Quote:
Originally Posted by OzSome
I was reading the Herald today and there's an article on the interview with the Swimming Coach Pierre Lafontaine. The guy seems content with the medal less olympic because 70% of Canadian swimmer had put in their personal best and 21 set national records. Wow, now I know why Canadian swim team haven't won a medal at all. It is because all the coach cares is having them to beat Canadian record or beat their personal best. This is the Olympic and the reason why they are there is to compete for the medals. I do not care if they are going against the best and the coach should not be happy with the outcome of this Olympic no medal for swim team.
The time to beat national record and personal best is before the Olympics. Maybe I am just annoyed or dissappointed that after a week of Olympics, we still have NO (zero) medal.
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I really don't understand all the anger over the swim results. Did you or anyone else really have different expectations? I thought they had an outside shot at one medal, most likely Hayden. But it seems like people have an expectation that the Canadians should have earned a fistful of medals at this point, which is completely unrealistic. Maybe the fault is on the media who, in their typical Canadian optimism, made it sound like all of our athletes are world-beaters.
After the debacle at the Athens Olympics, Swim Canada pretty much rebuilt from the ground up. High-level coaches were fired, athletes retired, and there was a real lack of young swimmers being developed, so the entire developmental system had to be restocked. It's not that the Canadian coaches don't care about medals, it's that medals at Beijing were simply unlikely; they've been fairly clear that they're trying to rebuild the program for London in 2012, and they've set firm medal expectations for that year. Results this year are vastly improved over Athens (not in terms of Canadian records and personal bests (which are meaningless in the context of the new swimsuits and fast pool), but in terms of where Canada ranks overall as a swimming nation when looking at a compilation of all individual results). I'm not happy about the results, but they're honestly pretty much exactly what I expected (if not slightly better).