Swimming: Big battle looms in backstroke

By PETER JESSUP

It is pure coincidence, the country's top coaches agree, that the most competitive racing in the national championships, which start in Auckland today, will be in backstroke.

They say it has nothing to do with the fact they are all backstroke experts.

Sydney Olympians Jonathan Duncan, Dean Kent and Scott Talbot-Cameron, plus Anthony van der Kraay and Saul Stephens will compete in the men's 100m and 200m backstroke.

All have produced times within one second of the Commonwealth Games qualifying time of 2min 02.5s.

In the women's events it is similarly tight with former Olympians Monique Robins, Helen Norfolk, Liz van Welie, Hannah McLean and Sarah Jackson within about a second of the required mark of 2min 15.66s.

Melissa Ingram has already qualified.

There is a distinct possibility that three men and three women could qualify for the Manchester Games in the two backstroke events.

Swimming New Zealand's director of coaching, Clive Rushton, came into a muddled management of elite athletes when he was attracted to apply for the job while holding the No 2 position in England.

Rushton was a backstroker in the Great Britain team for seven years from 1967 and swam at Munich in 1972.

His sons Tom, 23, and Elliot, 18, swim for Kenyon College in the NCAA college competition.

Many of the New Zealand Games prospects train at the North Shore Millennium Institute under Jan Cameron. Many have been with Cameron and are now under Igor Polianski at the North Shore club.

Polianski won gold for the old USSR at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, in 1min 59.37s.

He has been in New Zealand for four years, and his wife two children, and both parents are resident here.

Cameron admits she likes training backstroke as it suits the programme she runs.

New Zealand has a good history in the event and has role models, such as Anna Simcic, Paul Kingsman and Gary Hurring.

Polianski's input into the technical aspects added another edge and Cameron felt as many as eight North Shore swimmers could beat qualifying times for Manchester in the Waitakere Aquatic Centre pool this week.

Cameron has just been appointed to assist Rushton in Manchester.

Van Welie's coach Duncan Laing also expects to be given such a role because of his ability to spot minor deficiencies in technique and rectify them quickly.

There is no "head coach", as such, since Brett Naylor walked off the job last year. Rushton's job description is to co-ordinate the work of coaches with top-level athletes.

He arrived a week before last year's winter championships and has since been working on a programme to take swimming through to the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.

"New Zealand's history in swimming is quite remarkable for a country of its population," Rushton said.

That, and desire for the top job rather than No 2, brought him out here.

He identifies the weaknesses here as lack of competitors in mens' sprints and womens' breaststroke, and believes the remedy is to build numbers through clubs and increase competition.

He also points to poor "racing skills", starts and turns not as good as they should be; and what he calls the "flat-line syndrome", where promising teenagers stop developing, short of the expertise they need to achieve the next level.

And there's the perennial problem of lack of finance, New Zealand's distance from top-level competition and hence our athletes' lack of exposure to pressure, race-day situations.