The position of the fingers, the angles of the elbow, the orientation of the kinetic energy and countless other nuances of top swimming, one swimming sport at a time.
In the morning of November 8, almost 20 fully focused Finnish swimming coaches sat in the conference room of the Espoonlahti swimming pool, because now there was an invited guest who they wanted to listen to with full concentration.
Australian, has been coaching in the USA for decades Brett Hawke49, is one of the world’s most famous sprint distance coaches, and it’s very rare to get people of his caliber to give lectures and coaching clinics in Finland.
During his short visit, Hawke lectured dozens of coaches and held clinics at the pools.
– This is a significant investment for the club, and we believe that we will get a great benefit from this, responsible coach of the sprinters of the Cetus club in Espoo Jari Schwarte tells.
Cetus is a giant on the map of Finnish swimming and individual sports as a whole. The club has around 500 licensed swimmers, eight full-time coaches and around 60 volunteer coaches.
During the year, up to 10,000 people from Espoo participate in Cetus’ swimming school activities.
The first mission of representation
– This is funny, but I remembered this hall as soon as I arrived here. This is where I represented Australia for the first time, at the age of 19, in 1995, Hawke said while looking at Espoonlahti’s well-populated pool even during the day.
He represented Australia in the sprint freestyle at both the Sydney and Athens Olympic Games, 2000 and 2004.
However, the man who won a total of five medals at the World Short Track Championships and the British Commonwealth Games has become much better known as a coach than as an athlete.
The fact that when Hawke had landed at the Helsinki-Vantaa field, he was picked up from there by those who had trained a lot in Australia during his active days speaks volumes about the international networks Jani Sievinenwho swam his last Olympic final, remembered for his swimming goggles lighting up, just in Sydney 2000.
– Between Sydney and Paris I was always involved in the Olympic Games either as an athlete or as a coach, but in Paris I had no athletes, said Hawke, who coaches swimmers aiming for the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
The dual citizen of Australia and the USA served from 2006 to 2018 as the head coach of his swimmers at the famous Auburn University and since then has been a successful coaching entrepreneur in his company Sprint Revolution.
Business cards create credibility, as the two top names in the 50m freestyle all-time statistics, the Brazilian Cesar Cielo Filho (ME 20.91) and French Frederick Bousquethave both been coached by Hawke.
Hawke, who is coached by his assistants in Irvine, California, currently has 65 competitive swimmers on his team.
Finland fell off the train
At its best, even more than 10 swimmers who qualified for the Olympics only represented Finland in Paris Matti Mattsson and Ida Hulkkowhose competition contract was quickly cleared.
Swimming is one of those widely competitive forms of individual sports, the international bullet train of which Finland has stopped a long time ago.
– I want to help narrow the gap between Finnish swimmers and the top international swimmers.
So what is Brett Hawke’s coaching philosophy that he is successfully selling around the sports world?
– In the traditional coaching philosophy, a swimmer is only as good as the number of kilometers he accumulates in training. I represent a completely different point of view. Sometimes a 30-minute workout can be more beneficial than a two-hour workout.
According to Hawke, a swimmer should not train like a 100m swimmer if he wants to be successful in the 50m. If a swimmer wants to be successful in the 100m, he should only train as a 200m specialist.
– This makes sense in other sports, so it should also apply to swimming.
– This means training at a very high intensity, which requires a lot from the athlete’s mental capabilities. An hour and a half with high intensity is even a maximum performance in my world of thought.
Example of Usain Bolt
For his work, Hawke also studies swimming statistics and searches for long sequences from them.
– Specialization is progressing. In athletics, no one would have guessed that Usain Bolt would have won not only at short distances but also at medium distances. Such a perception still lives in swimming.
When Hawke was an Olympic-level coach for the first time, in Beijing 2008, the USA Michael Phelps achieved eight gold medals.
– Even though he was an exceptional individual, that shouldn’t be possible at the Olympic level and I don’t think it will be anymore.
Hawke describes with a good example the specialization that takes place even within sprint swimming.
– In Paris, no man swam in both the 50 and 100 meter freestyle finals.
Sweden again on the women’s side Sarah Sjostrom won both trips.
Accusations on China
At the time of the Olympic swimming in Paris, Brett Hawke woke up in the world of sports much attention when he strongly questioned whether a Chinese was born Pan Zhanlen ME time 46.40 in freestyle swimming with methods approved in the sport.
The ME improvement of as much as 0.4 seconds was the biggest in almost 50 years, and the relationship between top Chinese sports and prohibited methods in sports is not known to be distant.
Three months after the Paris Games, Brett Hawke takes back his words.
– I have rewound his swim back and forth countless times and I no longer find it suspicious. His doping samples were also clean.
In Finland, success in the short pool and long course in non-Olympic distances, i.e. in the 50-meter breaststroke, butterfly and backstroke, has traditionally been underestimated. Brett Hawke calls for a change of attitude, regarding the latter.
– Those three trips will inevitably and quickly become part of the Olympic program. Swimming is also top entertainment, and the intensity is interesting to the spectators. In the way of 50 meter trips, I would remove all mixed messages.