Swim coach Scott Talbot is destiny's child. His mum and dad were top swimmers and then top coaches. So, as Suzanne McFadden finds, it was almost inevitable the former Olympic swimmer would become a coach too.
Honestly Scott Talbot never had a choice. The calling he's now found was genetically determined for him, well before he was rocking on Alanis Morrissette's knee.
The progeny of an Olympic medallist and the godfather of Australian swimming, Talbot grew up in the slipstream of his parents as they
moulded some of the world's best athletes.
As a toddler in Canada, he came under the care of a teenage Morrissette, a promising swimmer who penned songs while babysitting her swim coach's kid. Then they'd go down to the local school hall and hear her sing.
He reached the heights of elite swimmer himself, backstroking his way to two Olympics and world championship finals. Now, at 29, Talbot has been singled out to lead New Zealand swimming to future Olympic glory.
"Maybe he was born to coach," says his mother, Jan Cameron, herself a master in the art of bringing the best out of New Zealand's swimmers when she was national coach. Her first husband, Don Talbot, was the man who guided Australia to swimming superpower status in the 1990s.
"You know, I never thought that this little 3-year-old kid, being babysat by Alanis Morrissette, would grow up to be an Olympic swimming coach."
Talbot isn't the albatross-winged, triangular-framed Goliath you'd expect of a former swimmer. He's more the compact, coiled-spring type, 1.7m tall, with an unmistakable glint in his eye.
He paces the side of the pool in a T-shirt bearing Nadia Comaneci's perfect 10 scoreboard, counting the seconds under his breath as his swimmers lap it out. Outside it's bitter mid-winter while inside Diocesan School's new $12 million aquatic centre, the climate's tropical.
Talbot has handwritten the afternoon's schedule on lined notepaper, submerging it in the pool before slapping it on the tiles so it won't float away.
"The two most important things we're working on ... a nice rhythm, nice smooth control," he says. It's an extra session today for three swimmers - Commonwealth Games freestyler Penny Marshall and two rookies - who Talbot says "need to build up a little more in here", thumping his chest over his heart. In the next 1hr 45min, they will swim a tad over 6km.
As assistant coach for Swimming New Zealand's High Performance Squad, Talbot is putting his group of athletes through up to three unrelenting trainings each day in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in October, and next week's Pan Pacific Championships in California. The Pan Pacs are an ideal dress rehearsal, pitting our best against the world's big swimming players - the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan.
As expected, the swimmers grizzle a little about the extra load, but they do it. They want to win medals in New Delhi, and they respect Talbot.
As Marshall says, he's been one of them. "He knows how boring these long sessions are. But when you do 7.5km with Scott, you wonder where the time went. I don't think we've done the same warm-up twice." Not an easy undertaking, when you're running 520 sessions a year.
Talbot coaches half of the high performance squad - the country's top echelon of swimmers - while head coach Mark Regan leads the other. Regan, a former Australian Olympic coach most recently guiding the Danish squad, was headhunted for the job by Cameron earlier this year.
Five of Talbot's 10 swimmers have qualified for New Delhi - Marshall, Melissa Ingram, Daniel Bell, Hayley Palmer and Emily Thomas.
Talbot has already been credited with good things. He's helped Marshall return to the sport after brain surgery when she was hit by a car last April; he coached Palmer to 11th in the 100m freestyle at the FINA world championships, improving her world standing by 30 places, and earning Talbot Swimming New Zealand's coach of the year honour in July.
He's also getting the best out of brash young swim star Daniel Bell. In the last couple of years Bell, a three-time junior world champion, has hit the headlines for alcohol-related incidents after international competitions. But Talbot can relate to Bell.
"We're similar, sometimes we have big, blow-up arguments, but we get on pretty well. He's rubbed some people up the wrong way, but I like him. And the goal we share is the same - to swim faster," Talbot says.
He's discovering there are different ways to coach men and women.
"With girls, it's a more caring relationship. You want them to feel good about themselves, which makes them swim faster. Boys don't have that need, they just want to do well. It's like having five girlfriends who you have to tell how good they're doing all the time," he says.
"We've got a young team, but I've got a good feeling about them. This might be time for the younger ones to step up."
Talbot is downing a latte in a cafe behind the Newmarket Pool when he admits he enjoys coaching more than swimming.
"But there's a lot more work in it. I thought they just sat around and drank coffee all day," he says.
"As an athlete, you are so self- interested. As a coach, you're thinking about a team and how to get that team to swim fast. Sure they've all got big egos and an individual focus, but you want them to think of themselves as a team too.
"I could easily do this from 5am to 11pm every day without pay. I'd be in heaven."
Cameron, who's just ended her 40-year coaching career, agrees her son has taken to his new vocation like a duck to water.
"Scott has a natural gift to help these young people realise more than their dreams. He has an absolute consuming passion for it," she says. "He's still learning, but I'm extraordinarily proud of him - not just because he's my son, not for what he's achieved, but seeing him work at it. It's very rewarding for me."
So how much of his ability to get the best out of these kids is chromosomal, and how much is learned - particularly from his role-model parents?
Talbot reckons he's acquired resourcefulness from his mum. "Jan's really creative, but really methodical. Everything has a process. She's really good at outlining a pathway and giving you the direction to follow it."
Talbot gets his athletes to use imagery while they're swimming - "imagining they have the perfect style, or they're racing the world champion in the last 50 metres."
From his father, he's collected gems of inspiration to pass on: "Don's a great motivator, quite inspirational.
"Both Jan and Don are extremely hard workers, and both demand the same of you. A lot of swimmers don't want to work hard for prolonged periods anymore. They want hard work then reward, but it's all about perseverance." As far as nature goes, Talbot reckons he has his father's looks, and his mother's nurturing side.
"I get my directness from both of them ... I can be pretty aggressive - if things aren't getting done, [the swimmers] hear about it straight away. But the most effective coaches are the best communicators."
He still turns to his parents for advice - he sees Cameron every day, sharing an office at the Millennium Institute on Auckland's North Shore. As director of Swimming New Zealand's performance programmes, Cameron is his boss.
He's grown closer to his father in recent years, especially as Don Talbot has just completed a year's contract mentoring coaches in the South Island. Growing up, Scott saw his dad four times a year, usually at swim meets.
He also gleans a lot from Regan, his immediate superior. "You have to have people who give you honest feedback," Talbot says. "A lot of friends and family tell you what you want to hear. My family don't."
Jan Murphy won a silver medal at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in the Australian 4 x 100m women's freestyle, with the legendary Dawn Fraser. She married her coach, Don Talbot, and Scott was born in Canberra in 1981 while his father was the Australian Institute of Sport's founding director.
The family moved to Canada a couple of years later, where Talbot coached the national squad to international success throughout the 1980s. Not long after, they returned to Australia, the marriage dissolved, and Cameron and her 10-year-old son moved to Auckland in 1991, where she married her Kiwi teenage sweetheart, Kevin Cameron - now Sky TV's director of sport.
It was in New Zealand that Scott Talbot became serious about swimming, under the tutelage of his mother. When it came to which country he would represent, Talbot never hesitated in declaring himself a Kiwi.
He broke national backstroke records, made finals at world championships, captained New Zealand at the world university games and swam at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics - his best placing 12th in the 4 x 100m medley relay in Athens.
"I was made for water, but I was limited by my reach. I don't have long levers," he says.
"I could have been more committed, but I wasn't mature enough to know that.
"I didn't train with Jan after I turned 21. I should have, but I didn't want a personality clash. But she was the one for me."
Cameron feels the same: "Like any young man, he wanted to see if the grass was greener elsewhere. I wanted to make sure he had opportunities to learn from other people; those experiences have helped his coaching but, in hindsight, maybe he should have stayed with me." While swimming, Talbot was scrabbling to finish his Bachelor of Arts psychology degree - taking six years - and in need of money. He started teaching kids at the prolific North Shore swim club and swiftly moved up to head coach. Ten of his squad this year made international teams.
In May, at just 28, he was promoted to the second-highest coaching job in Swimming New Zealand, to help Regan guide the country's best to success at the 2012 London Olympics and beyond.
"Sure, he had a fast-track opportunity, but being an Olympic swimmer gives you that - you know things that other coaches don't innately know," Cameron says.
"I was fast-tracked too. I think he displays an ability similar to mine, good with people."
It's been a momentous year. Talbot has been selected by Sparc for the Coach Accelerator programme, aimed at providing six of the country's top coaches with the skills to produce world, Olympic or Paralympic champions within the next five years. Last year's intake included All Blacks' assistant coach Steve Hansen.
The programme involves three years of mentoring, four live-in camps a year and coaching training.
"I've learned so much already off the coaches - I've even stolen some stuff from Mark Stallard, the rowing coach, for my programmes," Talbot says.
The demands of elite coaching can be telling on a relationship, and Talbot's aware of not getting too wrapped up in the job at the expense of his partner of five years, Sarah-Jane Fisher. Fisher, a brand manager for adidas, has never been a swimmer - they met in class at Massey University.
"She's not involved in the sport, but she's really supportive of me. She understands," Talbot says.
Fisher gets mentoring of her own from All Black coach Graham Henry's wife, Raewyn, on the rigours of being a coach's other half.
As part of the programme, Talbot had to outline his sporting goals, for both short-term and the future.
This year's objectives were to have five of his swimmers qualify for the Commonwealth Games (achieved), and all five make finals.
"Out of that, I want three swimmers to win medals," he says.
In the medium term, he wants to coach an Olympic gold medallist. And the future?
"For me to be the head coach of the country and for New Zealand swimming to be the top sport in the country among the top five funded sports. And maybe New Zealand's overall top sport ... I reckon it's possible, though you might kill yourself trying."
