6th in the World for the 100m Backstroke! BOOM!
Tweet by Liam Tancock after his sixth-place finish in the 100m backstroke final at the World Swimming Championships in Shanghai. Tancock placed equal fourth in the same event at the 2009 championships in Rome.
Well done to everyone who raced tonight, some amazing results! Pleased for our relay, great job by all the girlies!
Tweet by Caitlin McClatchey after she and her GB team-mates finished sixth in the 4×200m freestyle final at the World Championships, three places lower than in 2009.
I’m actually quite happy with that. It’s my best time in a textile suit
Comment by Fran Halsall after finishing fourth in the 50m freestyle final at the World Championships.
I am happy with fifth place
Comment by Tom Daley, the 2009 world platform diving champion, after dropping down to fifth in the final in Shanghai.
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Now I’m no sports psychologist, but something very strange is going on in the minds of some of Britain’s leading swimmers and divers.
The above quotations are just a representative sample of an attitude I encountered time and time again during the recent World Aquatic Championships in Shanghai.
The willingness of some athletes to accept and even celebrate what were patently disappointing results was a shocking development and is something that needs to be snuffed out quickly if they are to fulfil their potential at the London Olympics.
Whatever happened to the mantra of Bill Sweetenham, the tough-talking Australian coach who began the revival of British Swimming more than a decade ago?
“Winning is the only option,” he used to say, and even had the phrase emblazoned on a giant banner at one end of the Loughborough pool. Now, it would seem, just making the final is an acceptable alternative.
I can only imagine what David Brailsford, the performance director of British Cycling, would make of such a toleration of failure.
The success of Britain’s most successful Olympic sport at the 2008 Beijing Games was based on Brailsford’s ruthless pursuit of medals, to the extent that riders who failed to show top-three potential were simply dropped from the elite programme.
Simply making the top six or top eight was not acceptable.
Charles van Commenee, head coach of UK Athletics, is another who would turn the air blue at the thought of his athletes being happy with fourth, fifth or sixth place.
He once called Kelly Sotherton a wimp for winning an Olympic bronze medal because he thought she should have won silver.
Britain suffered a whole series of near-misses in the pool in Shanghai and were only salvaged by a late medal flurry on the final weekend from Rebecca Adlington, Hannah Miley and Liam Tancock, the latter, alas, winning in a non-Olympic event.
Those near-misses, as British Swimming performance director Michael Scott conceded, will have to be converted into medals in 2012, but achieving that will require a different collective mindset to the one I observed in China.
I am reminded of Ed Coode, the former British rower who finished fourth in the coxless pairs final with Greg Searle at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
“Happy” is not a word Coode used to described his feelings at his result, and for the next four years he proceeded to torture himself by replaying a video of the race to remind himself of the disappointment and spur him on the next time he had an Olympic opportunity.
At the 2004 Athens 2004, he rowed in the coxless four that won gold for Britain by eight hundredths of a second.
For Coode, winning really was the only option.
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