Swimming: Kiwi stars pick up tips from best in world

Several of New Zealand's leading swimmers have been getting an insight from the best overseas as they prepare for the world championships.

Moss Burmester, Corney Swanepoel, Hayley Palmer and Andrew McMillan have ventured abroad as part of their preparations for the championships in Rome on July 27 to August 2.

Burmester and McMillan are training under Denis Cotterell on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Palmer has just returned from a stint with Grant Stoelwinder in Sydney while Swanepoel is with Brett Hawke in the United States.

Hawke, an Australian, is one of the new wave of outstanding sprint coaches now based in the US.

He was the national coach for Brazil at the 2008 Beijing Olympics where his swimmer Cesar Cielo won gold in the 50m freestyle.

Swanepoel showed immediate benefits when he finished third behind Michael Phelps at the US grand prix meet at Charlotte last weekend, clocking a time of 53.22s in the 100m butterfly final, a pleasing performance amid his heavy training programme.

Cotterell is the renowned distance coach who guided Grant Hackett and Daniel Kowalski to glory.

Burmester and McMillan also trained alongside a group of leading Chinese swimmers, including a Beijing Olympic medallist, under the eye of Cotterell.

The pair have been training outdoors grinding out up to 75km a week and yet maintaining good health, one of the benefits of training out-doors.

Stoelwinder is the man behind world record-holding sprinters Libby Trickett and Eamon Sullivan and an invitation was extended to leading New Zealand coach Scott Talbot and Palmer to join him in Sydney.

Swimming New Zealand's Jan Cameron said the opportunities for swimmers to spend some time under top international coaches and alongside world champions was invaluable.

"The advantages are two-fold," she said yesterday.

"It offers the chance to get some specific coaching from some of the world's best coaches and training alongside some great swimmers to see how they train and therefore see what they have to do in order to become the best," said Cameron, SNZ's general manager, performance and pathways.

"They are in a crunch period of training and the overseas experience gives them the opportunity to train for a short time in a new environment which really freshens them mentally."

Palmer, who will compete in the 100m freestyle in Rome, said she and Talbot greatly benefited from spending time with Stoelwinder.

"It was fantastic. They were really good in that you could talk to Libby Trickett about how she trains and how she approaches her events," Palmer said. "She was very supportive.

"I found that in general I was able to match them in straight-line speed but Libby, especially, was outstanding in her turns and starts.

"So I've learned about that and I am now working really hard on this."

A nine-strong New Zealand team will compete in a grand prix in Melbourne next month before heading to Italy in mid-July with a final camp at Teramo before moving to Rome.

Open water swimmer Alannah Jury heads to Europe in early July to prepare for her 10km event on July 21 with national coach and former open-water legend Philip Rush.

- NZPA