The sun spilled over the horizon just shy of 5am. Long before its cracking heat had turned the sky from crimson to blue, the pools, playing fields, cricket nets, tennis courts and the bay and beaches circling The Southport School (TSS) teemed with activity as hundreds of boys began their day in pursuit of sporting excellence to the cries of coaches and kookaburras and against a backdrop of lawns left lush by five days of freakish, yet welcome unseasonal summer rain.
It was a scene straight out of the Boys’ Own Book of Sporting Paradise. In the midst of it eight resident aliens are making waves in a corner of the Gold Coast that British Swimming has made its permanent home-from-home offshore headquarters. These teenagers are the class of 2012 – boys who will be men when their home Olympic Games roll into London a little over six years from now.
There are no dark, dreary mornings and evenings here, no donning thick coats, scarves and gloves as a prerequisite to facing a chill that could cost them valuable weeks out of training each year, no longing to stay in bed. Every weekday they rise at dawn, train from 5.30 to 8am, change into their uniforms on the poolside, walk 100 yards to the breakfast hall ahead of lessons, which end with a further two hours of tutelage in the pool before dinner and welcome rest.
For the six weeks leading up to the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, the young hopefuls shared the pool with British home-nation teams. Courtesy of their presence, of British Swimming’s Sweetenham-inspired contract with TSS, it cost not a single penny for the national teams to use a 12-lane 50m facility, the quality and setting of which knocks anything Britain has to offer into a cocked swim cap. A sign on the gate reads: ‘Private pool: no public access’.
GOODWILL
The contract agreed between Bill Sweetenham, Britain’s performance director, and Greg Wain, headmaster at The Southport School, is weighted in goodwill. ‘It’s centred round the boys going to school and boarding here. It costs less than £10,000 for each of them a year,’ said Chris Nesbit, resident Britain coach at Southport. ‘The cost of that at home would be entirely prohibitive.’
Nesbit stands in front of his poolside office, in which a bemused staff member recently found the head coach sniggering like a schoolboy. ‘I was looking out of the window across the pools. It dawned on me just how amazing this is. Less than a mile that way there’s the Southport Club pool with an eight-lane 50m pool, 25m and and 33m pools. Then there’s St Hilda’s over this way with a nine-lane 50m pool and a six-lane 25m pool. Miami, where Grant Hackett (Olympic 1500m champion) trains is a couple of miles down the coast and…’ He stops short before concluding: ‘There are more 50m pools in a 10-mile radius here than in the whole of Britain.’
FIERCELY COMPETITIVE
But it is not just about water and weather. Nesbit was instrumental in the last round of talent identification that helped to choose the right raw materials. The most obvious thing about the British boarders is their size – they average 6ft 2in and two, aged 16 and 17, are over 6ft 4in. When their chests and frames fill as they reach prime in their early 20s, they will cut impressive figures. Their water skills border on sublime. They are the second wave to board here. They look Australian.
‘The environment reflects an Olympic village: sparse living conditions, basic food, noise, having to get used to lots of people around you, and international travel,’ says Nesbit. ‘If Bill Sweetenham had that in mind when he booked this, he got it absolutely right.’
The visitors have helped The Southport School win the fiercely competitive Australian public sector swimming championship trophy for the last two years after an 80-year drought. On the eve of the Commonwealth Games they lost the crown by a point to Nudgee College in Brisbane after a disputed disqualification in the medley relay cost them a 10-point lead at an event watched by a 7000-strong crowd.
Among Nesbit’s charges are 17-year-old Adam Brown, a 6ft 5in athlete whose great-grandfather played for Newcastle United, and Marco Loughran, born in London and no longer distracted by playing basketball for Surrey or playing in a punk-rock school band back home. His ambition: ‘To win an Olympic gold medal. Hopefully that will be in 2012 when I should be in my prime.’ Like his teammates, he lists no domestic heroes, his inspiration drawn from no lesser mortals than Michael Phelps and Ian Thorpe.
‘I felt we needed bigger people, more athletic, with the right attributes,’ said Nesbit, whose most successful international charge, Katy Sexton, Britain’s first ever individual female world champion in 2003, is based almost permanently on the Gold Coast, her boyfriend having secured a job at TSS as cricket coach. ‘Take Chris Fox. He’s 6ft 4in, solid at 87kg, just 16 and he takes a size 14 shoe. He’s the right raw material and he’s one of the best competitors I’ve ever come across.’
Nesbit stops to tell Jamie Broom to tidy up his collar and Fox to pull his socks up, literally. Sweetenham will use this environment to provide his seniors with an ‘endless summer’ ahead of Beijing 2008. The majority of the national team and others will have access to TSS and surrounding pools from September to March for the next two years to rid them of the need to endure too much winter weather as they prepare for the world championships, back in Melbourne in March 2007, and the Olympic Games three summers away.
It was time for British coaches to take their place in the sun. ‘British coaches have for many years had to work in adversity, with poor conditions,’ said Sweetenham, an Australian who describes his adopted country as ‘idea-rich but resource-poor’.
He added: ‘British Swimming has a programme unparalleled in the world, one in which we can provide great facilities in a competitive environment, outdoor long-course training at minimum cost and a chance to minimise winter illness that keeps swimmers out of the water too long back
in Britain.’
ALTERNATIVE TO THE US
The Southport School, which had housed and honed a first wave of talent with the likes of David Carry at the helm of a squad coached by Dave Calleja, is providing an environment which precludes the need for British swimmers to flee to the United States. Simon Burnett, Commonwealth champion over 100m freestyle, is based in Arizona and Sweetenham is fully supportive of that and the work of the coaching team there, led by Frank Busch. ‘Simon has thrived out there, it’s a great set-up. We wholeheartedly support him. But he’s one of the exceptions to the rule. Many don’t thrive,’ said Sweetenham.
Nesbit intends to make the set-up at TSS a place where his young charges thrive. ‘There are homesickness issues when the boys first come out. That’s natural and we cope with it. The people here are used to dealing with those issues with Australian kids who travel a long way from home within the country to be here.’
And what does he hope to get out of TSS? ‘I want it to be the best male youth programme in the world. We want to be supplying swimmers who make the Olympic podium in 2012. There are lots of steps in between but we want to lay down the foundations for that outcome.’
Four more boys will join the squad in time for the start of the new Australian academic year next January and Nesbit is keen to emphasise the importance of home coaches in the development ‘of all this talent – they are not forgotten, far from it’.
To glance along the lanes of the TSS pool is a heartwarming experience. In four lanes, eight boys go about their training, their skills look excellent, their work ethic strong. If they can’t make it here, chances are they wouldn’t make it anywhere.
Courtesy of Swimming Times Magazine
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