FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH

After swimming I float spread-eagled on my back to watch the sky as my pulse falls. There’s a pleasant sensation of wheeling today — minuscule — but convincing enough to prompt a sideways check of the lane ropes, to find I’m still parallel. Laying my head back again, I see some high-up bird peel off its line to circle, as if eyeing this belly-up floater for a feed. At sixty-three, I’m just back into my laps after a winter break, but hadn’t quite considered myself carrion.

Neither had I intended ageing forty-five years within a page turn of Munich, the cracking onset due entirely to my editor suggesting I write the remainder of this memoir from the eyrie of late middle age.

With retirement pending, I’m looking forward to maintaining my swimming and mountain-bike exercise routines. I have retired friends who taunt me with videos of their current cycling trek in the Victorian high country or along spectacular New Zealand coastal trails; at the moment, I haven’t the time to join them.

I’ve been coaching for much of my life, and one of my swimmers is working towards the Tokyo Olympic Trials in 2020.

I feel lucky to still be involved with swimming. One of my biggest thrills came recently when my Tokyo hopeful climbed the stands after an impressive performance, to where her parents and I sat, and beamed, ‘That was fantastic.’ She wasn’t referring to her time or whom she’d beaten, but the sensation of mastery she’d relished throughout her performance — one of those rare occasions when you seem to have a lever for every contingency. And I couldn’t recall ever having climbed from a pool to use the adjective ‘fantastic’.

If this swimmer decides the trek to the Tokyo Trials is worthwhile — constant review is expected at this level — she and her cohorts may eventually join the push for significant assistance. As valuable as this assistance is, I find it a mystery that Australia’s very best swimmers — the Hortons, McEvoys, and Campbells — receive only around $60,000 a year. This may vary somewhat from year to year, but it is a tiny fraction of the $450,000 their national head coach takes home. Such a modest return for their efforts seems an anomaly in world sport, where elite athletes typically fare better than coaches. There is an argument sometimes made that Olympic athletes shouldn’t receive government money, as if they were still meant to be amateurs, or as if the public purse should revert to ancient policy staples. (I still think there should be room to reconsider public sports funding. The mounting assault on fair play by the unstoppable march of doping technology might one day require it. If refusing to dope eventually means you’ve no hope, even government funding won’t make a difference.) Yet it seems odd that these same — often anonymous — voices rarely protest that the coach is paid so generously while their charges who actually fight for the medals still have to face the prospect of national opprobrium in cyber-hate-land if they fail.

The swimming budget for the so-called ‘Pathway to Rio’ was reportedly $33 million (some estimates have it as high as $38 million). But it has been estimated that less than ten per cent of that went directly into swimmers’ pockets over the four years of the funding program. When our Rio performance of three gold medals and seven ‘minor’ medals brought profound disappointment in the media, I wondered how we might have performed had all that money — even half of it — gone straight to swimmers in medal incentives. If our swimmers suspected they were being denied their true worth, I wondered, would they be capable of competing like winners?

I also wonder if they know how much power they have in this situation. Currently, much of the Sports Commission funding is spent on so-called developmental programs. A thirty-strong Australian team sent to the world junior championships in Hungary in 2017, for instance, took no fewer than twenty-two official support staff. I’m sure it was a high-water mark for such appointments. In the not-too-distant past, that number might have been fewer than eight. In Munich it was five. It’s these accelerating numbers I think of when I recall AOC boss John Coates returning from the Rio Olympics and accusing certain sports of financial ‘bloat’.

Swimming Australia says it sends away more and more junior teams with these extra coaches, physios, race analysts, medicos, masseurs, sports scientists, and psychologists to ‘prepare for the future’. There may be legitimate duty-of-care aspects to this apparent ‘minder-mania’, but there’s also a growing list of mid-teen tour veterans quitting before they benefit from that supposed experience and care. At least three Games medal-winning sixteen-year-olds have retired within two years of those peaks in the past several years. Tours force adolescents into a sudden cascade of social pressures. Whatever uniqueness and prestige they feel about representing their country can give way to the worst of garden-variety peer dramas within that tour hothouse.

Sport has also entered a high health-risk phase. There is an epidemic of arrhythmias, for instance; every other month, a soccer player seems to drop dead on a pitch. That sports scientists are now retained by most elite institutional programs might suggest an epidemic of nefarious intentions, but much of their input is in routine athlete education and procedural oversight. Their ethical conscience has been demonstrated to range from one of extreme caution to ‘whatever it takes’. Although Swimming Australia Limited’s own supplement policy document offers a generally sound mix of ethics and sanctions-based advice, athletes (in point #3) are curiously advised to be sure their chosen supplement works. ‘Does it work?’ the policy asks in bold typeface — seemingly contradicting its preamble insisting supplements are no substitute for hard training and dietary rigour. Such is the official ambiguity swimmers must typically wade through.

And few would pretend to know what internal levels of moral tolerance such governing bodies apply across the supplements spectrum. For example, there are always legal-but-dubious substances displayed on WADA’s ‘Monitored’ list. The list has become a euphemism for drugs soon to be banned. Taking all of ten seconds to google, it’s a handy guide for the intending first time ‘user’. (Presumably, WADA sees the logistics of actual acquisition as sufficient caution against such misuse.) Yet there is no accessible information to indicate how often Australians use Monitored drugs, even though WADA routinely furnishes SAL with such names. Does SAL counsel such ‘tagged’ athletes? With this seemingly legalist approach, it might be seen as okay to dope with substances which could be banned before the year is out (as happened with the now-illegal heart drug Meldonium) and whose ultimate health consequences may or may not prove as catastrophic as those suffered by former DDR athletes. If SAL announced that it at least cautioned swimmers using Monitored substances, its accountability would be applauded.

Similar filtering of information is seemingly found in statutory panels (ASDMAC) charged with approving Therapeutic Use Exemptions, or TUEs. TUEs license athletes to dope with medical consent. The academic researcher Bradley Partridge complained a few years ago (in The Conversation) after his request for statistics from such a panel was denied. His main concern was being unable to assess the appropriate use of therapeutic drugs after ASDMAC refused to disclose the number of TUEs granted for each of the thirty-seven different substances approved. He was not seeking names. The sports with most TUEs were AFL, swimming, cycling, and athletics.

Even something portrayed as innocuously as altitude training can be dangerous, but swimmers are generally expected to participate in such funded regimens. The literature on altitude training says it either ‘stimulates’ or ‘provokes’ the kidneys into secreting EPO into the blood to adapt to the oxygen deprivation; this is the same EPO that the cheats inject to increase the number of red blood cells to deliver super-oxygenated blood into their muscles. Among the health risks of altitude training are suspicions that it can accelerate the growth of otherwise slow-growing tumours anywhere in the body. The IOC says altitude training is ‘not in the Olympic spirit’, but doesn’t ban it. Such concerns come on top of the ‘default’ occupational hazard for sportspeople — and other ‘performing’ vocations — of significantly reduced life spans. (This phenomenon is easily googleable, though the exact causes of the discrepancy between these unfortunate occupational cohorts and their counterparts in, say, the professions, office work, or the military is not easily explained. Or perhaps this is an error caused by sporting vocations beginning earlier than sedentary counterparts, thereby skewing mortality figures by including younger age groups more prone to misadventure.)

Meanwhile, elite athletes are currently required to submit their intended daily whereabouts for up to a year in advance for randomised WADA drug testing, adding yet more stress to their pressure-cooker existence. When they miss three WADA testing appointments in a row, they receive lengthy suspensions, as three swimmers did in 2017. Not only this, but also such athletes can feel tainted because of speculation associated with a rising public cynicism about the reasons for the missed tests.

Swimmers are increasingly questioning if they receive a deserving share of the funding pie. For a while there, in the ’90s, and in the so-called ‘noughties’, this might not have mattered, because swimmers barely out of their teens were reputed to be accumulating a net worth in the seven figures. There seemed to be no Olympic gold medallists or world record breakers incapable of tapping into this blue-sky endorsement manna. They kept popping up in lifestyle and reality television shows, in ads, and even on radio. Then, suddenly, the money began to dry up with the post-retirement difficulties of Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett.

The pendulum has swung a long way since Don Talbot complained that coaches of his generation struggled for legitimacy in the eyes of amateur officials — ‘blazers’ as they are pejoratively called now. But few coaches complain now because a surfeit of funding means teams are no longer restricted to employing just one coach, or a pair (as Talbot and Ursula Carlile operated in Munich). In fact, the majority of swimmers on national teams have their own coaches along, at the taxpayer’s expense. The number of coaches with a national tracksuit these days is legion, likewise the physios, medicos, and masseurs — all forming a widening network of sport-‘serving’ professionals prepared to buttress the new coach-led status quo.

Even when coaches were complaining about their powerlessness all those years ago, they were still able to command the attention of the press. But no journalists asked them if they thought their top charges were showing signs of social and educational distress, which they were. Neither did they ask swimmers anything more probing than how they felt after a winning — or losing — performance. It was the prerogative of their coaches to pontificate on the various social indicators of their charges. Many of my generation got off to shaky starts in their post-swimming lives because of this benign dereliction. The coaches who led that accelerated Nietzschean (‘what does not kill me makes me stronger’) push for ever greater training mileage in the early ’70s — Talbot and Carlile — seemed to feel insulated from that responsibility, as if swimmers’ life transitions were the exclusive domain of parents. But those parents seemed to have been just as dazzled by the footlights of their offsprings’ exploits as the swimmers and public.

The more I consider this subject, the more I’m certain that today’s elite swimmers are being taken for a ride. My Olympic funding model (because all suggestions must be called ‘models’ these days) would award every swimming Olympian $300,000 for hopping on the plane. This might at least buy them a cheap retirement cottage in regional Australia for their trouble. Then there would be $400,000 for an individual medal of any colour, with a personal limit of $2 million. The ‘bill’ for such success wouldn’t even account for half the budget for Tokyo — and if it did, would at least mean we’d have done far better than in our last two diminished Olympic efforts. Their media appeal could only be boosted by financial enrichment burnishing their overall ‘success quotient’.

Changes to the disbursement bias would threaten the so-called ‘high performance’ coaching infrastructure. The various ‘Podium Centres’, where elite athletes must train or lose their funding, would be first to suffer. Critics of these fixtures say they constitute a semi-government cartel serving to choke off emerging maverick coaching talent in favour of an old-guard bureaucracy who rose to prominence under the once-decentralised system they now renounce. The Podium system’s protected status supposes that it is the exclusive repository of essential technological advances. In fact, the pace of world-record improvement is at an all-time low, and no Australian currently holds an individual world record. What actually causes all improvement is the constantly increasing population of swimmers. Even when general populations are static or in decline, net historical populations still increase. It is this constant expansion of numbers doing a particular activity that creates new standards. (No doubt this expansion is also delivering records for the worst swimming ever seen, except nobody bothers noting these.) If Australian swimmers received a much bigger slice of the funding pie through success incentives, they would hire the coach of their choice at the going rate, or retain one on a success fee. Podium Centres would no longer be needed. Such an individualist approach would put instant fire in the bellies of swimmers and swimming families around Australia.

I suspect changes are inevitable because training for elite international sport is now almost a full-time job. Why shouldn’t Olympic swimmers aspire to be compensated at the rates of their AFL and NRL counterparts, whose average annual salary is $350,000? The usual counter to this query is, ‘Duh — because football can pay its own way with telecast rights.’ And the counter to this is, ‘Because it’s been quite a while since governments began monetising the value of the Olympic Games via sports funding.’ (To match footballers’ salaries, a swimmer currently needs several hefty sponsorships, in turn condemning them to wear a virtual image detention anklet for the media to track any departure from an impossibly sanitised lifestyle. Even then, endorsements must be vetted by SAL to honour its own sponsorship covenants.)

Any full discussion of the Olympics acknowledges their exploitation by participating nations for the projection of ‘soft power’, aka ‘war by other means’ via medal-table success. (The Olympic movement never intended this — its ideal was for athletes to compete as individuals.) Given the geopolitical stakes, athletes unable to grasp their primacy in delivering such theatre may not know their true worth. It seems odd that other foreign-service professionals (diplomats, defence forces, etc.) should be well compensated, while the front line of our nationalist sporting forays are on virtual rations.

As president of one of Australia’s hundreds of suburban swimming clubs, I am well placed to note the recent urgency with which schemes and exhortations to arrest declining memberships arrive from the various strata of Australian swimming governance. One year there might come a call to relax membership restrictions, the following year a rush of incentives for clubs to plaster their Facebook pages with images of kids hamming it up in their allegedly hard-grind training lanes. No doubt professional services are retained to promote these earnest initiatives, but when I ask parents of swimmers why their kids are choosing an extra night of karate or dance over chasing the next tier of swimming competition, the answer is loud and clear: ‘There’s nothing for swimmers at the end.’ (You can almost hear the footnote, And there should be.)

Such parents are charmed by the lively post-race sisterly interview banter of Cate and Bronte Campbell, but they almost immediately find themselves wondering if these two great ambassadors for Swimming Australia Inc. are fairly compensated for that role.

It is no longer a sustainable ambition to aim for sporting glory on its own. The public will only respect athletes who are adequately paid. To retire with Olympic medals and little more is, in the eyes of today’s jaundiced commentariat, not an act of patriotism, but an entry into the ranks of the misguided and mismanaged.

Even if it were enough, the prospect of achieving such goals is under increasing attack through what is called a ‘doping arms race’, whose latest front is undetectable gene tweaking via the injection of viral bodies. Neither can athletes count on moral support from the most informed members of the community. It is not uncommon among academics, for instance, to take the stance that doping is small fry compared to the gulf of genetic and socio-economic difference that has always dictated who takes the sporting laurels. (When I read such opinions, I wonder which of these academics would have risked their tenures against former disadvantaged peers allowed to bridge their talent and demographic gaps with brain-doping drugs or affirmative exam coaching.)

Fair sport is also under assault from the increasing manipulation of the TUE (therapeutic-use exemption) scheme. The worst examples were from the American baseball league, where players were schooled on how to answer a GP’s questions on their claimed ADHD problems, in order to walk out with a Ritalin prescription to pep up their pitching speed.

For these reasons and more, it is surprising that swimmers are not agitating more loudly for a better deal.