Swimming’s pool of Olympic cash dries up

In leaked email, Swimming Australia boss warns officials in our No 1 Olympic sport to brace themselves.

Swimming Australia chief executive Leigh Russell. Picture: AFP

Australia’s No 1 Olympic sport is significantly slashing costs with Swimming Australia boss Leigh Russell telling officials to be ready for cuts from top to bottom.

The Weekend Australian has seen an email from Russell informing state bosses to prepare for “some if not significant change” in participation funding. She also revealed Olympic sports bosses have considered a proposition to band together and “lobby” the government for more money.

“We have been lobbying for increased core funding. I’m currently also involved in a co-ordination of Olympic sport CEOs to lobby together,” Russell wrote in an email to state swimming presidents and chief executives.

This follows the exclusive story in The Australian that the women’s hockey team’s funding is to be decimated by 60 per cent and that other sports such as taekwondo, table tennis, modern pentathlon, skateboarding, judo, golf, football, equestrian, diving, boxing, basketball, badminton, archery, athletics, gymnastics, volleyball and water-polo, face such big cuts some cannot hire coaches or properly support an elite program.

Officials are shocked that future funding won’t even be maintained at what is described as “the bare bones’’ levels of the past few years and an entire generation of Australia’s sporting talent will be lost.

But the revelation that Australia’s most successful Olympic sport is also under such financial pressure to boost community swimming has created further turbulence.

Russell’s email was titled “Budget Planning 20/21’’ and she wrote: “However, at this time, our instinct and reading of the messaging back is that an increase will not occur and a decrease is definitely not off the table, whether that be for 2020/21 or the year after.”

Russell adds: “Given this information and the lack of surety we have at this time, we suggest that you plan budgets to reflect at least some if not significant change in these funding arrangements, noting there is no funding guaranteed post June 30.”

Swimming is the most well-funded Olympic sport in Australia, awarded $10,582,352 for high performance in 2019-20, with its top brass on massive wages. Head coach Jacco Verhaeren is on more than $400,000 a year.

Swimming Australia has forecast a deficit of $1.1m this year.

When contacted by The Weekend Australian, Russell said: “Participation funding for 2020-21 is yet to be confirmed by Sport Australia. As we approach the end of our current financial year and build our budgets for the next year, it is prudent of us to inform our member organisations on any potential changes to their current financial landscape for their planning purposes.’’

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Swimming Australia still has no major sponsor. Once the most commercially adored team in the country, it only managed to hold onto an Optus sponsorship for 18 months. Not helping, is that Australian broadcasters also baulked at world body FINA’s prohibitive rights TV coverage deal meaning the world championships were not broadcast last year.

Aside from 2013, it was the first time since 1986 the world titles were not broadcast in Australia.

Also in the leaked email Russell informed the state bodies that $650,000 in “participation funding”, money to grassroots swimming, may no longer go straight into the hands of state bosses to disperse as it traditionally does.

“Sport Australia has in the past provided Swimming Australia as the NSO $650,000 pa core funding, … For some time, there has been a review in place of this annual funding process, with likely changes pending.”

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Russell had previously sent an email discouraging stakeholders from talking about “funding” to the media in the wake of The Australian’s Games Over series detailing a decline in sports funding but an increase in spending on consultancies and huge executive wages at the AIS and Sport Australia.

Under Sport Australia chair John Wylie’s tenure, he has firmly pushed a new governance structure which has rankled some officials at club and state level of all sports.

In late 2018 Wylie wrote to national sports bodies asking them to commit to new governance reform called “One Management”.

Sports are now required to streamline their management and remove state-based layers and aim to establish a single operating model bringing together strategy, workforce and financial management.

“It’s an extraordinarily sinister agenda that is being prosecuted, it’s basic position is that the federated model of Australian sport needs to be destroyed,” said one sports official.

“It is Wylie’s thinking that it needs to be replaced by a unitary model which provides for none of the strengths that the federated model delivers. It essentially seeks to put the management of sporting bodies into the exclusive control of one or two people. A chief executive and chairman who are prepared to be compliant to the whims of the Australian Sports Commission chair.

“Under John Wylie, we have experienced a rapid fundamental corruption in the quality and the success and the value of Australian sport. It cannot be allowed to go on, unjudged.”

One Olympic sport administrator said if “participation” money was no longer given directly to state bodies it could jeopardise the talent at grassroots level.

“The future generations of swimmers come through competitions delivered by state associations and the clubs underneath them,” they said. “And if this $650,000 no longer goes into states, that nursery ground for producing people who loved competitive swimming and have the talent and the ability to achieve to the highest standards will be significantly diminished.”

A high-ranking administrator said Australian sport as we know it was under threat.

“While in the short term it might look like it is good for high-performance athletes in the long term and broader view from high performance all the way down to local communities becomes very bleak,” he said. “The truth is, unless you are part of the sexy side of the business, for example an Olympic gold medallist, you are of no interest, and that’s a disgrace, because sport is valuable to our whole community.”