THE search is on for a good psychologist for a Great Britain team that suffered an acute bout of Olympic phobia and fell shy of expectations in the Athens pool after some coaches and swimmers had rested on laurels gained at the World Championships last year and then overtrained and overrested in “an act of desperation” in the weeks before the biggest test of their lives.
In an interview with The Times as he prepared to leave Athens yesterday, Bill Sweetenham, the national performance director who believes psychology to be a key factor in any success, said that he had thrown “every trick in the book” at his squad after realising at the Olympic trials in April that standards were not where they needed to be to expect widespread success in Athens.
“I knew at the trials that we had fallen back in our main events,” Sweetenham said. “We were less well prepared this year. It was too late to do anything about it but I couldn’t say anything. My job so close to the Games was to keep the team up. We have worked hard to get the best out of a bad situation. (Some coaches) rested on their laurels. They did not have the same sense of urgency. I have been in their faces for the past three years. I stood back and let coaches get on with it. I gave them more headway. I was wrong.
“We came physically well prepared but mentally the bogey men were all about us. We have a lot of work to do physically but mentally we have a very, very long way to go. I need a good psychologist. I haven’t found one yet.”
The Olympics were about three challenges, he said — the physical, the mental and the environmental. A swimmer had to win at all three to ensure success. Many of the men on the Britain team had done just that and the result was excellent: two bronze medals, courtesy of Stephen Parry and David Davies, one European, three Commonwealth and nine British records. There were also 16 finalists, more than Britain has had at any Games except 1980 and 1984, when boycotts had a weighty impact on results.
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Just one British record fell to women, whose performances were woeful. Had Katy Sexton and Melanie Marshall equalled personal bests they would now be Olympic champions. “We have to find and fast-track a new breed of women, working with women-specific coaches and Bob Smith, our strength coach,” Sweetenham said.
There was no single explanation for the performances of all swimmers. The pressure on Marshall, who arrived in Athens for her Olympic debut as world No 1 over 200 metres freestyle and finished sixteenth, had proved too much, not just for her but for Ben Titley, her coach at Loughborough University. Titley has admitted to overworking Marshall and then had overrested her to compensate, Sweetenham said.
Criticism of the team had also been destructive. Taking a sideswipe at the absent Mark Foster, whose silver medal-winning time at the World Championships last year would not have made the Olympic final, Sweetenham said: “Despite the sniping of unprofessional people outside the team, this Britain team is a great team. I don’t think people who have only known failure at four Olympics in the past are in a position to criticise others.”
His focus was already on the future. “Rome was not built in a day but it can and will be built if all are willing,” he said. His revolution would carry on and he would spend longer “out on deck being far more hands-on”. Team numbers will be tightened to between 12 and 20, while selection standards will rise again, with the top eight in the world being the expected mark for individuals and the top four for teams.
He will also be sending groups of 12 to 15-year-old girls and 15 to 18-year-old boys to train outdoors on the Gold Coast in Australia for 200 days a year from this winter to get them used to the kind of open-air conditions that caused problems for the team in Athens. Men and women will be separated at training camps.
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While the development of eight coaching centres is “the single most important factor” for the future of British swimming, the identification of talent programme now at large in cities across Britain could play a large part in future success. “Somewhere in Britain there is an Ian Thorpe,” Sweetenham said. “We have to find him.”
AGAINST THE TIDE
Britain’s medal-winning swimmers at Athens
STEPHEN PARRY
200m butterfly
DAVID DAVIES
1,500m freestyle