By now the story of the Brits failure in the pool at the Olympics has been told many times over.
Going into the 2012 London Olympics the Brits wanted to give their home town fans something to cheer about, they had high hopes for all of their athletes including those in the pool. The goal was to have British swimmers stand on the podium five times, after falling short of that mark and only collecting three medals there was great disappointment.
David Sparkes, CEO of British Swimming has expressed his feelings saying, “Words fail me in expressing our disappointment with the results from the London Olympics. So many people worked so hard in the last four years but we didn’t achieve our goals.”
Following the Olympics things began to change; Head Coach Dennis Pursley resigned almost immediately and on November 24th Michael Scott the High Performance Director of British Swimming decided stepped away from his position after early findings from the post Olympic review demanded that their National Director live in the country,”I respect this conclusion from the performance review I initiated following our results in London. I wanted to make sure we left no stone unturned in understanding why we didn’t achieve our goals.”
“One of the key findings of the review requires a change to my current working practice by being based in Britain. However, for personal and family reasons, I’m unable to meet this recommendation and therefore offered my resignation.”
The review process came to a completion and all of the panels findings and recommendations were released by British Swimming yesterday and can be found here.
Even though British Swimming’s brass is very satisfied with the review, which found that the programme does not need an overhaul and that they would start the process of finding a new Head Coach would start immediately, one swimmer who won more than half of the country’s Olympic hardware is not happy with how British Swimming has gone about their business.
In a BBC article released earlier today Rebecca Adlington expressed her disappointment in the decision to wait so long to hire a leader that the swimmers can look to, “”Why is it taking so long? We’ve been dying for them to appoint a head coach for months.”
“Us swimmers are like, who do we go to? And this is the biggest thing. We’d like to know who the person is we can go to if we have a problem or if we want something to happen.”
“We like routine, we like structure. We’re very regimented and we like to know who is going to be leading us.”
“A lot of us don’t know who we are going to at the moment. Who do we speak to? It’s awful what’s been going on.”
In was also apparent in her comments to the BBC that Adlington would like to see a few more of her fellow countrymen involved in the leadership of the swimming association.
“If British people do apply and they are qualified, I do think it would work better being British,” she said.
“[We need] people who live in this country, know how British people work, know the system, know quite a lot of us athletes, know the coaches and can communicate with them.”
“I just think it would improve things. It would help communication. I think we would be able to get the ball rolling quicker. It wouldn’t take a year to 18 months to get to know the system. They’d know it straight away.”
It will be interesting to see if Adlington who collected more than half of Britain’s swimming medals at the 2012 Olympics will have any impact on the hard decisions the Brits will have to make to determine their future success.