Solobrief: My Thoughts on the Loser Olympics

Organizing my big picture reflections on the stupidest event in swimming history, and all the losers who tried to make it work.

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Transcript

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Hello and welcome to the swim brief. I'm Chris DeSantis, and today a bonus solo brief. We're going to talk about the Loser Olympics. Uh on a previous podcast, I decided that's what we're going to use as our term to discuss the enhanced games. And I'm I'm going to get to why I think that at the end, but first I want to set up what we're doing today. I just give a little bit of context to it. I have to confess at the outset, like I'm really emotional about this. And the reason for that is because it this whole event and the stuff around it cuts to the core of my own values and what I care about and what matters to me in this sport in in life. And so it's hard for me to detach from some of that. I got a whole outline. I I want to present this in a rational, thought-out manner, but I I think if you listen to this, it's going to be hard to separate the fact that, yeah, I'm I'm pretty pissed on some level about what's going on here. And honestly, I think that's okay. And I I say that too because if you're listening and you're pissed, I hear you. And I want to help you. Uh, and and here's what I would like to do. I'd like to help you communicate about what's going on a little bit better. And I I've waited to do this because I think right now is probably the best opportunity. I have commented on the games throughout, and uh not to say I told you so, but I pretty consistently predicted the outcome that we had, which was uh a huge flop, especially in terms of the results. So I've been preparing for this moment because I think for those of us who see the inherent the inherent massive threat that something like this is, it's time for us to push really, really hard to strangle this before it goes any farther. And I mean that. I I really hope that the Loser Olympics, that the the people behind it, the people who, you know, the Peter Thiel uh billionaire group that is willing to blow some money on something that is a potential existential threat to our sport. I hope that they have lost enough money that they don't want to continue doing it. We'll see what happens. Uh their stock price is plummeting at time of recording, but is that enough to put the nail in the coffin here? Time will tell. Uh I'm not a I'm not a f I I don't do finance predictions. I'm pretty good at swimming predictions. I'm not good at uh not good at markets, so that's not my department. So there's really four things I want to talk about today. Let me give you a preview of where we're heading here. I want to talk about the actual event and why I was predicting beforehand that it would be very disappointing from a results perspective and help people to understand why that is, because I think it's been very well validated by the way the event went. And I think that has some implications for what we do going forward, right? Because there's this leads into some bigger, broader questions. I want to talk about the ethical and moral questions of it, because I I don't think that that is unimportant. We got people acting out there as if like that's not even worth discussing whether or not this is the right thing to do, because, well, we just, you know, we gotta do it. We gotta, our sport is dying. You know, this brought attention to the sport. I'm watching some of these loser influencers, and uh again, I'm gonna talk about them at the end, try to rationalize around this and just kind of dodge the ethical moral question of it. I, you know, I value that part. That part's really important to me. That is that is something that I cannot ignore, and I don't think that you should ignore. Third, I want to talk about another critique that I'm hearing in the wake of it, right? Which is, yeah, sure, the Loser Olympics are bad, but what we already have is bad and corrupt, and you know, world aquatics sucks and USA swimming sucks and all that piece of it, you know, saying like, not even sort of asserting that this is good, but that the alternative is bad, so might as well give it a shot. And then finally, as predicted, I want to talk about why why I'm calling this the Loser Olympics. So let's start at the beginning. We we had the event earlier this week. Hype was strong for gosh, has it been more than a year since they started flogging this thing and, you know, talking shit basically about how amazing this was going to be and big prizes for breaking a world record. And, you know, we had the the specifically in the swimming, the weird video of Christian Golomeev at Greensboro Aquatic Center racing by himself in a full bodysuit and you know, swimming a time that's faster than the world record. And then, you know, that was kind of propelled into like, oh, we're gonna get all these other athletes signed up, and you know, it's gonna be the fastest thing you've ever seen. And these guys spent a year plus hyping up the results. And now they want to pretend that, well, why were you expecting the results to be so good? I mean, a lot of these athletes, they're past the prime and they only had a few months, and all the excuses are coming out. Excuse, excuse, excuse, excuse. Okay. Let me tell you why I always thought that the results of this were gonna be really disappointing. Because I think the math that they were using to say there's gonna be world-class performances at this, there's gonna be world record performances at this, was just false. It was just really, really bad. And I'm talking swimming math here. I'm not, I'm not saying like, you know, the they don't know how to do calculus, although I guarantee Brad Hock doesn't know how to do calculus. What people were looking at, and what the specifically the Loser Olympics people were using to justify their hype is they were basically saying to you, look at these athletes, okay, and all things being equal, if we allow them to go on performance-enhancing drugs and we put them in a banned bodysuit, that those two things help you go faster. So quite naturally they will be faster. But what do the results tell you? The results tell you that that is either not true. So, you know, what are we supposed to draw as a conclusion? Either body suits don't help you. Does anyone believe that that's true? Just like, just, I mean, if you're listening, if you're listening to this and you go, actually, you know, full body JKIds don't help you to swim faster. I would love to hear from you and love to hear you justify that. I think we're pretty much in agreement that that's true. Okay. Then the second conclusion you might go is, oh, well, actually, maybe PEDs don't work. Do you honestly believe that that's true? I don't. Okay. There's a reason they're banned. It's because they work. It's because they, independent of other variables, give you an unfair advantage, okay, over people who are not using performance enhancing drugs. So why were the results so bad? Well, it goes back to premise. The premise was all things being equal, but all things were not equal, okay? And this is what a lot of people miss that creating world-class performance has a lot of variables, okay? One of the simplest ways, I have put this many, many times as I've been out speaking and and talking to audiences and trying to educate people is it truly takes a village, okay, for any world-class performance to get together. It's so often the way that it is covered is simplified. We just focus on how exceptional the athlete is, and maybe we include one coach in the conversation, and that's it. And we pretend as if, you know, those are the only two variables that matter. Could not be farther from the truth. And quite frankly, when I look at the village that the Loser Olympics put around them, their village sucks. It's not the best of the best. Okay, we're going to talk more about Brett Hawk's coaching later, but like you're locked into having Brett Hawk as a swim coach, for one. And when you look at the rest of the personnel around it, it's it's not the best. It's not the best. And you have these people also, and I believe rightly so, and I honestly I think we should we should be pushing harder on this, cutting themselves off from the community that has fostered them up to the point where they are. So for me, even that on a psychological level, stepping aside, right, and basically going rogue, I don't think it helps you to do your best at this level. And I think it nobody that's involved, I think, right now is going to admit it. But I I think that that played a big role in the fact that people generally were just not just not stepping up. Okay. They introduced a couple variables that undeniably help you to go faster, but they were really stupid about the big picture. And they were deficient in so many other details around what it takes to have a top-flight performance that the proof is in the pudding. Look at the results. And why I think this is important as we look into the future is, you know, so much of the conversation around the sport of swimming is about we got to get bigger, we got to get more money into the sport. And I don't think you're wrong. If you if you think, you know, we we've got to improve the way that, you know, we've got to improve the financial sustainability of our sport. I'm uh I'm uh with you a hundred percent. I'm not gonna, you're not gonna find me saying everything's fine, let's just keep the status quo. You know, we've certainly are are facing down some really big challenges on that front. But but money is not a flat variable that operates independent of other variables. Doesn't mean our sport doesn't need it, but also doesn't mean that we should just do whatever it takes to bring money into the sport, because the way in which we do that will have an impact on all the other variables in our sport. And that kind of brings me to my second point, which is the ethical moral question of what's going on here. You know, if we if the if the bargain that we have to make is that we are going to we are going to sacrifice the morality, the ethics of our sport just because we need the money, to me, not only is that wrong, but it's not even like neutrally wrong. And what I mean by that is what we're risking is the complete destruction. Okay, status quo, you can argue we're gonna die a slow death. To me, if we go down this road, it'll be a quick death. So what do you want? And let me let me talk a little bit about some of the moral arguments that I've heard on the other side. And I predicted, I I haven't seen that much of this, but I've seen a little bit of it afterwards, and I suspect we'll see some more cope, you know, because they'll try out some different, they'll try out some different rationales as they flail around after the big fat failure of this, right? But one thing that I think you'll hear, you've heard a little bit of already is, well, you know, there's already a lot of people cheating. It's already at the at the Olympics, there's already people cheating. So why shouldn't we just have this level where, you know, we have a little bit more control over the cheating? We got doctors, you know, we're only doing stuff that's FDA approved in the United States, blah, blah, blah, blah, all this bullshit. Right. And, you know, if some people are already cheating, why shouldn't we just let everybody cheat? Now that is a completely childish argument, and I I'm gonna make it clear to you why that argument doesn't hold any water here in a second. And it's it's actually informed by my travels over the last few months. I took a family vacation to Japan, and just recently for Krista Santa's coaching, I was in Switzerland. Okay. And what do those two countries have in common? It's no jaywalking. Now, when I say no jaywalking, did I jaywalk in both countries? Yes. Guilty as charged. But in general, people wait for signals and then they cross the street. When you set the boundary for behavior well away from the behavior that's actually problematic, it has a knock-on effect. What do those two countries have in common? They're extremely safe. Extremely safe. It's very safe to be out at night, even in a major urban center, even in the middle of the night. They're very, very safe places. And it it's it's not unrelated to jaywalking, okay? Because the cultural expectation around staying within the rules is well away from the truly problematic behavior. And this is an argument to bring it more into like swimming relevance that I think about a lot with the safe sport stuff. I know for my coaching friends out there, a lot of the things, sort of procedures and and all that stuff that's been put in place is annoying. It's annoying and it sometimes leads to situations where we're like, gosh, can't can't I just help a kid out? You know, my last coaching job, I was responsible for locking up the pool. And that meant that, you know, we'd finish practice and the kids would change and they would come outside and wait for the parents to pick them up. Now, inevitably, I had coached like 50 kids. Some parent would be late or they would forget to pick their kid up, you know, and I'd be left with one kid, and it'd be the middle of winter, it'd be 30 degrees, and I'd have to say, We're gonna go outside. I'm gonna leave you standing by yourself, and I'm gonna go be, I'm gonna be able to, I'm gonna be in a line of sight to you, like I'm gonna be in my car. Why is that? Well, because from a safe sport perspective, I cannot be alone in that building with that kid, nor can I say to that kid, hey, you know what? It's it's really cold outside. Come sit in my car. I can be the best person with the best intentions, but we've decided that's not allowed. And I'll tell you why. Because when we set the boundary that far away, it's a lot harder for the people who want to abuse and hurt kids to operate, right? That's a behavior that they use to gain trust, to start pushing boundaries with parents and children on their way to committing serious acts of abuse. And so we've drawn the line well away from that behavior to make it harder for them. And and it works. So if our approach to the fact that performance-enhancing drugs is already you know a problem, and I agree, there are people, I am sure, that competed in the last Olympics that were not clean. I'm not naive about that. Probably a not insignificant amount. But the answer is not to just open things up. That's gonna make this problem worse, not better. And so from a from a moral standpoint, I don't understand why we're even considering doing something like this. Except if we're already just admitting we don't care. We don't care about morality, we don't care about what's right, we just want to get paid right now. And I think that leads into the next argument, right? People say, Well, isn't it worth it? Right? I had I talked to somebody on the phone this morning, a friend of mine. He goes, I'm not mad at Cody Miller. You know, he's talked very openly. He wanted to make some money for his family, he made 500 grand for his family. Good for him. I don't agree. Sorry. Because here's the thing what about my family? Because in my opinion, Cody has done something to hurt my family. I have kids. What if my son grows up and he's looking up to Cody? Because he has a big platform, the influential. Do I want my son to go? Well, Cody Miller, you know, says if if you need to get on performance-enhancing drugs to get yours, it's okay. You know, what about all of us that are coaching, that coach young men and boys that are gonna look up to Cody, Ben Proud, etc.? What about them? So it's not just about Cody and his family. It doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not just like good for him, he got paid. He got paid at the expense of the rest of us. And I'm not okay with that. Now there's no doubt that the alternative, what exists already, it's not great. USA swimming as it stands today has a lot of problems. Okay? I happen to be more hopeful about it than I used to be. And that doesn't mean I think things are going well. Just means that I have some hope that we might actually start moving things in the right direction. World aquatics is a whole nother matter. You're not gonna find me arguing that they're not corrupt, that they're not cheating athletes. Wholesale. They're doing it. Okay? I agree with you. But the answer is not to turn over our sport to a post-humanist ghoul like Peter Thiel, Peter Thiel, whatever, and even more brazenly insane plutocrats, at the expense, very specifically, of the young men of our sport. We're just gonna basically sacrifice them for right now. Screw that. I'm sorry. I just I do not agree. I think it's very, very short-sighted. Everybody wants what uh I've heard referred to as the hamburger from heaven, right? Everybody wants some kind of top-down solution. We want a Ukrainian billionaire to, you know, fund the ISL, and that's what'll save our sport. We want Peter Thiel to throw money at, you know, some semi to recently retired athletes, and in exchange for them marketing overpriced peptides for middle-aged guys like me or younger, unfortunately. And, you know, that's that's what will save our sport. There's no hamburger from heaven coming. The solution to the problems that the sport of swimming has, they're not coming from the top down. Okay. And the sooner that you, I've I've said this for years, the sooner that you figure that out, the more you get working on what really matters, which is for each of us, you got a little corner of this swimming ecosystem that you're influential on. Everybody has a platform, okay? If you're a coach on a team, you're extremely influential within that team. If you work at a college, you're influential within that college, within the student athletes that you have on your team. And rather than waiting for the NCAA or World Aquatics or USA swimming or somebody else to deliver something on high, you're much better served, focusing on what is it do I that I have control over? How can I influence? How can I innovate in my corner of the world and make things better? Okay. If you think swim meets suck, if you think a lot of club swim meets suck, I'm with you, man. Do something about it. Make a better swim meet. Do the groundwork of getting people in on that idea and proving it. Show a proof of concept. Okay? Disrupt the model. And to the extent that those bigger organizations stand in your way, organize with other people to get things changed. I'll be, I'll be, I'll be with you. Okay. But the the solution is not coming from the top down. The billionaires are not going to save us. The out-of-touch bureaucrats are not going to save us. We have to save ourselves. And so grasping for these cheap short-term solutions, just not, it's not going to work. And for me, it's worse than that. Again, it's worse than not working. It's a loser mentality. And I want to be careful the way I talk about this. I said, like, I'm emotional about this. And when I get emotional, I have definitely in the past let things get too personal in the way that I've talked about other people in the sport. I know maybe some of you are listening to this are like, oh, new Chris. We all get older, we grow up, we mature. Hopefully, you know, if if we do mature, we we are reflective on our behavior and we think about it. Okay. So when I say that this is the loser Olympics, and when I talk about some of the people that I think have been involved or have been promoting this in some shape or form, and I call them losers, really what I mean is they're engaging in loser behavior. There's nothing inherent about them that make them losers. They could be on the right side of this tomorrow, but that's a choice. They can they can choose to do something good for the sport for the rest of us, or they can continue to be selfish, which is what I think they're doing. Let me start with the athletes. Honestly, shame on all the athletes that participated. Like I said about Cody, you know, and I I mentioned him specifically, but all the athletes that participated in this, you got paid, but you got paid at our expense. And screw you. In my opinion, these people should not be welcome in the sport anywhere. I'm gonna repeat that and let me be clear about what I mean. I don't want to see anybody that was involved with this coaching, giving clinics, giving a talk to a team, poolside, at meets, at practices. I think we should get together and say you're not welcome. You're not welcome in our sport anymore. Because you turned your back on us and you made a selfish decision at our expense, and there need to be consequences for that decision. And maybe there's some future where I'm a I'm a more forgiving person than I used to be, where they could do some penance and make their way back. But I don't understand anybody who is condoning this on this level or letting themselves be co-opted about it. A lot of people in the podcast space and the influencer space mixed up in this. This is not a comprehensive list, but uh social kickswim podcast was out there covering the event, hyping the event. I think if you're a coach or an athlete, you should boycott that podcast. Don't go on there as a guest. At a minimum, until those guys say, Hey, you know what? We got in on this. Loser games thing, and we messed up. And we're sorry. At a minimum. Forrest Boddy, who could do a whole nother podcast on him. He's been engaged in some baffling behavior over the years, but he used to be like, you know, just a pretty innocent guy, you know, made kind of like inoffensive YouTube videos. I saw him out there holding water for this event. I think he doesn't understand that we are the ones that have made him successful in what he's doing. And I think he should find out. Brett Hawk and basically the stepchildren of Brett Hawk's podcast, the Night Swim Podcast. I'll talk about the podcaster guys first because we we got to talk about Brett really kind of all on his own. Because he's he's way more involved. The rest of these guys are, you know, whatever. They're trying to like kind of bandwagon jump on this. I think if you're a swimmer coach, you should not go on the night swim pod. Now, like these guys blast it out, and maybe they will again. We'll see how they react to this. I can't imagine it'll be in a mature manner or with any kind of humility about what they've done. They blasted out that I, you know, I DM'd Elvis Burroughs when they were getting started and said, hey, I actually like what you're doing with the podcast. I'd love to collaborate with you. And I have enough humility to say I was 100% genuine when I did that. I have changed my mind since then. I made a mistake. I thought, you know, these guys are pushing the envelope a little bit. I like that. But I've realized like it's a full-on troll podcast, more or less. It's like if you gave a couple of 14-year-old boys some mics and told them, hey, you can just get on and talk shit about whatever, that's what they're doing. And when they're very demonstrably wrong, they just kind of retreat to child trying to bully, mock, whatever the people who've pointed out that they're wrong. If that's what they're about, it's not for me. Because to me, all these people, they're not behaving like leaders. They're little underlings, they're followers, they're wave riders. Okay. They bet on that this amoral, selfish effort was gonna have a payoff for them, and they literally do not care about you, anybody that's listening. They're just in it for themselves. Okay. And I have to be frank with all my listeners. If you guys all told me that actually you love the loser games, and I'm wrong, and you're not gonna listen to Swim Brief podcast anymore because you've got shit opinions, Chris, and I go, good riddance. See you later. That's how I am, okay? Because to me, that's leadership. Leadership is being willing to stand up for what's right, even when it's not popular. And it's not this selfish, wave riding BS. And by the way, props to Kyle Sockwell. I'm gonna give a shout-out to Kyle Sockwell. He's been very strong, I think, on the loser games. I he's been very, very strong in his critiques of the existing structures, okay, and what he would like to see changed. And I think it's very telling that he did not jump on this bandwagon, okay? And the rest of these losers did. Now, I said we'd save Brett Hawk for the finish, and let's talk about Brett. Because what I want to say about Brett goes well beyond the Loser Olympics here that he's been involved with for the last couple years or year and a half or however long it's been. Before that, you know, Brett built, starting in the pandemic, a podcast that I think became really, I don't think so, it became really influential in the swimming world. He was getting really big interviews, he was getting guests on there that people really wanted to hear from. And he built up a way bigger audience than than this podcast, for sure. He was kicking my ass, no doubt. But I think to a lot of people it became very apparent, and it became apparent to me that it was really not about everybody else, it was just about Brett. And Brett was trying to extract what he could for himself from the rest of us. And for me, nothing encapsulated that more than when he went all in on sprint revolution, right? What it what sprint revolution actually means, he never really bothered to define that. Very loosely, it was, you know, traditional sum training sucks. It's too much yardage, it's too slow, so stupid. I'm a genius. Everybody should listen to me and buy and send me money because I know the way forward. And so to anybody who remembers that or believes that, I'll bring you back to the beginning of this podcast. Brett had the opportunity to work with world-class swimmers. We're talking like in Golomeev, Ben Proud, we're talking about people that were in championship finals or winning medals at the highest level of beats. He got to race them in full bodysuits. He was 100% responsible for their swim coaching, and they got to be on performance-enhancing drugs. And these are the results. So tell me again how sprint revolution is some genius breakthrough in swim coaching. And how the rest of us, when I say the rest of us, anybody who trains athletes in a semi-traditional format, how the rest of us are just idiots. Wow, we're so stupid. Brett, what did you do? You had access to top facilities, you had medical experts, you had the ability to put people on five different categories of performance-enhancing drugs, and you had suits that, in case anyone didn't remember why we banned them in the first place, it's because they world records were dropping like flies when these suits were introduced. And this is the results that you produced. Now, to be fair to Brett, he can coach. Like don't listen to everything that I just said and go, Chris says Brett's a terrible coach. Brett has been part of some world-class performances. But unfortunately, he's become way more about himself and his own ego. And he's lost sight of the fact that as much as he was around some high-class performance, that it took a village to do it. It wasn't just him, wasn't just some genius of his that created those results. And he cut himself off. And now it's really an open question like what's next for him? I think he's got a couple years contract, so again, maybe they're gonna limp along with this thing for another year, but I don't think that it's going to last. And I don't think he should be welcome in any other part of our sport. Um so this might be it for Brett Hawk in the sport of swimming. And that's that. All right, that's where I'm gonna wrap it, guys. That's my response to the Loser Olympics. I hope this helped you guys in a little bit and in the way that you're gonna think and argue around this, because we've got to be able to move forward from this positively.

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And stay focused on the stuff that really matters for our sport and not let, you know, these selfish losers drag us down. If you guys want to get in cut touch with me, you can write me crdesantis at gmail.com, Christy Coach.com, Christy underscore coach on Instagram. And uh, I'll be back next week with a regularly scheduled interview and podcast. See you then.