THEMA: The USA Sting In Singapore 2025

The Ghost of USA Swimming Past awaits us on the burning deck below stands stacked with every complexity of parent there ever was, from the pushy with a performance enhancement mindset to the hands-off, steady-as-you-go, bright, rounded child of the Mary-Gens and Davids of this world, and much else in between.

The whistle blows, and coaches guide the sons and daughters of spectators to the start. Take your pick of blocks, the two key ones:

• the chopping kind for those whose ticket includes a tour along a trail of tears for lives altered by the unknowing, uncaring and self-serving in positions of authority as architects of the loopholes that rogues are only too happy to leap through in search of the alchemy of promise to survivor of one type or another, or ...
• Launch Pad to the long haul of outcomes good to excellent, in sport and life - the experience of most, in my experience, own and observed.

This day, our host the ghost goes by name Integrity, Truth and Reconciliation, a spirit of clarity flying us over a set of wooden scales aflame. A phoenix rises from the ashes to declare that no number of fine results can ever be seen 'in the balance'. Rather, they are the flip of the dark side of one of many coins that make up the minted realm of our focus.

We started out by asking 'what's the matter with USA Swimming', after a World Championships where pre-event prep threw up a challenge that contributed to a growing feeling that the World No1 swim nation is heading towards a home Olympics in need of a wake-up call:

FORUM: Into The Depths Of An American Debate Too Shallow To Drown A Mouse In

As the U.S. swim community has a scrap over a bone with no meat on it, until Michael Phelps weighed in with clarity yesterday, we consider the difference between the shallows of a tiff and the depths of real debate in a sport of Dickensian tendency when it come to ‘truth and nothing but the truth’

State Of Swimming +Craig Lord

None of that amounts to anything more than coaches and others have been warning of for some while now, but sometimes it takes a Baltimore Bullet to hit the target and ricochet into wider consciousness.

Our spirit guide - Integritas for short - interrupts to point to a scroll in the shape of a coin with two distinct sides, a blind spot running right through it at the interface that binds performance in the pool and out at sea to performance of governors, guardians, or, when and where the term works, leaders.

In this week's Thema, Integritas takes us on the first part of what he has to show us: a flypast of USA World-title campaigns 1973-2025 to see where the result in Singapore that swept sackcloth back into fashion fits in the ranking of the American swimming bull run.

So, how bad was Singapore? Here we go:

USA World-title campaigns 1973-2025...