British swimming woes due to wrong kind of water

It wasn’t a lack of determination or the failure to prepare properly that caused Britain’s swimmers to bring back just one medal from the FINA world swimming championship in Barcelona.

Oh no, their poor performance was due to the fact they had been training in the wrong type of water.

Bill Furniss, head of British Swimming, explained the perfect design of Sheffield's Ponds Forge pool and the consistency of the water were hampering competitors because they were unable to reproduce their fastest times in other pools.

It’s a bit of a cliché but now I really have heard it all, our swimmers were training in the wrong kind of water and that is why they performed poorly at the world championships, that has to take gold for the most pathetic excuse ever given.

Let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment assume that this excuse is correct and our swimmers were training in the wrong kind of water, why didn’t anyone say anything and why didn’t they change where the swimmers practiced?

When you’re in charge of anything and results are bad there is, naturally, a temptation as the one in charge to say it’s not my fault and look for someone else, or something else to blame, but in this case Mr Furniss has only dug a bigger hole for himself.

If he had come out and apologised for the poor showing and said it was my fault, I take responsibility and I’ll either resign or make some big changes to the way things are done then he may have retained some modicum of respectability, but he choose not to do that and has instead made himself, and British Swimming, out to be more of a shambles than we already thought it was.