Bill Sweetenham
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Bill Sweetenham has been the National Performance director for Great Britain since November 2000. He has managed the Australian swim team for 4 Olympic Games and 5 Commonwealth Games. He was the head of the Australian Institute of Swimming from the late 1980s till 1994. From 1995 to 2001 he was the National Youth Coach for Swimming Australia. He has worked with more than 12 World Record holders as part of the national team in Australia. His greatest success could be said to be Tracey Wickham, whose 400m freestyle world championship record still stands to this day. He was voted Australian coach of the year three times and as performance director in Britain led the national team to 15 medals at the 2001 and 2003 world championships. Britain had won 18 medals in total since 1973 before Sweetenham arrived.
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[edit] Britain makes great progress despite recent setbacks
Sweetenham has worked directly with more than 40 Olympians. The one that got away because of the 1980 boycott was Tracey Wickham. She remains one of the greatest distance freestylers in history and her world championship record survives from 1978. Sweetenham was her personal coach throughout and Wickham has heaped praise on his head for the work he did to get her to what were phenomenal times for their time over 400, 800 and 1500 metres freestyle. Those times would be good enough to win world and Olympic medals in the current era.
Sweetenham is also credited with the Australian youth programme of the 1990s which produced the likes of Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett - the latter who has been very complimentary about the Australian coach - and a crop of great talent, many of whom made it through to the Australian national team. This is in itself a considerable achievement given the high standards in Australia, standards much higher than those in Britain, where only a cultural revolution, many believed, could change decades of mediocrity. It was against a background of failure that Sweetenham was brought to Britain specifically to shake things up.
Before Athens, Sweetenham was responsible for the biggest progress in British swimming of the past 30 and more years. Britain won as many medals at the 2001, 2003 and 2005 world championships as it did at all previous world championships back to 1973.
In Athens, two bronze medals represented a result as good as the average for Britain in the pool throughout Olympic history and was a step forward from the lack of a single medal in Sydney in 2000. The problem for Sweetenham is that much more was expected as a consequence of earlier results.
[edit] Rumours and misinformation
There are many rumours circulating regarding Mr Sweetenham, most of which are not supported by publicly available evidence.
One of the reasons Sweetenham has been so heavily criticised is that expectations were so high going into Athens Olympic Games because of the huge gains made in 2001-2003. Some in the media blamed a media ban but the record shows that Sweetenham, his coaches and the swimming team continued to be quoted extensively by Anita Lonsbrough in the Telegraph and Craig Lord in The Times (indeed The Times carried big features with three swimmers and Sweetenham in the week before Athens), and Sweetenham was also quoted by Cathy Wood in the Daily Mail.
In an interview with The Times, Sweetenham was quoted as saying that the media ban was not intended to shut the media out, rather it was aimed at impressing upon swimmers that they ought to spend less time appearing on TV quiz shows, talking to the national press about their ambitions and more time focussing on the job at hand. "The time to tell the world about yourself is after the gold medal is round your neck, not before," he said.
The other reason for the media "blackout" was, Sweetenham is quoted as saying, to protect rookies such as Melanie Marshall, who had never raced 200m freestyle at international championship level before but went to Athens as fastest in the world. The result fell well shy of what was expected of Marshall but Sweetenham's intentions had been positive. After Athens, Marshall's coach, Ben Titley, went on the record as saying that his swimmer's performance did not reflect poor decisions by Sweetenham and refused to accept that he or Marshall had made too many mistakes in her final preparation. However, he alluded to a medical problem which was "a confidential matter".
Another coach, Ian Turner, was quoted as saying that those who swam poorly in Athens did so for "very different reasons" and stated that "the problem was not a common team-wide one, the problem was different in just about every case involving a bad swim".
[edit] Success
Britain's achievements since Sweetenham arrived in 2000: Best World Championship results - as many medals (18) won in 2001, 2003 and 2005 as Britain claimed at all eight previous championships put together, back to 1973; best Commonwealth Games result, Manchester 2002; three world, four European, 14 Commonwealth and more than 100 British records broken; more than twice the number of top-ten world rankings by British swimmers in the past four years as the national team enjoyed in the previous 20 years...
