Change of pace for successful Gisborne swimmer under lockdown

Michael Pickett. Picture by Liam Clayton

Michael Pickett has been in the water since he was a tot.

“I couldn't tell you when I learned to swim,” he said under lockdown in Gisborne this month.

“My parents threw me in the water when I was a few weeks or a month old.”

He doesn't know whether it was his father, Fletcher Pickett, or his mother, Anna McVey, who gave him that first lesson. Whoever it was seems to have done him a favour.

“I was swimming competitively at six or seven, in races at local meets.”

Since then it has been pretty much non-stop.

Google-search “Michael Pickett, Gisborne swimming” and you'll see why. He has set or equalled 36 national age-group records, mostly in the 50- and 100-metre freestyle but also in butterfly. He still holds 17 of them. For the long-course 50m freestyle, he holds every age-group record from 12-and-under to 16 years (that's five); and for the long-course 100m freestyle, he holds four of the five records in that age range (the 13-year mark eluded him).

Highlights have included the 2018 Youth Olympics in Argentina and the 2019 senior world championships in South Korea, where he placed 10th and 31st respectively in the 50m freestyle. He was third over the same distance at the Junior Pan Pacific Games in Fiji in 2018, and stepped up to the junior world champs in Budapest, Hungary, in August last year. Less than a week after his 17th birthday, competing in a race open to athletes over a year and a half older, he finished fourth in the 50m freestyle.

But the pinnacle event for him would be the Olympics. He came back to New Zealand from Australia to take part in the national swimming champs in the hope of qualifying for the Tokyo Games.

Since then the national champs and the Olympics have been postponed, and Pickett is staying in Gisborne with his sister Lauren (home from physiotherapy studies) and his father until New Zealand comes out of lockdown.

Pickett turns 18 on August 17 and is in his last year of school. He moved to Brisbane in January 2018 to attend St Peters Lutheran College, one of Australia's foremost swimming schools and the home of St Peters Western Swim Club.

“You have to go to the school to swim at the club . . . and it's one of the best clubs in Australia,” he said.

Pickett was a student at Gisborne Boys' High School and a member of Enterprise Swim Club. Going to Australia would be a big upheaval, but he felt the opportunity was too good to turn down. Swimming coach John Gatfield, from Red Beach, on the Hibiscus Coast, Auckland, had just got a job at St Peters and, before he left for Australia, he approached Pickett about joining him there. It was mid-December 2017.

The invitation was hardly surprising. Pickett was already established as one of the top emerging sprint swimmers in the country. If he was going to go, he had to decide quickly to get there in time for the start of the school year. Pickett hadn't heard of St Peters, but he found out about its sports programme and accepted the offer three weeks after receiving it.

“It's a private school,” he said. “I get a percentage of a scholarship, so I'm thankful to my parents for paying the rest. My family and I decided I would board over there for the first year. Then I moved out of boarding and into a flat with a mate for a bit. Now my mother is living with me in Brisbane, working there for my last year of school.”

For the time being, though, Anna McVey is in Gisborne, having got back at the start of the year.

Pickett said he hadn't really had any low points in his swimming.

“I guess now is a bit of a low point. We'll have Olympic trials next year, probably in April or June. I'm trying to keep fit while we're in lockdown. I have a home gym set up, and I'm living near the Taruheru River so I swim in that at high tide, in my wetsuit if it's cold. I also do a bit of running, but it's like a break at the moment. If I don't do anything I feel heavy, both mentally and physically.”

Usually that's not a problem. He trains six hours a day, three hours at a time.

“Last year I had four weeks off; the biggest break was three weeks. That's common. To be among the top athletes in the world, you have to do the most. Swimmers usually peak around 21, so I'm tracking pretty well. Last year I qualified for the worlds and this year I was hoping to qualify for the Olympics. That's no-go now, but I'm pretty happy to get another year. If I'm bigger, stronger, faster, I'll have more of a shot of making it.”

“A bit of both. It kind of consumes my life. I don't see it as a job, although I would like to be a full-time athlete. If I was a full-time swimmer, I'd still do a couple of university papers — business, probably, because it goes into a lot of things — but I'd have the freedom to go home after morning training, have a nap, have a feed.

“When I'm going to school, it's ‘wake up at 4.30, train, go to school at 8, get out of school at 3.15, train till 6.30 or 7, home, dinner, shower, bed, and do it all again the next day'.”

“It's just always been there. I'm a pretty driven person. You have to set your goals. My goal is the Olympics — the biggest stage for swimming and most sports. Seeing improvements and training well are also good for motivation.”

As for competitive life expectancy, he says most swimmers retire around the age of 28, but proposals for an international swimming league look promising, and the prize money might persuade swimmers to compete for longer.

Nicholas Santos, the Brazilian world record holder for the short-course 50m butterfly, is still competing at 40 and set his record only 18 months ago.

“There's not much money in swimming at the moment,” Pickett said.

“But you never know. This league could take off, and you have opportunities for making a business . . . swim clinics, things like that. In 10 years, who knows what could happen.”

While he has had considerable success in 100m races, he concentrated on the 50m freestyle last year.

“That's the event I'm most likely to make the Olympics in,” he said.

At 1.84m in height (just over 6ft), with a lean, fast-twitch muscular build, Pickett has found he doesn't handle longer races as well as the swimmers whose make-up is more in the stayer's mould.

“The power sprint — that's what my body type is built for.”

He has athletic genes in his favour, too. Surf lifesaving (with the Waikanae club) and swimming feature strongly on his father's side. Michael's grandfather Tony Pickett was also a swimming coach whose son Fletcher (Michael's father) was among his competitive swimmers.

On his mother's side, Michael's grandfather Duncan McVey was an inside-forward who represented New Zealand at football, scoring two goals in a 4-1 victory over New Caledonia. He played for Dunedin club Northern in the 1959, '61 and '62 Chatham Cup finals — Northern won the first two — before he came to Gisborne and served for decades as a doctor in general practice.