I have to confess to a dark curiosity about this country’s futility when it comes to competing in H2O without the aid of a vessel. We’re a country that loves to talk about punching above our per capita weight class, but if swimming success was a barometer of sporting prowess, we would not view ourselves so smugly.
A New Zealand woman hasn’t won a medal in the pool since 1952 — that’s quite a while — and the last New Zealander to win anything in the pool was Danyon Loader in 1996.
Let’s break that down for a short minute.
This century the NZOC and Swimming New Zealand have sent swim teams totalling 76 spots made up of 56 athletes (several have been to multiple games) to the Olympics. The largest team was the 16 sent to London, the smallest the seven who went to Tokyo.
Those athletes have competed across 106 separate events in the pool and have made, wait for it… 11 finals. That’s a ‘success’ rate, give or take a few decimal points, of a final made for every ten events entered.
In Sydney and Athens no finals were reached, while in Rio de Janeiro only Kane Radford swam in a final, though there were no heats and semis for his open-water event.
I’ve had spirited conversations with people who like to point out that swimming is a huge sport dominated by the USA and Australia, so securing medals is much tougher than it is, for example, in sports like rowing and sevens.
This is unquestionably true, but so is the following list of countries that have won at least one medal in the pool this century: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad & Tobago, Tunisia, Ukraine, USA, Zimbabwe.
To save you counting, that’s 41 countries, and while a good eight or nine of them are noted powerhouses, you can’t look at that list and say all of those countries have better access to coaching, infrastructure and competition.
This is why I remain so fascinated by the country’s inability to medal in the pool.
It is the sheer inexplicability of it.
Paris was where the drought was going to end, with world champions Erika Fairweather and Lewis Clareburt poised to make a mark in their respective specialist 400m freestyle and 400 individual medley events.
Vague hope was replaced by expectation.
Both swam below their best (many have, including some winners, leading some to conclude it may be a ‘slow’ pool), and struggled to put a finger on why it “didn’t click” on the night in post-race interviews that were raw and in Fairweather’s case tough to watch. It would be cretinous to lay the woes of New Zealand swimming at their feet. Both have done an incredible job of boosting the sport here with their world championship gongs, but it is also hard not to see something symbolic in them reaching for the wall in Paris and the big prizes remaining just out of reach.
That is the story of New Zealand swimming — the perpetual fever dream of chasing a mirage in the desert.
Unless these two can conjure up something miraculous in their secondary events, the futility will move to Los Angeles, where it will be 76 years since Jean Stewart’s backstroke bronze, and 32 years since Loader’s freestyle double.
Until then it’s time to raise a glass of chlorinated water and embrace this incredible streak.
