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'You call yourself the FINA family, so how come you treat your children so badly'
Article By Craig Lord. The following article appeared in edited versions in The Sunday Times in Britain and the Sport & Politics magazine.
Swimbledon. Strawberries and cream on ice. Swimming as a pro-sport paying salaries of more than $1m a year? The vision of Konstantin Grigorishin, a power-sector tycoon from Ukraine, does not stop at the International Swimming League (ISL) he intends to launch next year: he wants to see the revolution in the pool extended to an overhaul of the Olympic Movement that would see champions of the Games earn $3m a gold, $2m for silver and $1m for bronze.
In a sport populated by what even the World Swimming Coaches Association has described as “the downtrodden victims of modern slavery”, Grigorishin may turn out to be what swimmers have been waiting for: a Kerry Packer for swimming.
Evoking memories of the cricket revolution of 1977, the financier of ISL, head of its Advisory Board and a man whose wealth Forbes estimates at more than US$1 billion, including a $300m art collection, intends to sue FINA if they stand in the way of turning swimmers into highly paid sportsmen and women with union representation and the standard set of rights workers are entitled to.
Little wonder that the athletes are queuing up: 50, including Peaty and 11 other Olympic champions and 12 World champions, have already pledged their support for the League. Peaty is a prime example of the lot of swimmers. Take away private sponsorship and he is among those eligible to be at the top of the funding tree in Britain on a maximum grant of £28,000 a year.
The irony of Peaty's situation is that the success he has worked for in the pool has attracted enough private sponsorship to take him over the maximum £70,000-income threshold for eligibility for funding. In that sense, he gets training-facility and coaching support via sports authorities in Britain but no direct income whatsoever. He is not considered to have a job. He is, in effect, a volunteer swimmer in status even though he is a professional in workload and dedication.
In an interview for The Sunday Times, Grigorishin scoffs. Swimmers, he says are treated “like laboratory rats, with risks to their health" and with “no salary, social guarantees, no welfare, no medical and life insurance, no pension rights, no insurance.”
The head of the Energy Standard Group has registered ISL in Switzerland on the doorstep of the International Olympic Committee and FINA, the global swim federation. He is heartened but not surprised, he says, to find athletes queuing up for a new start while Olympic and swimming bureaucrats are lining up to crush a challenge to their “a self-serving monopoly”.
Moves to stop Grigorishin have begun in earnest. On November 15, a League test event offering prize money of almost $1m and scheduled for Turin on December 20-21 was cancelled after FINA threatened whole-nation suspensions and financial penalties against the hosts, the Italian swimming federation, and all other member nations whose swimmers had signed up to race unless they punished their own athletes with domestic suspensions.
FINA issued a statement citing monopoly rules that bar “relationships with non-affiliated members” and because “no approval has been sought” to host the event in Turin.
That, says Grigorishin, not only paints a false picture but fails to mention that he was asked to pay $2 million for approval in the course of several talks with FINA in the past year. They ended in September when he met three members of the federation’s executive, director Cornel Marculescu, and vice-presidents Hussain Al-Musallam, the Kuwaiti delegate cited as a "co-conspirator" in the U.S. Justice Department case of Guam football official Richard Lai, and Dale Neuburger, the USA's top-table delegate and a director of TSE Consulting, an outfit that has won lucrative contracts organising FINA events.
A source said “things did not go well from the moment Mr. Grigorishin asked Marculescu ‘you call yourself the FINA family, so how come you treat your children so badly’.”
Grigorishin told FINA he was happy, beyond Turin, to discuss a 10-year multi-million-dollar deal in which the governing body would be recognised as the global regulator of the sport, without having a say in details such as the levels of pay pledged to athletes.
What happened? “Nothing happened. We sent our last letter to them in September and since then have heard nothing except about the threats to swimmers and federations,” said Grigorishin.
Frustration tangible when he speaks of FINA's approach, the head of the League says: "What is holding us back? Sheer inertia of minds and the resistance from international federations, specifically from FINA due to their conservative mindsets and possibly some degree of malicious intent, which I don’t even like to think about."
When he talks of athletes being treated like "rats", he is talking about a culture in which the nature of the show demands the athlete to give their all - but in return for a medal and "pennies", not a fair share of the revenue their efforts generate.
The World Championships and Olympic Games cycle, he believes, has created a culture and environment in which “the rarity of major competition once every two or four years means that athletes are treated as expendables; the next Olympic cycle will bring new ones. That also manifests itself in terms of the athlete having no institutional voice unless they are chosen by the institution; they are not reckoned with as individuals, unlike NBA players, for example. They are expendable. Not even slaves, just expendable because at the end of their career they are gone and new ones come along.”
As he speaks, the shadow world comes to mind: the athlete comes and goes; the bureaucrats stay ... and stay... and stay... and stay, one might say. And that for decades with no maximum terms in office and a budget model that devotees bigger sums - sometimes far bigger - on bureaucrats and their luxury lifestyles than the money allocated to athletes. Allocated is an important word: what actually reaches athletes in pay and direct support often falls well shy of the advert, in both 'developed' and 'developing' worlds.
Back to Grigorishin and the picture he paints of coaches and systems preparing swimmers (and others) for very rare peak performances and the cultural expectation that to get the biggest medals (and attract the biggest private sponsorship in the aftermath), they will need to exceed previous human limits. Add to that equation a weak anti-doping regime that allows cheats to return to racing, applies different suspensions to different athletes for the same or similar offences and, as witnessed in swimming, tends to treat "stars" more leniently than the unknown swimmer.
As FINA director Cornel Marculescu - acting as promoter and policeman, a conflict of interest that the World Swimming Coaches Association, its national affiliates and many athletes around the world have said must be brought to an end - put it in 2015: "You can't condemn the stars for a minor doping offence".
Grigorishin argues that the very people setting doping rules also encourage athletes to break world records, to exceed human limits. "In that way, we see that they also motivate athletes to cheat," says Grigorishin. "If you ask most athletes why they should not take doping, they [often] don't tell you the most important thing: it destroys their health."
“If the current paradigm of high performance sport defines ‘the result’ as the necessity to push the athlete to levels of performance that often exceed the natural limits of the human body - this is an indirect motivation for the athlete to resort to various performance enhancers (not only substances), in other words doping, which could be extremely harmful to a person’s health.”
“Olympic sport is built on the assumption that the athlete should deliver a most remarkable result once in four years and his/her entire sports career banks on achieving that particular result. In that context the so-called “fight against doping” sentiment coming from the IOC is sheer hypocrisy and lip service."
He believes that members of the Global Association of International Sports Federations, such as FINA, are not upholding the statutes they are signed up to, paying lip service to such mission statements as “Sport should not be judged to pose an undue risk to the health and safety of its athletes or participants. The sport proposed should in no way be harmful to any living creature.“
“If the athlete risks his life and health, then where is insurance, compensation, social security, like in any other high-risk occupations (test pilots, rescue workers, military, etc)? Where is the explanation of the potential risk for the athlete, especially young ones.Grigorishin is particularly critical of the IOC, international and domestic federations for allowing what he calls the “ridiculous” Youth Olympics. "Children have to have a childhood," says Grigorishin. "They have to enjoy the sport; they have to enjoy the competition not feel pressure when you are a 15-year-old girl or boy there is huge pressure to perform for your country. It destroys their mentality. It's a form of conditioning. They don't have a real childhood because they have training twice a day six days a week and preparing for one big moment to make a team and race at the Olympics.
Konstantin surrounded by participants of the 2017 Junior Energy for Swim Cup
His Energy Standard Swimming Club nurtures young swimmers from Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere. He wants the program to be a safe haven for talent that must be given time to grow. "Especially in the post-Soviet system, that destroyed a lot of talents by promoting rapid development. They accelerate their development and by the time they are 16-17 years old they look like veterans. When these kids come to us, some of them have much more injuries than 30-year-old Olympic champions. Kids bodies are very fragile. It is easy to destroy them."
Add all that and more together and takes in the money, says Grigorishin: "It seems to me like a science experiment in which we push young people to break limits of moving through water but in return those athletes have no way of earning a salary or a decent living from their work. Compared to other pro athletes - because swimmers put in a professional day of work - they earn pennies as salaries, do not have insurance or pension, do not have many rights at all vis-a-vis governing bodies, enjoy limited engagement with fans, very limited exposure to media and limited media nor even sponsorship exposure.
"That paradigm is historic and has existed for decades: it is still very much supported and incentivised by swimming governing bodies and bureaucrats with no motivation or plan to change. We need to shift that paradigm."
Another swimmer, who preferred not to be named, noted: “That British Swimming won’t public back the Italians and swimmers against FINA makes a mockery of their claim to support good governance. If they stood together with athletes, all this could end overnight."
How? "A professional league in a team format that would mean swimmers are seen more often in an environment that does not demand they break a world record every time they race, is the only way to ensure fair distribution of profits; promoting images and image rights/ reputations/ help swimmers transition for life after an active career, post career employment assistance programs. ISL is ready to take the lead in creation of the Union.It is about to register the USA Swimming League as an offshoot of the parent body in readiness for the start of the league with a 12-team tournament to begin in August next year and run until November. That timing will put the league in direct competition with the FINA World Cup… The Union will be in place for the start of the League - and LOI will be converted to agreements. A selection of swimmers will join the ISL board. The Union will protect athletes rights to compete in the ISL and protect athlete interests in negotiations between the governing bodies and the ISL." A request for comment and questions put to FINA went unanswered, the international federation simply issuing a long statement that included: “...aquatics athletes are at the core of FINA’s activities. They fully deserve all our respect”. The buzz on social media alone in the 24 hours after the Turin decision suggested that swimmers do not feel respected by FINA. The international federation, says Grigorishin, “intends to hold on to its 110-year monopoly” despite a European Union Competition Authority anti-trust ruling last year in which the International Skating Union (ISU) was told to change rules granting itself a global monopoly in the face of complaints from athletes threatened with punishment if the raced to earn money at an event the ISU did not approve of. The EU competition authority has indicated that it will roll the same ruling out to other sports on receipt of complaints. One complaint is already being prepared in Britain. Others may follow. In a letter to federations and swimmers expressing regret over the cancellation of the Turin event, Paolo Barelli, the head of the European and Italian swimming federations and a vice-president of FINA at loggerheads with his fellow board members, noted the challenge FINA has opened itself up to: "We understand that this may be considered as anti-competitive conduct, which is not permitted under European Union law, which, as a European Federation, FIN must comply with." He added: "FIN can only assume that FINA's true motive if to safeguard its dominant position as the sole and exclusive license holder of aquatic sports ... it is using its power to restrict competition, which is to the detriment of the Athletes' individual earning capacity." The ISL responded to FINA's move by saying it intended to press on with innovation and change in swimming: “It is with much regret, that we have to let you know that Italian Swimming Federation was just forced to cancel the Energy for Swim 2018. Best world-class athletes were excited to meet in Turin this December to celebrate swimming and to partake in the unforgettable two-day show. ISL is very sorry and predicts a groundswell of discontent in the swimming community and beyond. The ISL pledges to be at the forefront of change and innovation that we can ensure together for the sake of our beloved sport.” There was more fight in Grigorishin's words: FINA "has never been in a real fight with real people," he said. "They have just bullied kids with no experience. I have told them openly that I am ready for a big litigation process.” In 1977, Packer took the ICC to the High Court in London and won, his “Circus”, though short-lived, reverberating yet, years after fast bowler Dennis Lillee said “we’re not getting a fair share of the pie”. Peaty feels the same in the pool today and fired a broadside at FINA after the Turin event in words that his own domestic federation may wish to sit up and note given efforts to discourage coaches from letting their swimmers risk suspension by challenging FINA's resolve.
“Athletes should be at the heart of any decision made by our governing body,” said Peaty. “I think this is the wrong decision and it will galvanise the swimmers, not break them.”
Another swimmer, who preferred not to be named, noted: “That British Swimming won’t public back the Italians and swimmers against FINA makes a mockery of their claim to support good governance. If they stood together with athletes, all this could end overnight."
