Jake Niall is a senior sports writer.