George Bovell III

I will let you in­fer what it's re­al­ly all about af­ter read­ing be­low. Fi­na, the in­ter­na­tion­al gov­ern­ing body of swim­ming, div­ing, wa­ter po­lo, syn­chro­nised swim­ming and open wa­ter swim­ming has been mak­ing it ob­vi­ous what its pri­or­i­ties are.

In 2008, NBC bought the tele­vi­sion rights to cov­er the swim­ming events for the US mar­ket. Fi­na then sold out, al­low­ing this net­work to dic­tate the Olympic com­pe­ti­tion sched­ule in the in­ter­est of the Amer­i­can prime­time tele­vi­sion au­di­ence, and not the Olympic swim­mers. As the US au­di­ence fol­lowed the Michael Phelps quest for eight gold medals, the Olympic swim­mers went to bed at 2 am af­ter com­pet­ing in the pre­lim­i­nary rounds, and then woke up 5 am to pre­pare for the se­mi fi­nals and fi­nals at 9 am.

It's well known that the op­ti­mal time of day for hu­man per­for­mance due to the body's cir­ca­di­an rhythms is late af­ter­noon and not in the ear­ly morn­ing. The body's blood sug­ar and glyco­gen lev­els are low in the morn­ing af­ter fast­ing over the course of the night, and the body is less awake. Host­ing the Olympic fi­nals ear­ly in the morn­ing, made a mock­ery of the ath­letes' four year quests to be the best they could ever be, mak­ing the event more of a show and less of a com­pe­ti­tion.

Fran Crip­pen, the leg­endary Amer­i­can open wa­ter swim­mer, died trag­i­cal­ly in 2010 due to neg­li­gence on be­half of the or­gan­is­ers of the Fi­na ten km Open Wa­ter World Cup event in Abu Dhabi. The ten km race was swum in dan­ger­ous­ly warm wa­ter ex­ceed­ing 30�C. There was no safe­ty boat in sight when help was need­ed as Fran was vom­it­ing and cramp­ing due to de­hy­dra­tion and heat stroke, be­fore even­tu­al­ly drown­ing near the last buoy. The race con­tin­ued on.

For ob­vi­ous rea­sons, there have been se­ri­ous ob­jec­tions to the se­lec­tion of Abu Dhabi for the World Cup stop again this year. In light of this, a boy­cott has been or­gan­ised by the swim­mers in favour of at­tend­ing an­oth­er event to be held in the mem­o­ry of Fran Crip­pen, on the same date, March 13. Now, in an ef­fort to counter this boy­cott, Fi­na has tripled the to­tal avail­able prize mon­ey in Abu Dhabi from US$20,000 to US$60,000. To save face, the ob­vi­ous thing for Fi­na to do would have been to sup­port the Fran Crip­pen memo­r­i­al event, by throw­ing some of their blood mon­ey be­hind that.

Vladimir Putin was re­cent­ly pre­sent­ed the Fi­na Or­der. The Or­der is pre­sent­ed to "in­di­vid­u­als of high dig­ni­ty, who have achieved re­mark­able mer­it in the world of Aquat­ics."

For many in the swim­ming world this was quite con­tro­ver­sial, con­sid­er­ing the fact that Rus­sia is on the verge of be­ing sus­pend­ed from in­ter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tion, due to the num­ber of pos­i­tive dop­ing tests from its swim­mers. In June, Rus­sia's sports min­is­ter Vi­taly Mutko told the Russ­ian me­dia that "one or two more breach­es and the fed­er­a­tion could be sus­pend­ed al­to­geth­er."

It seems that any­thing goes when your coun­try is host­ing the Olympics. Brazil re­cent­ly suf­fered its 19th ath­lete an­ti-dop­ing penal­ty in aquat­ic sports since the coun­try won the right to host the Olympic Games in Rio 2016. The most re­cent in­ci­dent seems to be an­oth­er case of the "sup­ple­ments be­ing in­ad­ver­tent­ly con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed with mask­ing agents."

Joao Gomes Jr re­cent­ly in­curred a pos­i­tive dop­ing test re­sult af­ter one of his races at the World Short Course Cham­pi­onships where he won Gold Medals in three re­lays. In re­sponse to this, he was slapped on the wrist with a mi­nor ban of six months.

Fi­na then de­cid­ed that the re­sults of the re­lays would stand, al­low­ing Brazil to keep the gold medals. In out­rage, one elite in­ter­na­tion­al swim­mer vent­ed on Twit­ter: "Who­ev­er keeps putting mask­ing agents in Brazil­ian swim­mers pro­tein please stop, it's not fun­ny and they might get in trou­ble... might". Ac­cord­ing to the news site Swimvor­tex.com, the strik­ing things about the cas­es is that they are all in-com­pe­ti­tion, not a sin­gle out-of-com­pe­ti­tion pos­i­tive.

To top things off, Fi­na has once again to sold out to NBC, by go­ing against the ath­lete's best in­ter­ests by resched­ul­ing the com­pe­ti­tion times of the Rio 2016 Olympic swim­ming events to suit the Amer­i­can prime­time tele­vi­sion au­di­ence. The fi­nals ses­sion will now be­gin at 10 pm and the pre­lim­i­nar­ies at 1 pm. This means that ath­letes will be com­pet­ing at mid­night and will not get to bed un­til at least 3 am af­ter warm­ing down, mas­sage, the com­mute to the vil­lage and din­ner.

At the Fi­na World Cham­pi­onships and World Cup, the ath­letes are forced to ad­ver­tise the lo­gos of Fi­na's spon­sors on their bod­ies and are pro­hib­it­ed from wear­ing their own. How mar­ketable does that make the ath­letes? Who is Fi­na serv­ing?

�2 Fol­low George on Twit­ter: @george­bovell