Hindustan Times (Lucknow)

Swimming to success regularly at the Olympics, the Aussie way

Rohan Taylor, coach of the Australian national swimming team, sums up why Australia, whose population is a fraction of the powerhouse­s, has a pipeline that keeps the talent flow going.

“Number one, with a population of 27 million, we have to be designed and very specific in our approach. Number two, we can’t get it wrong. Because we don’t have a lot to choose from, going up against the rest of the world, particular­ly America and China with a billion people. We can’t just waste our talent. So, we are always looking,” he told HT.

And they invariably find it. USA continue to top swimming medal charts at the Games, but Australia have been catching up. By the end of the second night of events in Paris on Sunday, Australia had as many gold medals as USA (2). The Aussies in fact got going first courtesy Ariarne Titmus and the women’s 4x100 freestyle relay. At Tokyo, they won nine gold medals to USA’s 11, finishing a runaway second above Great Britain and China. That was a big swing from 2016 (3 gold) and 2012 (1 gold).

Taylor took over as national head coach at the peak of the pandemic in 2020, with less than a year to go for Tokyo. He went back to the model that got success through the 1990s but one which he believed they had “kind of waivered” from.

One that keeps giving the world a spread of top-class swimmers, especially women. There’s Emma McKeon, 30, Kaylee McKeown, 23, and Titmus, 23. Then there’s Mollie O’Callaghan, a 20-year-old 2023 Worlds five–time gold medallist who is already challengin­g Titmus. That structure comprises eight high performanc­e centres, known as performanc­e hubs, scattered across different states. Each one is synced with the most integral part of it — the root. Swimming Australia appoints national youth technical leads, which collaborat­es with coaches at swimming clubs in every town. States run their own talent identifica­tion leagues where raw prospects first get noticed. “We have a relationsh­ip from clubs and states all the way through. You start swimming at your local club, then state championsh­ips, then state talent leagues. Then if they swim faster, Swimming Australia comes in and brings them into what we call national event camps,” Taylor said.

It’s not just about picking out talent as a whole. Through next generation camps, they seek stroke-specific youngsters. “We look for breaststro­kers, backstroke­rs and then bring them in and hold purposeful stroke camps. The idea is to find talent early, get them into our system, educate them and their coaches,” said Taylor. They start doing that around age 13-14 for girls and 14-15 boys. Big believers in multi-sport developmen­t, the Aussies don’t go rigid and deep too early. But what they do see as one of the early trait indicators is “competitiv­e IQ”.

“Their ability to get on to the blocks and swim fast and say, ‘let’s get on the medal dais’. Because you need to be competitiv­ely intelligen­t around racing,” Taylor said. “You also see someone with good, natural feel of the water. And then we start influencin­g their technical developmen­t and look at their physiologi­cal markers.

“But that doesn’t mean you don’t find that one diamond in the rough, where you’ll see a kid with good natural talent and technique but might not be getting on to the podiums. That’s where the coaches that we work with, if they come and give us a heads-up, we intervene and help provide some support.”

All these potential swimmers then assemble in combined training camps at national level. The eight performanc­e hubs have their reach across all states in the mainland, and the Australian Institute of Sport. “That’s where performanc­e support will start capturing some footage, getting data around them, do some test sets. That is then handed over to the coach; to take that data and go back to your home programme and build on that. It becomes a bit of a performanc­e service centre for them,” Taylor said.

Walking all along this pathway to the elite are the swimmers’ personal coaches. Taylor believes the country has some of the “world’s best coaches” down to the club level, and it’s about collaborat­ion even at the Worlds and Olympics.

“When they get to the level of Titmus or Kaylee, they (coaches) are very much involved in that. Because they’re setting the standards of what they want to achieve,” Taylor said.

“We’ve got the right coaches around, which will say, ‘hey, this is our standard and here comes somebody who has a lot of attributes of it’. So, you start moving them on a similar path and then the specifics around that will be dictated.”