Swimming: Burmester 'stoked' about damning report

Moss Burmester says the release of a damning report into Swimming New Zealand made his day. Photo / Wayne Drought.

Former New Zealand Olympic swimmer Moss Burmester says the release of a damning report into Swimming New Zealand made his day.

The independent review recommended a complete overhaul of the dysfunctional organisation, calling for the entire board to resign and chief executive Mike Byrne to be removed.

It appears to have already accomplished the latter of those goals, with Newstalk ZB reporting Byrne cleared out his office hours after the reports findings were revealed by the head of the review, former NZRU chief executive Chris Moller.

The report said swimming in this country was plagued by poor leadership and a dysfunctional relationship between Swimming NZ and its stakeholders - problems that could only be fixed if the sport implemented the report's 17 recommendations in full.

The news came as music to the ears of Burmester, who retired from swimming in 2010 after a prolonged battle with swimming's top management. Burmester won gold at the 2006 Commonwealth Games but quickly became disenchanted with how the sport was run at all levels.

"I was having run-ins with management back in 2008, serious ones. And then in 2010, by that stage a couple of years of it, I'd had a gutsful and that's when I went public with it - at the end of my swimming career," he said.

"That's why I was so happy that something's finally happened and we'll hopefully be able to get some real ground from this."

Swimming NZ have been down this road before. The taxpayer-funded review was the third major investigation into the governing body in the last four years, with the 2011 Ineson report making similar calls for widespread change at the top of the sport.

"Both the Ineson report and this report pointed it out clearly - the top management just wasn't working at Swimming NZ," Burmester said. "[The Ineson report] was just ignored. It pointed the finger at top management but instead of people stepping down then or deciding to do something about it and try to redeem themselves, they all just sat on their hands and did nothing.

"The outcome of this report, because they didn't really move on the Ineson report, is that they really shot themselves in the foot and ended up having this review done, which really just pointed everything out for them."

Burmester, who finished fourth in the 200m butterfly at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, said he was disappointed the changes were too late to salvage his career, but that was tempered by satisfaction for those of his peers still competing.

"The reason I spoke up - and some of the other swimmers like Cameron Gibson and Helen Norfolk - we've done this because we didn't want the current swimmers to go through what we went though, all this crap."

He hoped the findings of the combustible report wouldn't adversely affect those competing at the London Games in August, and said that hope was strengthened by their performance in the recent national trials.

"It's not ideal, of course, leading up to London but it had to happen and hopefully the swimmers that are in there let us deal with it and are able to just focus on their swimming. I think they were able to do that at trials and hopefully they can do that again now going into London."