Dean Boxall Urges Australia To Get Olympic Swimmers Like Ariarne Titmus Back In Pool By May

Boxall has called for Australia’s elite swimmers to be allowed access to a training pool in “the next two weeks”, saying they need to return “very soon” to prepare for the rescheduled Tokyo Olympic Games. He believed that if his swimmers only get back into full training by September, they will struggle to get back to best form in time for a Tokyo Games in July 2021. A return in July and August this year would still make things “difficult”.

His wish is one to be found far and wide on the wind across the world of water.

When Britain announced a wave of moves among national-team next-wavers on Monday, it effectively fast-forwarded plans to have the likes of Freya Anderson and others transit from local programs to Performance Centres with Olympic coaches.

That decision anticipates the probable opening, long before pools in general, of major training-centre facilities such as those at Loughborough and Bath universities. Their pools are not open to the general public, can continue to be closed to students and can be operated in controlled circumstances, including the numbers of swimmers in the pool at any one time, commensurate with efforts to ease lockdown measures.

Coaches and athletes the world over have been given a new date with the Tokyo Olympic Games, now due to start on July 23, 2021. Uncertainty does not only surround that new timeline: many did not yet know when national trials will be held nor do they have any clue as to when they will be able to return to daily training in water.

The likes of Katie Ledecky and Lilly King are reported to be training in backyard pools in the United States, while coach Bob Bowman said today that his team in Arizona is getting “very comfortable now with ‘I don’t know.’ ”  One of his charges, 2012 Olympic 200m freestyle champion Allison Schmidt is getting 45 minutes in the water three times a week at a local country club.

Boxall had to close his St Peters Western program a month ago as Australia imposed lockdown measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 and the International Olympic Committee and Tokyo 2020 organisers announced a year-long delay in staging the Olympics.

Australia is well down the league of nations that suffered the worst of the pandemic since the spread of the virus emerged from Wuhan in China. To date, 6,647 Australians have contracted the virus, which has caused 74 deaths in the country according to official figures, compared to 819,175 Americans, among whom 45,343 have lost their lives.

While wary of the threat posed by the pandemic, Boxall hopes that guidelines will soon be introduced to ensure elite swimming squad members can get back to pool training.

“I don’t want to be seen as someone who is not in touch with what is happening,” he told reporter Laine Clark of The Australian Associate Press (AAP). Dean Boxall added:

“I get it, people are dying. It is a terrible crisis. But you go to parks and you see stacks of people but we can’t get elite swimmers to swim in a pool. We want to get back in the water but we can’t, we are hamstrung. I am not talking about the whole swimming community in Australia returning to pools, just the elite guys.”

The longer Australia’s elite swimmers spent out of the pool, the longer it would take for them to get back in shape, the coach said, adding:

“They need to be in the water very soon, like the next two weeks, just to get the body back into a rhythm. Usually if you have a month off, it takes you two months to get back into it – it’s normally double. If you call it (pool training return) in September it is going to be a struggle. If you call it in July, August, it is still difficult – they need to get back in the water.”

Coronavirus survives in water for long periods of time, stretching to weeks and even months in some circumstances but the water itself in treated pools is not the issue. Rather, the risk comes down to the closeness of contact and hygiene habits in pools and open water.

Dean Boxall believed swimmers would not balk at any stringent conditions placed on them in return for permission to get back in the pool. He told AAP:

“Of course we want to be in line with government (coronavirus) guidelines, so give us heavy, strict protocols (at pool) and I promise you that we will adhere to them. If they told us we can only have one person an hour, or a person in every second lane, if this was the policy put in place we would follow it.”

Boxall said his squad members had “suffered a shock to the system” when the lockdown was imposed and Olympic plans blown off course. He said:

“Everyone grieved and dealt with it in a different way. But everyone has got through that stage. They are now going ‘I see a lot of people doing exercise, maybe we can get back into the water’.”