THEMA - Deep Clean the Olympics

PART 1 of 4

The honeymoon is over. It was back in March that Kirsty Coventry ascended to the throne of the Olympic Movement on the strength of votes from the small, elite club of IOC members she belongs to.

It's now October 2025, and this author understands well the need to be patient in a world where plans can be thrown out by the demands and even distractions of busy lives on many fronts far beyond the narrow world of sport, from work far removed from swimming shores to family commitments that clash with sporting calendars.

And timelines, too, in ways that just about every family that ever had a parent as coach, sons and daughters as athletes, other children as brothers and sisters who chose a different path with very different demands on time, money, energy and focus is likely to have been familiar with at some stage on a voyage with a compass seemingly susceptible to reversed polarity on a daily basis.

Each experience is different, mine including the two books I did get written and two others I did edit within an Olympic cycle and in the rush of the rest of life as a source of quiet pride balanced by the frustration of slow progress on other book projects that had to take a back stage for a while but will occupy all of my spare time and more in the coming year.

Coaches and swimmers know what a cycle feels like: some days feel like weeks, some months feel like days - and all the while, you have to show up and get the work done to serve your passions, priorities and wherever the pathway may lead you, regardless of 'the rest of the stuff' on your list.

There is not a swim story out there without intervention and setback being a part of the picture, no matter how relative, no matter the swimmer. Adam Peaty, Caeleb Dressel and Kristof Milak are among the big swim names to have talked recently about the pressures that come with towering success and a sports culture in which a bad race day is one without a win in record time.

There are many, too, who make so much look 'easy' when it's anything but. Even aces such as Katie Ledecky and Sarah Sjöström have had to deal with that dodgy compass from time to time, even though to the occasional visitor to their lives under lights may only see plain-sailing. They do that, these days, over the course of five or six Olympic cycles: extraordinary pacing and perseverance.

Every career gets some of what the swimmer worked for, some swimmers, Michael Phelps the beast of best, strike gold or get a prize far more often than the average high flyer - and even then come to a place where they speak about the challenges, the cost, the cliff edges they've faced and had to deal with. Grant Hackett, Ian Thorpe ... the list goes on and on.

Imagine then what it feels like to have that pain last four and five decades beyond the moment the work of the athlete and coach was done, the support of family and friends had been given and communities had sent their sons and daughters "off to the Olympics to represent us, only to get there and find the opposition wearing a striped shirt and mask, a swag bag over their shoulder in which to carry away the stolen goods while the police waved the getaway car through and told the victims of theft to 'move on' because there was nothing to see.

No amount of evidence and reminders has changed that position since the 1970s and 1980s, for a longer time than any of the current generation of swimmers has been alive.

These are swimmers who had to face a different kind of cliff edge and then live with it, not for a few Olympic cycles but between 9 and 13 cycles. In other words, for between some four and five decades.

The chief cause of their sense of being harmed: boycott, and doping.

Next year, a few months after they've blown the candles out on Kirsty Coventry's first birthday as queen of the IOC, we'll arrive at the 50th anniversary of the first Olympics that witnessed the dominance of GDR women in the pool. Make that girls, all of them members of programs proven to have administered doping on a systematic basis as part of a state secret to sell the virtues and strengths of communist ideology. Many of the girls, as it would turn out, had ingested and been injected with testosterone at the first sign of puberty, before they could call themselves a teen.

The short version of the result is in our main image: 11 golds in 13 events in the pool. In the depth were world records galore, astonishing rates of 'progress' on the clock, male voices reported in female lockers that turned out to be the voices of females with altered testosterone levels that gave them just enough 'boy' to beat all out every girl into submission.

I make no apology for returning to this theme again, and again, and again, ad infinitum until it is a theme no more.

To the current generation of athletes, retired, just retired (including those happy to feed from any hand that bites) and current alike, coaches, administrators and those who feel it best to let sleeping dogs lie and accepts it's "all water under the bridge", I refer you to Cicero:

“To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”

I like these, too:

• “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.” - Edmund Burke
• “Study the past if you would define the future.” - Confucius
• “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” - Mark Twain
• “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” - Aldous Huxley
• “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” - Winston Churchill

I have no idea at this stage how Kirsty Coventry feels about it all, which is itself an uncomfortable truth. After all, at a time when World Aquatics was keen to make a move on reconciliation over GDR doping after all these long years in the last term of the previous IOC president, the Zimbabwean Olympic 200m backstroke champion of 2004 and 2008 by his side, the message to generations of women harmed and wronged from HQ in Lausanne, under the watch of Thomas Bach, was 'no - we're simply not going there'.

Coventry has shifted the IOC compass in a few key directions for the better since taking the throne. By next year and that 50th anniversary, she could easily - and I mean that word to be read precisely in its most basic and universal sense - trigger a process of reconciliation and reach for the spirit of a fellow African she will surely know all about, having hugged FINA long-termer Sam Ramsay on the World Aquatics stage this past July in Singapore as the South African retired from life at FINA/World Aquatics: Desmond Tutu.

“It is a risky undertaking but in the end it is worthwhile, because in the end only an honest confrontation with reality can bring real healing. Superficial reconciliation can bring only superficial healing.” - Desmond Tutu

That's how the long file I link to below ends after an explanation about the reconciliation process Tutu refers to and how that is highly relevant to swimming and the IOC's burning question and need to act in a world in which 'enhancement' is sold as acceptable because Olympic sport has not only struggled to alchemise its clean-sport mission from word to deed but has encouraged cheating by doing nothing about the biggest fraud sport has ever seen, one perpetrated on the IOC's watch and then followed up with loads of official profiles and praise among federations for all those performances we know were the product of doping.

Instead of making that whole history a foundation stone for strength in the IOC/WADA approach to clean sport down the years, the failure to deal with it has become a millstone around the IOC's neck, a burden shared with WADA when the going gets tough and trust is hard to find.

Global Athlete is not Coventry's labourite organisation, if we go by her history with the independent version of her in-house involvement as an athlete rep at the IOC. And yet, there are many reasons why she should consider GA among her best friends. Why? Well, truth is a very useful weapon.

The very excuse for not doing anything about the tail of tears alive and kicking since the 1970s has relied on two pillars:

• fear of legal challenge from a state that no longer exists or citizens of a state that does exist but are highly unlikely to take on an expensive cross-border legal case over matters that have been decided in a German court in a way that left no doubt that those athletes were definitively part of an official, systematic doping program between 1974 and 1989 and were being doped before that, as whistleblowers, confessions and other evidence have long confirmed. (NB, that legal fear is also illogical, imo, on grounds that they don't appear to fear being sued by the women who they know to have been damaged by what happened on IOC watch)
• too tricky, because they were "not the only ones" to have used doping, as president of the IOC Juan Samaranch told two GDR world-record-setting women when they tried to hand back their medals in 1990.

From the archive - The long file on reconciliation:

Reconciliation Requires Olympic Bosses To Scrap ‘Statute Of Limitations’ Irrelevance & Heal Harm Done To Women In Sport

Why Desmond Tutu offers a shining light for Olympic sports that have chosen to keep horrid histories in a locked and dark room marked ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. They never do.

State Of Swimming +Craig Lord

Coventry came to the throne with the fulsome support of the sport she excelled in, backed by World Aquatics and a leadership understandably keen to have one of its own at the helm as Queen B of the 'Olympic Family'.

So, let's start there and look at two promises World Aquatics made four years ago - to me but more importantly to all the women harmed and robbed by the GDR's mass fraud on IOC/FINA watch - but appear to be just too tricky to keep, let alone honour.

Here's what I'm talking about....