Olympians applaud late swimming trials

Swimming Australia announc­ed yesterday that the next Olympic trials would be held in June 2020.

100m freestyler Cameron McEvoy.

Swimming Australia will adopt US-style late trials for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics after a comprehensive review of its high-­performance structure in the wake of the national team’s under­performance in Rio last year.

The national federation announc­ed yesterday that the 2020 trials would be held in June, five weeks before the Olympics, in a bid to improve on the Rio return­ of three gold medals.

Olympic 1500m great Grant Hackett hailed the decision as long overdue. “I wish I had that news back in 2000,’’ he said.

“I have always performed better at a second meet a few weeks after the first, because I had more race practice under my belt. I felt twice as good and swam twice as fast. I’m a huge believer in this.

“The other problem with us having early trials is that it puts a target on our backs and gives the rest of the world time to respond if we’ve swum fast at our trials.’’

Fellow Olympic champion Susie O’Neill said she was also in favour of late trials, predicting the Australian swimmers would feel less pressure at the Games because­ of the shorter build-up.

In the past Australia’s top swimming coaches — including former­ head coach Don Talbot, who masterminded the national team’s last golden age in the pool — have staunchly defended the tradition of having the Australian trials four months before the Games, giving the swimmers time to do another full cycle of preparation in between.

But only about 20 per cent of the national team improved from the trials to the Rio Games and head coach Jacco Verhaeren said the coaches had concluded that most of the swimmers were not sufficiently battle-hardened by recent high-level competition going into the Games.

“We need to provide more and significant competition leading into the Olympics,’’ he said.

“This was known already and the option we chose back then was grand prix meets, but coming out of the review we need even more and better competition, and trials will give us the toughest competition close to the Games.”

Verhaeren said Australia was not slavishly copying the American system after the US team dominated the Rio competition, winning 15 gold medals. Rather, the decision was based on competition needs. “We are one of the few countries that have winter when most of the other countries have ­summer and there’s a lack of meaningful competition for our swimmers between April and August­ (when the Olympics are usually scheduled),’’ he said.

National team coach Craig Jackson, who guided Mack Horton­ to gold in Rio, said he was confident he could adapt Horton’s training to account for late trials over the next three years.

The new system will be introduced for next year’s Commonwealth Games and the 2019 World Championships and Jackson said that would give sufficient time to adjust to the new schedule. “The American distance coaches can work around it, so we can too,’’ he said.

Swimming Australia has made other changes to the high-­performance structure, reducing the number of high-performance centres from 14 to nine, and recasting the Australian Institute of Sport program as a development program to help junior swimmers transition to the senior team. And it has created a coach leadership team of four state head coaches to work with the national coaches.