Swimming against the tide
He probes again. “What was the objective of the workout this morning? What were you trying to improve?”
One of the kids pipes up. “Everything!”
“No,” smiles Bill Sweetenham, “you can’t do everything in one workout. Were you looking to work on your endurance, your starts, your breaststroke kick, your skills? What did the coach ask you to do?”
More silence, until Sweetenham breaks it with the blunt conclusion: “Coaches, the swimmer hasn’t got an idea what the objective of the workout was. This afternoon when we come back, tell the swimmer precisely what the objective is – to improve race speed, to improve endurance, whatever it is – so you have something to evaluate your workout on.”
He picks out a gangly youngster, who we’ll call John.
“John, I’m not picking on you, I just want to know a few things. How much one-to-one time did you get from your coach today? Did you request extra attention and say, ‘Coach, how good were my turns? Coach, do I need to hop back in for a few minutes and work on something in particular? Coach, I want 10 minutes one-to-one attention in every session.’ Did you do any of that, John?”
John shakes his head.
“Did you push yourself to the maximum this morning? Or did you just go in and swim from A to B and to C, giving a half-decent effort, not knowing what were you were working on, how fast you were, whether it was good, bad or only alright? Did you go right to the limit of your potential today?”
John smiles, unconvincingly. “I did!” Sweetenham smiles too, looking to the rest of the group. “He lied!”
He turns back to John. “I think you did a good workout, but I’ve watched you and know there’s a whole other level in you this afternoon.” John nods.
The message goes for the whole group. They’ve improved enormously since he last visited Ireland back in October — their confidence levels, the way they attack the water, their skills. They can be as good as any squad in Europe, the world. But for them to make Rio 2016, they’ve got to have perfect skills 100 percent of the time. They’ve got to keep the head down and stretch for that wall every time, not look up to locate it.
He tells the story about the 400m freestyle Rebecca Adlington won in Beijing, without mentioning he coached Adlington from when she was their age. Adlington trailed America’s Katie Hoff approaching the last wall but Hoff looked up; Adlington kept the head down. Seven-hundreths of a second was the difference between gold and silver, and in Sweetenham’s cold eyes, the difference between a winner and loser.
“Around here,” he tells the Irish youngsters, “it’s head down, fingertip finish. Every day, every turn, ask yourself: did you win or lose your workout by seven-hundreths of a second?”
THERE’s a mantra Bill Sweetenham swears and wins by: the job of a coach is to make getting to the top as difficult as possible for his athletes — but to make sure they get there.
It’s how it was for him. Nothing in his life came easy. Long before he almost lost a leg falling out of a minibus flying down a German autobahn, and long before he mentored legions of Australian swimmers and coaches to Olympic glory, he and his father would have to shoot and skin crocodiles to survive after the mines were closed for a few years during a massive strike.
“Poverty,” he says, “has been a big motivator in my life. It makes a difference, knowing it. I feel I have an advantage on everyone else.”
He maintains one of the reasons Australians are so competitive in sport is because it’s a form of protest, a reminder they exist. “There’s a genuine feeling we’re forgotten, down here at the bottom of the world” — and the town he grew up in was the Australia of Australia. Mount Isa was a small town with a big mining company and little else, except maybe rugby league and rugby union. “If you played anything else you were a bit of a sissy,” says Sweetenham. “Opportunity didn’t exist in Mount Isa.”
It was a tough town but an even tougher house that he was reared.
“I came home drunk one night when I was 16. My father belted me and the next morning I waited outside for him and I hit him over the head with a piece of timber from our fence. He needed 17 stitches in his head but never said anything, he just dusted himself off and went on to work.
“About three months later we’re sitting at dinner and he says, ‘We’ve got a score to settle.’ So we go outside and he beats the crap out of me again. So, I tell him, ‘I want to leave home.’ He says, ‘No, think about it.’ I say, ‘I have thought about it. I want to leave. You don’t like me and I don’t like you.’ He says, ‘Well, okay, on three conditions. You don’t come back, if you ever do come back there’ll be a penalty to pay, and you’ve got to come home every Sunday night to visit your mother.’
“So I ring my mates to come and pick me up. When they come over, he’s standing at the door and I can’t get out. He says, ‘Everything you packed there, I paid for. They belong to me. But because you’re my son, you can keep the underpants you’re wearing and I’m going to give you 20 bucks.’”
So he stripped down to his jocks, and with his mates screaming laughing, followed his old man over to the car and had 20 bucks slapped into his hand. He stayed with his friends for a year before he wanted to go back home. His father said he could, on one condition. A friend of his had a little son with a foot where his knee should be. If Bill could teach little Tony Spargo to swim by the end of the school holidays, he could return home. If Tony still couldn’t swim, Bill couldn’t come back.
It remains the most satisfying experience of Sweetenham’s entire coaching career. Every day he watched Tony improve as a swimmer and grow as a person. Tony had fallen in love with the water, and Bill with coaching. By the end of that summer another 40 kids had joined Tony in the pool and by Christmas their parents had each bought Bill a present for teaching their little ones the gift of knowing how to swim. Not that his new landlord approved. “My father said, ‘You don’t understand — this is a penalty, not a reward. Give all the presents back.’ Which I did.”
A few years later he’d worked his way up to Queensland Director of Swimming, an impressive-sounding post that paid little better than coaching the kids in Mount Isa which didn’t pay at all. But poverty is the mother of invention and boldness. When he asked himself how could he become the best coach in Australia, he identified he’d need to study psychology, biology and exercise physiology. Once he happened to be on the Queensland University campus and wandered over to where there was a sports psychology lecture going on. He looked around: there didn’t seem to be anyone checking who could go in or not. So he walked in and sat down. It was the same story with the biology and physiology classes. For three years he took notes without taking exams.
“I didn’t want to blow my cover so I waited until the end of the third year to approach the professor. He said, ‘I know you’re not enrolled. I’ve known that for three years. I’ll let you take the exam and I’ll mark it; I just can’t give you a degree.’”
Sweetenham also sat the biology and physiology exams- and topped all three classes. Everyone else had been there to pass. He’d been there to learn.
THAT yearning for knowledge has taken him all over the world, maybe because his love for winning is even greater. There’s a warm, almost cuddly side to Sweetenham that makes a mockery of the bully-boy caricature. When he tells his coaches the athlete needs to like them, trust them and believe them, he’d like to think for the most part he ticks the three boxes himself. But compromise isn’t for him. “I hate it. Compromise is what two people agree on that neither of them want. Anytime I’ve compromised it’s come back and bit me fairly on the backside. It’s never worked for me. Compromise is what other people do that allows me to beat them.” He talks about having zero tolerance for mistakes. Find out what your competitors are doing (“Winners are predators of opportunity. I know more about the hearts and minds of my competition than they know about themselves.”) Put performance above popularity. Repeat – your job is to make it as difficult as possible for the athlete to reach the top – but make sure they get there.
He says it’s not just him who thinks this way. He tells the story of his American friend, Bob Bowman, who coaches Michael Phelps. “When Michael was a young swimmer he left his goggles on the deck during the warm-up. Bob went over and stood on them. He could have picked them up and said, ‘You forgot these, Michael’, but Michael wouldn’t have learned the lesson. Michael went to get his goggles and found them smashed. From that point on he made sure he looked after his equipment.”
Sweetenham has also done his share of goggle-crushing, most notoriously in the UK. While the 2000 Sydney Olympics had been a glorious one for Sweetenham and Australia, it was disastrous for British swimming, their first time in 64 years returning home without a medal. They duly head-hunted Sweetenham to overhaul their national programme. It would involve being away from his wife and family for 11 months of the year but to leave his comfort zone meant having to leave them.
That meant other people leaving their comfort zones. Up to then it was normal for members of the UK national team to take off two or three months a year from the sport. Under Sweetenham they had to train for 50 weeks. He no longer wanted athletes content to make the team but athletes who wanted to make the podium.
His methods didn’t sit well with established swimmers. Karen Pickering accused him of “shouting at me until my eyes watered”. Mark Foster claimed he couldn’t look after any swimmer over 16, which he felt was reflected in the fact 13 swimmers retired after the disappointing 2004 Olympics. There were even charges of bullying, prompting a three-month enquiry. But ultimately it cleared Sweetenham of all charges and after a very successful Commonwealth Games and European championships, even Foster had come round to the view Sweetenham’s methods had been justified and that he wasn’t “a dictator but a leader”.
By Beijing, Britain would finish third on the medals table, Adlington winning two golds. His legacy continues and will be most evident next summer in London. Only last month one Olympic prospect, Fran Hansall, tearfully paid tribute to her old mentor when, within weeks of undergoing a serious ankle surgery, she bounced back to win silver in the 100m butterfly at the national championships. “It shows,” she said, “if you believe in what you’re doing, you can do anything.” Bill ingrained that into her.
He spends most of his time now back in Australia as a head mentor for the Australian Institute of Sport, advising the leading national coaches in all the Olympic sports and beyond. He also does some consulting abroad for various business and sporting organisations, including now, Swim Ireland.
He’s a long-time friend of Swim Ireland’s national director of swimming, Peter Banks, from Peter’s time coaching in America and internationally. Last October on Banks’ invite, he came over to Dublin for a weekend to overlook and mentor the national youth development squad and the elite senior squad. Last month he was back to do the same and give a workshop to coaches. The plan now is to pop over every four or six months.
Irish swimming excites him. “These youth swimmers I’m seeing aren’t hemmed in by limitations like ‘That set is too hard for me’, ‘I can’t swim that fast.’ They have a can-do attitude and an open-mindedness that’s refreshing. They haven’t been told they can’t do it which is great.
“Gráinne Murphy is fantastic, but there’s a lot of other talent in the pool in Ireland. They’re as good as anyone. They’re putting in the hours. There are coaches here that can coach as good as anywhere else in the world; they just maybe haven’t been exposed to a certain level as much as they should be. But in Peter they have a coach and a leader with a passion for Ireland, a passion for swimming and a passion for excellence. There’ll be setbacks along the way, success is rarely linear, but I can see he’s putting in a structure and culture that will create repeatable excellence.”
Before they win in Rio, first they must win today, or at least this afternoon. It has to be better than this morning’s session and that will be up to the coaches that surround him now.
“The skills have to be upped,” he tells them. “We’ve got to have them swimming this afternoon the way they’re going to race. And we’ve got to have attention to detail. We can’t let one bad finish through the loop. I want about 15 percent more urgency this afternoon than they’ll have in competition. That’s your job as a coach today — to lift things up this afternoon above anywhere they’ve been before. Why not today? And when we get them to reach it, we’ve got to make them feel special. We’ve got to tell them what a great job they’re doing, with sincerity. We want every swimmer hop out this afternoon going, ‘Yes, yes! I did a great job today!’”
Behind the hard-nosed winner is a soft interior. For all he’s learned and won, in many ways he’s still coaching little Tony Spargo.
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