Cycling and swimming: alarming parallels

Eddie Arzouian

Stubbs in swimming form



There are few really good journalists writing about Canadian amateur sports but Dave Stubbs of The (Montreal) Gazette happens to be one of them. Today he wrote a great piece on the new CEO of Swimming Canada.

I had just walked in from looking after our pool when I read this line, "Canadian swimming was practically backwashed out of the Athens Olympic pool last summer, suffering its worst Games in four decades. " Excellent!

I have been keeping Dave and Pat Hickey (my former editor), like the rest of you, abreast of things at the Canadian Cycling Association (CCA) but so far no story on it yet.

If you look at the Swimming Canada disaster the parallels to Canadian cycling are alarming. The only saving grace is that some Canadian women in MTB and on the track pulled off medals. Frankly, we probably would have been better off if they had not. All it did was mask the problem, delaying changes. After all, it isn't like the medals led to any new sponsorship. CCA President Bill Kinash told Canadian Press (Judy Monchuk) he and the CCA had no plans to market them.

Anybody that knows anything about CDN cycling knows those medals were despite the CCA not because of it. Hell, Olympic gold medalist Lori Ann Meunzer did not even have her coach there and she had to borrow wheels from France and Australia to finish her ride: another disgrace, like Canada is in the Third World.

Here are a few worrisome points from Dave's story that cycling has in common with swimming:

1. For a decade, or longer, Canadian swimming had been mostly rudderless for many reasons, its coaches bickering and administrators steering the ship in circles before beaching it.

2. The word "accountability" had been erased from the program's dictionary.

3. Swimming Canada last September fired 12-year national head coach Dave Johnson. (CDN cycling had three coaches quit)

4. For a year, the sport had been without a chief executive, the ineffectual Karen Spierkel having suddenly resigned in 2003. {The CCA had been without a CEO for about ten months with former or current (depending upon a reading of Ontario Labour Laws) Pierre Hutsebaut on sick leave to avoid dismissal (Canadian Cyclist words form last fall, not mine). Too bad he did not resign or that CCA President Bill Kinash will not resign. The CCA has also been without a Marketing and Communications Director for two full years, missing huge opportunities during the 2003 Road World Championship in Hamilton and an entire Olympic year.}

5. Swimming Canada has ....to reduce bureaucratic clutter.

6. A lot of coaches should take responsibility for Canada's poor performance," Lafontaine said, "and I'll have no problem taking blame when it's due.


One thing Swimming Canada has going for it, a central point in Dave's story, is that Swimming Canada's new CEO has a great deal of experience in competitive swimming. Now you would think that would be a no-brainer, right? Well, not so. The CCA hired a new Chief Operating Officer (COO) 95-days ago. He has no background whatsoever in cycling. He has an MBA, the CCA President Kinash made a big deal about that. His experience in "sports" is from the YMCA and some hockey.


You would have thought the CCA would have learned from the mess at Hamilton 2003 with football players running the cycling Worlds about using people with cycling experience in cycling but apparently not. Do you see anybody from cycling running the CFL????


That failure or omission might have been mitigated if the CCA had a president who knew something about the sport but instead the current President spent 20 years in with the Saskatchewan Cycling Association, the worst in Canada, and in those 20 years it held 1 (ONE) national road race: a Master Championship in 1991.


The COO may work out. I can't judge him personally yet. I have never met nor spoken to him. He has never responded to an email from me, unlike most of his staff and some CCA Board and Committee members who usually get back to me rather quickly. I know the guy is reading my stuff since the mistakes I point out in them are usually corrected quickly. For instance, he does sign his press releases with his MBA credentials anymore! This week he met my deadline to reinstated the National Criterium Championships as an official event after years of wasting that marketing opportunity.


So below is Mr. Stubbs' full story on the new Swimming Canada CEO.


I hope Dave follow it up with a story on cycling soon.


Sincerely,
Ed Arzouian,
St. Anicet, QC


posted on www.cyclingforums.com


The new boss wades in
Pierre Lafontaine, who started his aquatics career in Pointe Claire, is on a mission to lift Canadian swimming from bottom of the pool
DAVE STUBBSThe Gazette
Saturday, May 14, 2005




Pierre Lafontaine walked into a Montreal news conference on Monday, his first as Swimming Canada's new chief executive officer, dressed in a golf shirt, shorts and deck sandals.
Hardly the typical wardrobe of a CEO. But then, Lafontaine is hardly your typical CEO.

"I own three ties," he said, laughing, "and my brother just gave me all three of them.

"I wondered how to dress for this, but then I finally decided, 'Just be yourself.' "

The advice has served Lafontaine well through an aquatics career that began in 1976 in Pointe Claire, as a teacher of disabled children.

He has gone on to coach U.S. and Australian Olympic medal-winners and direct several of the world's most successful high-performance swim programs. Now, Lafontaine has come home to embark on his greatest challenge yet - trying to haul Canadian swimming off the bottom of the pool.

"I don't believe I have to reinvent the wheel," the 48-year-old said this week, shortly after sharing his vision with coaches before the start of Canada's world championship trials at Centre Claude Robillard.

"I think it's running pretty well, even if it needs a new tread and some oil. But we have to go back to having the passion again. We must want to win badly enough that we can taste it."

Canadian swimming was practically backwashed out of the Athens Olympic pool last summer, suffering its worst Games in four decades. Not since Tokyo in 1964 had this country failed to win a swimming medal.

Finishing behind Zimbabwe and Trinidad and Tobago in Athens was only the most recent sign of a program in distress. For a decade, or longer, Canadian swimming had been mostly rudderless for many reasons, its coaches bickering and administrators steering the ship in circles before beaching it.

The word "accountability" had been erased from the program's dictionary. Swimmers in Athens were disspirited and angry, unfairly the lightning rod for most of the criticism.

What once was a glittering jewel in Canadian sport, the stage for Olympic champions Alex Baumann, Vic Davis and Anne Ottenbrite in 1984 and Mark Tewksbury in '92, had become dollar-store jewelry in the eyes of the population.

With the heat turned up to a boil, Swimming Canada last September fired 12-year national head coach Dave Johnson. For a year, the sport had been without a chief executive, the ineffectual Karen Spierkel having suddenly resigned in 2003.

Lafontaine was looking on from Canberra as head coach of the fabulously successful Australian Institute of Sport, at which he personally produced four Athens medallists.

From 1997 to 2002, he watched from the deck of the Phoenix Swim Club, where he coached eight Sydney medalists; for two years before that, as head of Atlanta's Dynamo Swim Club.

From afar, Lafontaine had supported Canada as best he could. He opened his pool in Atlanta to the Canadian synchronized swim team before the 1996 Olympics when no one else would. His home was an open house for this country's swim coaches during the Games.

But he's not been in a position to make a real difference until now, hired to the top job on April 18.

And his challenge to Canadian coaches, a talented if often head-strong and cliquish group, is plain and to the point.

"A lot of coaches should take responsibility for Canada's poor performance," Lafontaine said, "and I'll have no problem taking blame when it's due.

"We'll empower our coaches with the ability to communicate and to work together. We'll make it easier for them to do their jobs, but not make their lives easy. I told them I'll do this, but they'd better not let me down. We'll set things up, but they've got to make things happen.

"I've asked them if they'd be proud of coaching their own children. If they can't say that, then they need to get out. If they're not going to show me passion, I'll go around the world and bring new coaches in.

"I don't have time to wait for them. If they're going to fight among themselves or be more worried about their own skin, well, we're not big enough to be dog-eat-dog here.

"Our kids are dreaming to be good. They deserve coaches who'll dream along with them."

Swimming Canada has a talented, energetic new president in former Olympian Dan Thompson and a refocused board whose goal should be to reduce bureaucratic clutter.

The hiring of Lafontaine has been warmly received in every corner. He calls swimmers and coaches "the cornerstones of our organization," and pairs renowned technical skills with an ability to pull people together for the common good - even if that good doesn't best serve the individual.

"Our sport is about people first, then about swimming," he said. "I enjoy dealing with people and making a difference, one person at a time."

Lafontaine learned well from his first days at a pool, working with disabled children in the Aqua-Percept program of Pointe Claire's George Gate and Wendy Campbell.

He didn't even want to coach age-group swimmers when Gate first asked him nearly 30 years ago, preferring to work with needy children while considering a career in pediatric medicine. But Gate, as usual, had the right approach.

"He told me if I coached 100 kids, I might one day get 100 people to make a difference to the disabled," recalled Lafontaine, to whom Gate remains a mentor.

"And Mr. Gate told me basically the same thing when I called him about this job two months ago: 'If you can coach coaches to be great people, then they can touch more people. Instead of your touching 30 or 60 kids in a club, you can touch 17,000 swimmer in a country.' "

Lafontaine left an influential position in Australia, the call of home too strong to resist. He expressed fear of the job to Alisa, his wife of 17 years, who scoffed at his being afraid of anything.

The couple's two girls and two boys, age 9 to 15, are learning what "home" really means.

"Yesterday was the first time that my children met their own cousins," Lafontaine said, clearly moved by the fact. "They met my father for the second time ever. All four kids were out playing street hockey with their cousins - one's never played hockey before - and it's like they'd been friends forever.

"I was watching from the window thinking, 'This is why I've come home.' Only the last few years have I come to terms with who I am. My role is to make a difference for my kids. That's four kids, plus 17,000 Canadian swimmers and the summer-club and grade-school kids."

Lafontaine's plate is full to overflowing. He knows this ship will take work, and years, to turn fully around. His results will best be judged at the 2012 Olympics, the 2008 Beijing Games just around the corner in terms of preparing a team.

He wants to install a new national coach soon, and a youth coach, too. He'll examine the network of Canadian training centres, long a bone of contention, and consider perhaps a different role for them.

Lafontaine will take the positives of Canadian swimming to the corporate sector and the media, hoping to build support that's grown dangerously thin.

He's delighted that July's world championships are in Montreal, no matter that the program's weaknesses will be laid bare in home waters.

"If you're going to step into the fire," he reasoned, "you might as well jump in with both feet. I hope the worlds will be a great catalyst for better things."

Tomorrow and Monday in Montreal, Lafontaine will assemble about 40 people, a cross-section of the sport, for a national planning conference. The very future of Canadian swimming is at stake.

"We've had a lot of strategic plans the last 30 years," he said. "But now we need to put on one sheet where we're going the next five years, something we all can tape up on the bathroom door and see every day.

"We need to swim fast and service our coaches. If the decisions we make don't address those two things, then we're all wasting our time.

"I don't need more paper. I need to fire up these coaches and make them collectively more excited about where we're going. We must surround our kids with the best of the best."

dstubbs@thegazette.canwest.com

BillyBlass

One key word that stands out for me is "accountability". Anyone can conceive great plans,ideas, etc, but following through is another matter. The new COO mentions it. Good for him. On the other hand, if someone were to say they were going to get $50,000 from a pizza shop the get the rights to all the National events, and they pay up, I guess that is accountable. Maybe "ethical" should be thrown into the COO report next time. "It is unethical to sell our National events for an unsustainable amount". Yup, thats a start.

BillyBlass

Sir, I will post that thread about the UCI enjoying my tax dollars perhaps on Monday. A good friend of mine from Hamiliton, who you provided help at the worlds, is popping in for a visit on Sunday. I want to get more info before posting.

peeininnepean

Because no one reads your e-mails, you nutbag. I spoke to one of your precious sources at the Globe and Mail, and he told me he has you tagged for spam except that you keep changing e-mails. Get a life!

Eddie Arzouian

You read everything I write so why wouldn't everybody else????


Do you have any comment or opinion, anything at all to say that is not about me?

It is obvious who the "nutbag" is: it is you. You have nothing to offer, nothing to say. You simply come on to make personal comments about me. You have nothing to offer on the sport nor anything else it seems.

Furthermore, you're boring.

Eddie Arzouian

Oh, yes... and you are also a liar. Here is one small example. I have dozens and dozens more.

----- Original Message -----
From: Christie, James
To: Ed Arzouian
Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 1:29 PM
Subject: RE: Swimming bath


Hi, Ed...
Thanks for this. My original piece did mention Serge Savard, but the editors trimmed him.
Sorry I didn't get a timely piece written on the pro cycling circuit, but I hope to recoup that issue yet. I keep getting seconded for assignments by news pagaes and health pages, features and even obits.
Did you see this from Merker?...

BillyBlass

Since the Globe & Mail came up in discussion, what ever happened to Robert Zeller. At one time, his articles were the only source of international biking news for me.