Away from the spotlight of stars such as Adam Peaty, Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky, some nations will not be sending their best swimmers to Rio, while leading figures call for wholesale reform of the sport

As far back as she can remember, Becky Kamau wanted to be an Olympian. She was seven years old when she won her first swimming race, in her school pool in Nairobi. Four years later, her family moved to Birmingham, partly so she could have access to better training facilities. “It was a big risk for us,” says her father, Kiruri, “because we were so settled.” It worked, because Becky did. Most days she wakes at 4am so she can do two hours of swimming before school. The sacrifices she has made paid off when, in 2015, she became the first female Kenyan swimmer ever to achieve a ‘B’ qualifying time for the Olympics. She did it in the 200m individual medley. A year later, she got another, in the 200m breaststroke. So far as Becky knew, her dream was about to come true. She was going to Rio.

Becky is only 16 but already holds seven Kenyan national records. Her success should also be the success of the Kenya Swimming Federation, and the sport’s governing body, Fina, which makes great play of its commitment to developing swimming around the world. But it is not. Because Becky has not been picked for the Olympics. Kenya’s best male swimmer, Issa Mohamed, has also been left out. Instead, the KSF is sending two athletes who are both on Fina scholarships. Neither has as many Fina ranking points as the swimmers who have been omitted, and neither has come remotely close to achieving an Olympic qualifying time. The one female swimmer Kenya is sending to Rio has a personal best that is six seconds slower than the Olympic ‘B’ standard.

Everyone agrees that Becky Kamau is Kenya’s best swimmer. But a ‘B’ qualifying time is not necessarily enough in itself to get her to the Olympics. Only an ‘A’ time guarantees entry. Athletes with ‘B’ times have to be invited to compete by Fina. There are a limited number of places, and Fina says Kamau’s time was not good enough to merit an invitation. The KSF nominated its two Olympic swimmers under Fina’s universality rule, which allows countries without any ‘A’ standard swimmers to send two individuals, one man and one woman, to compete at major championships. They say that Kamau is ineligible for a universality place because she did not compete in the world championships in Kazan last year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Becky Kamau will not be among those competing in Rio. Photograph: Tristan Potter/The Guardian

Which is true. Becky swam at the world junior championships in Singapore instead, where she made the semi-finals. The two championships were taking place in the same month, and Becky’s parents pay all her expenses. So she could not do both. Becky says no one had told them the decision would affect her Olympic qualification. Fina says that its Olympic selection rules are “complex” and that the KSF is in the right. However, there are at least three swimmers competing at the Rio Games under the universality rule even though, like Becky, they didn’t compete in Kazan.

Kenya’s leading male swimmer, Mohamed, was entered for the world championships and still was not selected for Rio. Mohamed took his case to Kenya’s sports disputes tribunal. The tribunal felt unable to change the Olympic selection because, according to reports, “a reverse decision would have another athlete disappointed on actions of other parties”. However, it did rule: “Kenyan swimmers eligible for universality places were not made aware of the criteria used to forward names to Fina.” The KSF has been punished “for operating on unclear grounds” and will bear the appellant’s costs.

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The KSF has said that the Fina scholarships “helped” when it was deciding who to pick for Rio. But the process the KSF uses to decide who gets these Fina scholarships is opaque. There is no readily available information on what the criteria are for earning one. A number of sources, including three leading coaches, are concerned that the process lacks transparency and, at a minimum, requires further explanation.

In the United States, several officials have called on USA Swimming to demand that Fina launches an investigation into the way in which the scholarships are distributed and the team selections are made. So far no action has been taken. The KSF declined to comment. Fina had not responded at the time of going to press.

It has been reported in the Kenyan press that there “are serious issues with transparency, inclusion and open communication from KSF to her respective stakeholders”. Kiruri Kamau says “nobody knows how these two were picked” and certainly both he and his daughter would like an explanation. Kiruri is not afraid to speak his mind. Others are, and with reason. In 2008 Kiruri took issue with the KSF when, he claims, it overcharged Becky for flights and accommodation. “They started disqualifying her in every gala we went to,” he claims. “Then I was told: ‘That’s what happens when you start complaining, you get punished.’” Kiruri believes “nobody cares about developing the sport”. He fears “the people running the KSF are there for the money, the money that comes from the stakeholders, the swimmers, the parents, and the sponsors, and of course the money that comes from Fina”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Issa Mohamed competes at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. He, like Becky Kamau, will not be in Rio. Photograph: Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

The president of the KSF is Ben Ekumbo. He is also a vice-president of Kenya’s National Olympic Committee, both the secretary and treasurer of the Confederation of African Swimming Associations, and he serves on the Fina Bureau. In 2005 a former treasurer of the KSF raised questions about why funds sent by Fina to assist Kenya’s participation in the world championships in Japan had allegedly remained in a bank account when swimmers were being asked to pay for their own trips. Ekumbo said he had transferred the money to Japan and denied any wrongdoing.

More recently, the vice-chairman of the KSF during the London 2012 Games was Martin Dunford. “I was a very unhappy vice-chairman because there wasn’t enough financial disclosure,” he says. Dunford was voted out at the next election. Dunford’s sons, Jason and David, were both successful swimmers. “At the time when Jason and David should have been eligible for scholarships, KSF gave them one between two.” Dunford claims that even then the scholarship money never came through from the KSF, and that he had to go to Fina and ask them to send the funds directly to his family.

Whatever has happened here, one thing is absolutely clear. A 16-year-old girl who has sacrificed her school work and social life for her swimming has been badly let down by the men and women who run her sport. Becky says that she has grown used to this kind of treatment. She claims that in 2013 she won seven events at the trials for the Commonwealth Games, but was then told that the team had largely been picked before the trials started. Her father says that the KSF added Becky to the squad after he spent two weeks in Nairobi campaigning for her inclusion. There has been a campaign this time too, articles in the Kenyan press, petitions sent to the president and the sports minister. They made no difference. Becky believes “it is clear now I was never going to go to Rio. Because they never wanted me to go.”

‘THE WATER HAD TURNED BRIGHT GREEN’

In September 2012 Nairobi hosted the African Swimming Championships. “It was a fiasco,” recalls Dunford. The pool was so dirty that the water had turned bright green. Swimmers dived in and seemed to disappear from sight. Fina’s president, Julio Maglione, and its executive director Cornel Marculescu both attended. Dunford asks: “Why didn’t they take a stand?”

He believes it was because of Ekumbo’s standing in the African swimming community and its political power as a voting bloc within Fina. “All his committees idolise him because he gets them trips to championships.” Dunford says. “They get to fly business class, they get to stay in nice hotels, they get to attend banquets, they get nice little goodie bags. I’ve been to those banquets and seen them run around and pick up those bags off empty chairs with glee. And you think: ‘For goodness sake, this isn’t really what it is about, is it?’”

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John Leonard is executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association. He is not shocked by Becky Kamau’s story, because he has heard many more just like it. “This is going on all over the world,” he says. Before Rio, Leonard has had similar complaints from swimmers in three other countries. “Naturally they are not willing to have their names used,” says Leonard, “since they will then be severely punished by their national governing bodies for bringing those NGBs into ‘disrepute’.”

After a lifetime in swimming, Leonard has become Fina’s leading critic. He is of the opinion that Fina “needs to be replaced” because “they are not fit for any purpose, whether it be running elite swimming or developing swimming around the world”. He says “as cynical as you can possibly be about this, that’s correct and accurate. I believe.”

And here is the rub. If this is how swimming works at the lower levels, what is going on in its highest reaches? Because for Leonard and many other top coaches and swimmers around the world, the abuses committed in the developing nations are only a side issue.

In October 2014, Fina’s president Maglione attended an international sports conference in Russia. Maglione was there to present the Fina Order to Vladimir Putin. It is an award, it was explained in a press release, which is “granted to a head of state or individuals of high dignity, who have achieved remarkable merit in the world of aquatics”. Putin’s contribution – Maglione thanked him for his “personal involvement” – was to have Russia host the 2015 world championships in Kazan.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vladimir Putin (right) at the Fina world championships with Fina president Julio Maglione (left). Photograph: Matthias Hangst/Getty Images

A fortnight ago, the McLaren report into Russia’s state-sponsored doping regimen revealed that those same championships had been compromised by corrupt practices at the Moscow anti-doping laboratory. Fina was warned about corruption in the Russia Anti-Doping Agency long before the championships began. Leonard wrote about it himself in a series of emails to Fina’s executive director, Marculescu. “[Rusada] are clearly complicit in the doping of Russian athletes,” Leonard wrote in February 2014. “It appears to myself and many others, that the legitimacy of the Fina world championships this summer is at great risk.”

Marculescu replied: “I would like to confirm that we have excellent working relations with Rusada and we co-ordinate with them our doping control programme in Russia. Please be sure that Fina will continue with its policy, fighting against doping.”

“The money bags are attached to Mr Putin’s hips,” says Leonard. “It’s not a matter of whether they have trust in the Russians. They don’t give a crap. They are getting paid by the Russians.”

Among all the major Olympic sports federations, Fina has been the strongest supporter of Russia, and fiercest critic of the McLaren report. Two days before the report was released, Maglione issued a statement saying that its credibility had been undermined by “breaches of confidentiality”, and accusing the World Anti-Doping Agency of “a drive behind the scenes … for the total ban of Russia”.

After the report came out, Maglione, an 80-year-old Uruguayan, added that Wada had “exceeded its powers” by recommending that Russia be suspended.

Fina says that it has stepped up its anti-doping programme. In the last six months the governing body has conducted “1,817 unannounced out-of-competition tests on the first 10 athletes of each swimming event at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games”. Since the McLaren report, it has also decided to “retest all the samples of Russian athletes collected at the Kazan 2015 Fina world championships”. It has also suspended seven Russian swimmers from the Olympics. One is Yulia Efimova, who won the 100m breaststroke in Kazan after serving a 16-month suspension for failing a drug test. After she won that gold, Efimova failed another drugs test, this time for meldonium. Despite that, Fina had initially cleared her to compete in Rio after taking advice from Wada. But after the McLaren report, the IOC excluded all Russian athletes who had been sanctioned for doping from the Rio Olympics. So Efimova was deselected. She has launched an appeal at the court of arbitration for sport.

Efimova’s is not the only curious case. China’s Sun Yang, the reigning Olympic 400m and 1,500m freestyle champion, was given a three-month ban for doping in 2014. It was hushed up until after he had completed his sentence. Despite that, Fina named Sun Yang as the outstanding male swimmer of the 2015 world championships.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russia’s Yuliya Efimova poses with the gold medal she won in the women’s 100m breaststroke at the 2015 world championships in Kazan. Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty Images

Leonard’s is not a lone voice. Jon Rudd, based in Plymouth, is one of the leading coaches in the world. He believes “the Efimova case is the tip of the iceberg” and “what we’re seeing above the water is significantly smaller than what is going on below the water”. The spotlight has been on Efimova, but Rudd believes she is just “a representative of the system that doesn’t work”. He contrasts Fina’s attitude towards the Efimova case (which he characterises as “let’s keep our heads down and hope it goes away”) to the alacrity with which they sought to attack the McLaren report. He points out that when Maria Sharapova tested positive for meldonium the International Tennis Federation took two months to decide to ban her for two years. Efimova’s positive test for the same drug became public knowledge a week later but her fate remains unclear.

Everywhere Rudd travels, he has the same conversations. “Everybody feels the same as me,” he says. But many are afraid to speak up. “There’s a lot of people who I think are just so worried about what would happen if they caused waves.”

Bill Sweetenham is not one of them. Like Leonard, Sweetenham was a coach during the 1980s and 90s when first the East Germans and then the Chinese were running state-sponsored doping programmes. Despite that, he believes the doping problem in swimming now is “worse than it has ever been”.

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Sweetenham asks: “If you were a swimmer, how safe would you feel, how secure, that you were competing in a fair and equal sport?” He worries that, in the eyes of many, Fina’s closeness to Russia risks making them look “guilty by association.” But, like Rudd, Sweetenham is also clear that “I don’t think the Russians are the only ones cheating. I think there are other countries as well.” He believes some are running systematic doping programmes, and others are simply turning a blind eye to corrupt coaches and swimmers. “I would like to be able to say, to believe, that our sport is clear, transparent, and fair,” Sweetenham says. “I can’t do any of those things the way it stands at the moment.” He wants Fina to agree to a “full, independent, and transparent audit”. It is a hope, not an expectation.

Rudd believes this is a watershed moment. “How can Fina, in its current form, with its current members acting the way they do, how can they honestly put their hands up and say: ‘We are the custodians of your sport?’” he asks. “Because we don’t feel that way. Hard-working athletes who are clean don’t feel that way. Hard-working coaches working with clean athletes don’t feel that way.” Fina, Rudd believes, “has very much lost its way. Its credibility and respect could not be any lower.” The organisation “needs taking apart and putting back together again”. What happens next may, in fact, be far more radical than that.

COACHES DRIVEN BY THEIR DESPAIR

Last September, 650 members of the American Swimming Coaches Association gathered at a hotel in Cleveland. Sweetenham gave a speech. In it, he asked everyone in the room to stand up if they believed their sport was “risk-free, clean, doping-free, transparent, serving athletes”. No one moved. That same week those 650 unanimously voted to support the World Swimming Association, a new body that aims to take over the running of the sport. The main organisers of the WSA are Leonard, and the president of the WSCA, George Block. But as the journalist Craig Lord wrote on his excellent site SwimVortex this is not just the work of a few ornery old men, but “a powerful wave building, a clear commitment to replace Fina”. Leonard, Block and their colleagues are being driven by their despair at what their sport has become.

The WSA began by hiring an international law firm to map out a skeleton structure for the organisation. “They came back with a whole bunch of questions,” says Block. “And we said: ‘Let’s ask the world those questions.’” So the WSA has been open-sourcing its constitution. Right now it is in its “12th or 13th iteration”. It plans to launch it at a conference after the Games. In the meantime, coaches from around the world have been signing up as members on the WSA’s new website. Block says they want to set up a credible organisation to replace Fina.

Leonard knows that the coaches alone cannot make this happen. “The only power that can stop Fina is the athletes themselves,” he says. He has been organising a Professional Swimmers Association, a union “like the PGA in golf”, which will co-exist with the WSA.

The plan is to launch a new series of major swimming events, “a four- to six-event world circuit” which will run alongside the Olympics and world championships. Leonard, Block, and several others have been in discussions with around a dozen of the world’s top swimmers. They did not want to put the names involved on record before the Olympics, but confirmed that they included “all the people TV wants to show”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bill Sweetenham: ‘I don’t think the Russians are the only ones cheating. I think there are other countries as well.’ Photograph: Matthew Lewis/Getty Images

According to Leonard “there is huge interest among the males. There isn’t anybody opposed. But the females are more cautious. I think the two biggest names we’re OK with, they’re enthusiastic, and the others will come along eventually. The men are ready to go tomorrow. I think the ladies are a little more cautious.”

They are not the only ones. Sweetenham wants to see Fina reformed rather than replaced. While Rudd says that “the WSA plans are radical and in many ways I hope they are not necessary … if we put a challenging body up against Fina, there will be a long period of instability in the sport, and I worry about that.” He adds, however: “If it is necessary then it is necessary.”

Leonard believes it is. He says: “My question is, other than self-perpetuation, what are they succeeding in?” Block agrees. “We think that we can change swimming. We have all the tools to do it right, all the knowledge.” But the issue is bigger than that, he adds. At a time when so many governing bodies are corrupt, Block believes that if swimming can change, “the rest of international sport will see that it can change also, and we can be a template for that change”. He says the battle between the WSA and Fina is “a morality play”.

However this all turns out, it will be too late to help Becky Kamau make it to Rio. “It is really, really important that the athletes take this into their own hands,” says Leonard. “Because they are the only ones who are going to be able to solve the issues that affect them and future generations of swimmers.”

Athletes like Becky, a 16-year-old girl who has been put in an impossible position. When she learned she had not been selected for Rio, she spent two days “crying it out” in her room. Now, she says there is a silver lining. “If we can make things change, I am fine sacrificing Rio. Because this doesn’t end with me. Even if I had gone to Rio, there would have been other people in the future having the same things happen to them.” She is determined to be at Tokyo 2020, with an ‘A’ time that guarantees automatic entry. “So they can’t take it away from me.”