Clareburt’s decision to sink or swim a tale of NZ bureaucracy
It’s a bit of a wonder Olympic swimmer Lewis Clareburt, one of New Zealand’s finest medal hopes at next year’s Paris games, is ranked as highly in the world as he is.
This week, the 24-year-old decided to leave Wellington to train in Auckland, laying bare a tale of bureaucracy and frustration — and the distinct feeling a certain pool in Wellington will be hoping Clareburt performs well, or they many suffer from some rippling backwash.
The Wellington Regional Aquatic Centre, known by the unlovely acronym WRAC, appear indeed to have been wracking overseers of their 50m pool — the only one in Wellington — where Clareburt has previously trained before repeated frustrations over swim times and lane space became too much.
This is a world-ranked swimmer, remember, one of the planet’s best 400m individual medley stars, the decathlon of the pool.
Clareburt found himself coming second to WRAC’s need to put the community first.
There can be no argument about priorities — it’s a ratepayer-funded pool. But, seriously, was there really no way WRAC could have organised matters so one of the world’s top swimmers wasn’t being given short notice that he couldn’t train there and, even when he did, had to dodge aquafitness classes and public swimmers?
Clareburt’s frustration apparently boiled over after regular lane space issues caused a strained relationship with WRAC staff, ending with unexpected WRAC restrictions on his camera use for his social media followers and a request to remove gear bags.
This wasn’t some self-obsessed Gen Z kiddo doing look-at-me Instagramming. Filming is needed for stroke and speed analysis, and the social media is designed for sponsors, funders and to keep the sport in front of the next generation of international hopefuls.
So how hard can it really be to accommodate a world-ranked swimmer? Former Olympic swimmer and world champion short-course swimmer Moss Burmester told the Herald more than a year ago that Clareburt’s battle for training space in crowded lanes was even tougher for a butterfly swimmer (his main stroke) because of their wider wing spans.
“It is always difficult in a public pool because under bylaws, there has to be a certain amount of public access, which is fine because ratepayers are paying,” Burmester said. “He’s in a . . . lane with six swimmers which is not ideal . . . similar to when I was growing up. You’re constantly giving way.”
Clareburt’s frustration was stoked several times when 50m lane bookings were cancelled or altered at short notice and, on at least one occasion, he couldn’t even find space to swim at Freyberg pool — a 33m facility. It’s preposterous stuff and has led to Clareburt leaving behind a close-knit support network of his coach, friends and family in Wellington.
That extended family is important to any athlete. Burmester said he was fortunate with help from family, friends and businesses in Tauranga during his career, who continued to back him when he shifted to Auckland’s high performance swim facility. But Auckland was an even tougher place to survive, he said, because athletes did not have the familiar connections.
While we’re at it, what was High Performance Sport NZ’s role in all this? They clearly had one and may well have been behind the Auckland move. But they couldn’t bend a council swimming pool to their will, or find a way to compromise for the national good?
Clareburt clearly wants to improve. He burst on to the scene with an unexpected bronze medal at the 2019 world championships. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, he set the second-fastest qualifying time, beating the eventual gold medallist, and led in the gold medal race before fading to a disappointing seventh in his first Olympic final.
He has February’s world championships in Doha to test his progress, although his fastest time this year (4m 11.29s) is well below his best of 4m 08.70s, posted when he won one of his two gold medals at last year’s Birmingham Commonwealth Games.
His 4m 11.29s sees him ranked 10th in the world which (based on time alone) would see him outside the final at next year’s Paris Olympics, although he has four Americans ahead of him (they select only two in each event, except for the 100m and 200m freestyle).
One of the things I remember fondly in my two-year stint as a Parliamentary press gallery reporter was an old saying that came to mind when I had to deal with the Wellington bureaucracy. Honore de Balzac: “Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism run by pygmies.”
If Clareburt gets among the medals in Doha or Paris, he will have done so by beating that giant mechanism. The pygmies, meanwhile, will be getting on with what is important to bureaucrats — the process, not the outcome.