Chinese Fortune Cookies

Incredible statistics about this year's world swimming standards from Craig Lord at swimnews.

Interesting, and scary, to look at our chances for next year; NZL is not looking good at this level.

Falling Short

Santa Barbara Swim Club has an excellent entry on its website; 'Concept of the Month'. This month it's 'Institutionalised Falling Short', a good diatribe on purposeful training and the pursuit of excellence.

Concept of the Month is a great idea for your club's site and you could kick-start it by systematically going through Dr. Keith Bell's '76 Rules For Outperforming The Competition'.

If You Don't Want To Do Better, Why Are You Here?

Two articles from the 2005 editions of the ASCTA magazine, Australian Swimming.

'A Chat With Bill Rose' and 'The Return Of The Great American Miler' were both reprinted from the October-December edition of Swimming Technique and were written shortly after Larsen Jensen won silver at Athens 2004.

Excellent reading and, as you'd expect, some very good lessons and attitudes.




'A Chat With Bill Rose'











'The Return Of The Great American Miler'

Creative Coaching

The American Swim Coaches Association make an award at their World Clinic each year named after the greatest innovator of our sport, the 'Counsilman Creative Coaching Award'. Examples from last year can be found here.

Curiously Strong Idea

Team banners are abundant at Nationals and good to see. Here's an imaginative one from the recent US Nationals based on the design of the famous Altoids tins, a popular peppermint in the USA (but note their place of origin :)

Idea for SCAT; award a prize for the best team banner at each Nationals.

22:48.4

There's a fascinating article on the FINA website titled 'World Records, a long history'. It's co-authored by Nick Thierry (of swimnews fame) and Chaker Belhadj, both FINA Press Commission Members. Most out of character for Nick, but not for FINA, there's a mistake in the article when it attributes the oldest standing World Record to Krisztina Egerzegi with her 200m backstroke from 1991 but, in fact, the oldest is Janet Evan's 800m freestyle from 1989.

The youngest (and the youngest in any sport when it was set) was by Karen Muir (RSA) on 1 August 1965 when she swam 1:08.7 for 110 yards backstroke in Blackpool at age 12! She did it in the heats of the 'Junior' (under 16 in English categorisation) English National Championships and, watching from the swimmers' stands, I picked it as a WR at the 55 yard turn.

The oldest record listed in the FINA Annual (compiled by Nick Thierry) is Henry Taylor's 1,500m Freestyle at 22:48.4 set on 25 July 1908 to win the Olympic gold. Yes, that's right, 1908 and metres, quite extraordinary, and, David Davies take note, the last time a British swimmer held the 1,500 World Record. The pool was 100m in length in the centre of the athletic stadium, surrounded by the runing track and the cycling track. The diving tower was designed to be collapsible and was hidden underwater during the swimming competition. We haven't really moved on that far, have we?

Henry lived and trained at a place called Chadderton, only 8 or 10km from where I lived. We had a lot of mid-week dual meets in the area so I swam at the Chadderton pool regularly. At the top of the entrace stairs there was a glass trophy case where Henry's four Olympic gold medals were displayed and they were a source of inspiration to me during my development years as a swimmer. The 'racing' suit he's wearing in this photograph is made from silk and, 100 years later, still retains its 'stretchiness'; I know because I've handled it.

He won a whole truckload of trophies but, unfortunately most of them are untraceable because he pawned them after he retired from swimming to buy an Inn but the venture failed and he never reclaimed them.

The certificate shown at the top of the article is one of his three from 1908 which are on my office wall. Unfortuneately the originals are in Chadderton!

Thoughts of an old dog

So you are having trouble motivating your distance swimmer and thinking they havn't got the drive that swimmers from the past have had.
Their training attendence is poor at best and their attitude, well I just won't comment on that least I lose it.
Well I've got news for all of you, maybe you should look at yourselves first ,remember if an orginization is going off the rails look it from the top first,look at the goal and more importantly the plan on how you are going to achieve it.
Next you must share the dream with everybody on your team and have them all on the same page before the journey commences.
When you have established how you want to proceed, do it from the front and by example, this way you steer the ship in the direction in which you want to travel and are constantly in a position to make changes when and if they are needed,much better than reacting to problems as they crop up, all you seem to do is complain about how they won't do what you want and the more you react the worse it gets, till in the end all you seem to be doing is putting out the fires and going backward instead of the direction you intended to go.
Impower your team both swimmers and helpers this way you will get the best out of everybody and together you can make this exciting journey.
I don't believe it has anything to do with training volumes number of session needed per week or whatever, show your team the way and they will follow you,try and drive the from behind and you will fail.
Coach Trev