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Time To End The Swimming Scrum As FINA Fail Once More To Deliver Decent & Fair Sport
- Updated: August 17, 2016
Editorial
I feel sure that Nick Thierry – the late father of world rankings and a man who did more to promote swimming by covering it honestly than every FINA Bureau of the past 40 years put together – would not mind me breaking a confidence this day as we contemplate two marathon swimming podiums in Rio marred by the shoddy work of custodians.
I once asked Nick if he wanted a piece on open water from some event I was at and he replied with the following note: “Do a couple of pars. Keep it short – or tell us how FINA is now signed up to athlete abuse. This isn’t serious sport. The kids work hard but all that kicking, spitting, scratching and punching? What the hell is that about: it’s undignified, that’s nothing to do with swimming.
“We’re a 100 years into standardisation and we went back to the dark ages. We’ve spent those 100 years making swimming a sport of serious skill and beauty. They’ve reduced it to a bar brawl.”
You’ll have heard the stories, from crocs on the bank at FINA open water events to “handbags at dawn” on the pontoon, as David Davies called one marathon race. If there is a funny side to that tale, the serious side of it demands far more attention – and the issues stretch to FINA’s new fancy, high diving.
There is nothing more serious – indeed nothing comes remotely close – to the events of 2010 when Fran Crippen lost his life in a FINA event off the coast of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Important to say so. The damning reports of the day are a part of some of the darkest history in sport, bad governance playing a critical, nay fatal, role in tragic events.
Doping comes closest to death on the scale of damnation (and has sometimes even matched it when the two worlds collide and young athletes lose their lives as a direct result of abuse) and then the next level down is where we find the custodians of swimming so incapable of setting and enforcing good rules that they find themselves playing an active part in condoning cheating and the deliberate bending and breaking of rules.
Such moments are not entirely uncoupled from the death of Fran for they speak to the health, safety and well-being of athletes and the abdication of responsibility of those custodians falling down on the job with the regularity of waves breaking on Copacabana.
Not long after Fran’s family repatriated their soldier and put the swimmer, son, brother, boyfriend and the father he would never be in the ground, FINA promoted the man in charge of the catastrophic day. Water is indeed thicker than blood sometimes.
Holland House – they even built a sand sculpture on Copacabana for Sharon Van Rouwendaal – by Craig Lord
Now we have an Olympic Games at which a World champion had her years of work wiped out by bad planning and a world cup winner had his years of hard work wiped out by the inability of officials to recognise a victim in the wash and avoid making him a victim all over again.
Double jeopardy kept the filth of doping in the pool at these Olympics because we must all be fair to cheats and dissemblers while the good are expected to suffer in silence. Double jeopardy extinguished Jack Burnell’s dreams today.
The rules of FINA quite clearly and unequivocally state that no competition can be held under FINA rules without minimum facilities standards applying. And yet there we find FINA and its member from New Zealand entering a pact to a have world short-course record ratified (no fault of the athlete) even though those minimum standards were not observed. FINA even went to the length of stating officially that facilities rules did not applky when world records were set.
Like hell they don’t – for that is the whole point of them. Those rules cover the specifics of how long pools can be, how deep, how wide, and lay out many other parameters that set the competitive environment. They are at the very heart of standardisation. And there on the World-Record Application form is confirmation itself: the referee at any event must sign (perhaps it ought to be in blood in future) that in his or her opinion “all FINA rules have been met”.
No consequence
Some Other Moments Of FINA Washing Its Hands
February 2015: The debate over FINA returning Open Water to the UAE so soon after the death of Fran Crippen in October 2010 tipped over into greater controversy when it emerged that the UAE, with FINA …
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