I Beg to Disagree

Two crises erupted over the last couple days in the swimming world. First, the Wall Street Journal published a silly article bashing US Universities for "training the enemy". You only have to take two minutes to look at the Georgia Tech Swimming and Diving roster to find out how I feel about that. Around the same time, I got another reminder of the downside to swimming's popularity in Australia, after team punching bag Olympian Nick D'arcy and Kenrick Monk were castigated for putting up a facebook photo of them holding guns.


I don't even know where to start with how much I disagree on the WSJ article. First off, I think it's a legitimate argument that foreign swimmers, despite all the scholarships they are ruthlessly stealing from hard working Americans, actually enhance American swimming. Subtract foreign athletes and the NCAA would be a much lower level of competition for our domestic athletes. As it stands it's probably the best "minor leagues" for international level swimming. Subtracting foreign athletes would only further isolate us from the greater swimming world. The idea that America should snatch it's ball away and play by itself unless we get to win all the time is incredibly childish.

Foreign athletes are often painted as mercenaries with a passing interest in academics. That in general, is also completely false. Foreign athletes come here because we have the only university system in the world that seemlessly melds academics and high level sports. Of course, the WSJ is also somewhat out of date when it comes to swimming: more developed countries abroad are significantly improving their domestic talent development and moving beyond the NCAA, but that's for another blog.

Likewise, I agree with Rokur on swimmersdaily about Monk and D'Arcy. I hope that all of Swimming Australia completes their principled stand by boycotting every summer blockbuster, especially Expendables 2. I can only imagine how many US Swimming stars would be out of the sport right now had their lives been placed under the same scrutiny as the Aussies. I also feel that at some point we are heading for a complete paradigm shift with the whole "posting inappropriate things online" drama. There is a cultural divide between people too old to remember that had facebook existed in their youths they likely would have done the same and a younger generation. At some point, the world will be populated mostly by people who have done something "embarrassing" preserved for eternity online and it just won't be a big deal. Obviously we're not there yet.