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All 3 stations TV6 C and CNC3 showing swimming and none sailing even though T&T have an athlete in it
George Bovell blames Fina for making Olympics ‘a glorified reality TV show’
• Veteran Olympian expresses anger against swimming authority
• Bovell: ‘The Olympics is now a spectacle, not a competition’
George Bovell
Andy Bull at the Aquatics Stadium
Thursday 11 August 2016 15.58 EDT Last modified on Thursday 11 August 2016 20.05 EDT
This is George Bovell’s fifth and final Olympics. After 16 years he is done, with swimming and the people who run it. “I came into the Olympics, my first Olympics, believing in the ancient legacy of heroic sporting glory,” Bovell said after his final race in the 50m freestyle. “And now I am leaving after my fifth Olympics seeing it for what it is, sadly a media franchise.”
He says Fina’s approach to anti-doping “has made it very, very obvious that this is really a glorified reality TV show”, adding: “They have shown the world that the Olympics is now a spectacle, not a competition. And I think it cheapens everything.”
Bovell is a good man who has given much of his adult life to swimming. And at the end of it all Fina has left him feeling “so disillusioned that I feel like: ‘Why fight against it?’”
Occasional fans may not know Bovell well but he is hugely respected within the sport. The most successful swimmer ever to come out of the Caribbean, he finished third behind Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte in the 200m medley at Athens in 2004.
He then parlayed his success into his charity work. He runs free swimming clinics for kids in Trinidad and raises money for a malaria charity in Uganda. Bovell is everything an idealist would want an Olympian to be. There is even an internet film of him rescuing a drowning deer from a wild river while he was on a cliff-jumping trip in Trinidad.
Bovell believes that the swimmers are being “let down by the people at the top of the sport”. He knows he is competing against dopers. “I see the cheating going on. I see the people with terrible technique swimming incredible times and the people dropping lots of time late in their careers.” He says that the swimmers are being exploited by Fina. “The people at the bottom, like us, we just feel like gladiators. Ancient Roman slave gladiators.”
He is not the only one who feels this way – far from it. Bovell says there are a lot of conversations just like this going on away from the press. “There is a general consensus that we have been let down and we are fed up.” It’s just that he, like Lilly King, is one of the few willing to speak out about it.
While Bovell was upset about the mess Fina has made of its anti-doping policies, another freestyler, Sidni Hoxha from Albania, was angry about the many mistakes it had made in processing the Olympic entry times. This is an issue affecting the other end of the sport, away from the semis and finals. Hoxha’s personal best in the 50m free is 22.93sec, which he set at the world championships in Kazan last year. But when he arrived in Rio he found that his time had been registered as 29.93sec, a full seven seconds slower.
“I was looking for my name on the lists,” he said. “I saw the guys I knew I was going to race and then I kept on looking, in the previous heat and the one before that, and I went all the way to the end. I was scared I wasn’t even there.”
Hoxha’s is the 18th similar mistake Fina has made in these Olympics. Some were later corrected but Hoxha’s was not. So he was seeded in the very first heat, alongside swimmers whose personal bests were 10 seconds slower than his over the distance.
“According to Fina, they mixed the times up, but my coach wasn’t in the technical meeting, so they blamed it on him,” he says. “I tried to argue with them but they kept on sending me back to the same regulation.”
This is his third and final Olympics. He had spent the past two years training for it while simultaneously trying to find a job after graduating from college. Like Bovell he is feeling pretty disillusioned. “It may seem a small thing,” he says, but “you look down the line and think, ‘Who knows? If that’s what happened to me...’”
George Bovell blames Fina for making Olympics ‘a glorified reality TV show’
• Veteran Olympian expresses anger against swimming authority
• Bovell: ‘The Olympics is now a spectacle, not a competition’
George Bovell
Andy Bull at the Aquatics Stadium
Thursday 11 August 2016 15.58 EDT Last modified on Thursday 11 August 2016 20.05 EDT
This is George Bovell’s fifth and final Olympics. After 16 years he is done, with swimming and the people who run it. “I came into the Olympics, my first Olympics, believing in the ancient legacy of heroic sporting glory,” Bovell said after his final race in the 50m freestyle. “And now I am leaving after my fifth Olympics seeing it for what it is, sadly a media franchise.”
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