Will The Epiphany Of This Twelfth Night Stretch To A Brighter Day In Swimming?

Editorial

Twelfth Night, Epiphany, “a moment of sudden and great revelation or realisation” [Koine Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, meaning manifestation or appearance]. The latter may be regarded as the beginning of change.

In English tradition, the yule log was left burning from the start of Christmas until this day, and the charcoal left was kept until the following Christmas to kindle a new festive season, the thread of past, present and future woven to last. The log was, in part, there to protect the house  from fire and lightening. Fighting fire with fire, so to speak.

Swimming is in the midst of its own epiphany, 2016 marking the rekindling of a yule log that has smoked not glowed for far too long. For log read clean sport and the failure of global sports governors to deliver it. Deep in the hearth is the ash of underlying crisis: governance structures that deliver poor to woeful ‘leadership’ that takes its cue from self-interest.

Politics (it might be called petty politics in many ways if the impact were not so significant on many levels), that thing that athletes are obliged not to bring with them to their blocks, has played and is playing a huge role. To understand the pull of that power, you might follow the money in the Olympic Movement. In its “Visualising Rio 2016” series last July-August, The Washington Post posted a most useful graphic setting out the basics of the flow:

Ragout from The Washington Post

Estimated annual income of the IOC: $1.375bn (1 Olympic cycle = $5.5bn)

Main Source: Sponsors, Broadcasters, NBC the top dog by virtue of winning IOC-given rights (NBC pays $4.4bn for Olympic Games broadcast rights 2014-2020)

The IOC money goes on:

90% of that annual IOC income goes to Organising Committees of the Olympic Games (London 2012 got $1.347bn; Rio 2016, $1.5bn) National Olympic Committees: $520m after London 2012 35 International Sports Federations, such as FINA: $520m (FINA, with the IAAF, is in the club of biggest recipients) Self-spend: first-class travel, 5-star hotels and per diems of $900 a day for IOC members.

Halt the flow there and let’s consider a detail.

That last bullet point raises issues of transparency. Take Julio Maglione, president of FINA:  easily tops 100 days a year on the road in his ‘voluntary’ roles as an ‘unpaid’ career sports politician. Some of his time spent in London, Lausanne and elsewhere on the way to the 2012 Games and some of the time spent in Rio, Lausanne and elsewhere on his way to Rio 2016, included a lot of time spent on IOC and FINA duty. We cannot see a breakdown of the financial benefits all of this activity delivered to the Uruguayan for no such thing exists in the public domain (and may not even exist in such form in any other domain).

The questions pondered by those who favour greater transparency include:

did he take a per diem from the IOC and FINA for the same days? did one of those functions override the other and so the FINA per diem went unpaid because Maglione was already receiving an IOC per diem for the same say of ‘voluntary’ work? did Maglione pay tax on any of that money?

These questions are not put in order to suggest wrongdoing. They are put because proper, due transparency would demand they be put – and answered.

An then there’s this: what did Maglione receive in per diems? That is a perfectly legitimate question. The answer may well be: something like well over $100,000. We’d like to be far more accurate and precise but a lack of transparency and open public record on per diems simply does not allow the wider world to get closer to understanding how the mechanism is built.

The per diems are not a ‘wage’, insist the IOC, FINA and others joined at the hip to the per diem culture. It is a contribution to ‘costs’ – and those appear to amount to no more than showing up to work and then doing that work that they were not asked to do but volunteered to do. To be honest, those ‘costs’ about to what you and I would call a living wage but sports politicians who volunteer (and, in many cases, actually spend no time away from a full-time career elsewhere because they simply don’t have one) call a contribution beyond costs already covered by the federation treasury, namely, flights, travel, limos, hotels, food, drink and every fundamental need you might find reasonable.

Michael Phelps – who ended his career on his own terms, on a high and wearing his own brand of kit, MP by Aquasphere – is at the top of the financial food chain among swimmers in a realm in which most survive on parental support and modest stipends – photo by Patrick B. Kraemer

Just to put such sums in context, we turn to what average folk earn as a living wage. On best figures  – those that use only full-time employed/waged figures to calculate averages – the top earners per household even out at the following levels of pay (U.S. $) according to the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) calculation for 2015:

LUX 60,369 USA 58,714 SUI 58,389 NOR 50,908 NED 50,670 AUS 50,167 DEN 50,024 CAN 47,843 BEL 47,702 AUT 46,084 with IRL, 46,074, GER, 44,925, and GBR, 41,384, just outside the top 10.

So, on those rough measures, the average highest earner in household (including coaches and parents of swimmers and so forth) is at best half of what someone like Maglione is worth in per diems to cover the ‘costs’ of him being away from whatever else he might be doing if he weren’t attending meetings and pressing the flesh a great deal more than many of the rest of you might be used to.

Food for thought but not so much in Olympic circles, as that Washington Post graphic seems to indicate:

Of the $520m of IOC money that goes to NOCs, a fair amount feeds into other pots to make those NOCs fairly flush when it comes to funds available. Prime example, for commercial as well as reasons of contribution, is the United States Olympic Committee: it has a pot of $230m a year and is a good example of being proactive to raise funds while the majority of NOCs around the world simply wait for the handout and add nothing or next to nothing to the amounts that are handed down by the IOC. That USOC money translates to a payroll at the American outfit of $49m a year, for 600 folk a year, according to The Washington Post. It is here that we see those flush per diem figures knocked into a cocked hat: USOC CEO Scott Blackmun: $1m a year 14 other execs: $200,000 or more a year From the money left over after paying its own staff, USOC hands down a sum to help individual sports federations, the USA example, once more, one in which those federations, such as USA Swimming, generate their own income, from meet entries, commercial enterprise and partnership and related activities. The system is both funded and entrepreneurial. In most nations, the system is funded. Full stop. At USA Swimming, wherever the cash comes from, it translates to a wage of more than $850,000 a year for CEO Chuck Wielgus, with his track and field counterpart Max Siegel said to be on $1.1m a year, according to The Washington Post.

In a bold yellow box next to the names of Siegel and Wielgus the newspaper runs the following, telling words:

“Athletes: some athletes can make big endorsement money, but most get by on stipends and charity”.

Family counts, regardless of financial power of achievement. Michael Phelps and Nicole Johnson with their first-born, Boomer, and the swimmer’s mum, Debbie Phelps in Rio – by Patrick B. Kraemer

The latter includes a huge amount of support from parents, most of who never get anywhere close to a VIP ticket to the big day, let alone the lounge in which they hand out the champagne.

A world-class American swimmer can make up to $42,000 in stipends each year, and some of that is down to the good work of USA Swimming. Most who make the top 100 ranks in the world come nowhere near that amount.

Professionalism and a hefty professional wage is a must in white-collar world. Why, you just couldn’t get the quality without the big money. The same argument doesn’t apply to coaches, swimmers and others, however, it seems. There, quality can only be extracted through leanness of experience, hard work and the carrot of a fine pay day if you win Olympic gold one day (and even then, the carrot is relative).

The USA is, of course, among the best examples among feds when it comes to care and support for athletes in world swimming. If you take into account the professional work that goes into selling swimming for a return that feeds back into the sport, USA Swimming has no peers, while the likes of Swimming Australia and several others, rely not just on public funding but the generosity of sponsors and partners.

The reality of swimmers, meanwhile, is that they not only have much less than their peers in sports such as tennis but they are governed by federations that spend far less of their budget to the direct financial benefit of the athlete in all too many cases when looking up the chain to professional sport not down it to other Olympic sports struggling in ways familiar to others in the FINA stable, diving, water polo and synchro.

Chad Le Clos – by Patrick B. Kraemer

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