The credibility of Olympic swimming, already suffering from spats and doping scandals, has been further damaged by serious discrepancies in the entry times of a number of competitors.
The Olympic entry lists show many of the swimmers competing in Rio achieved their entry times at the World Aquatics Championships in Kazan in August 2015. In nine cases the entry times listed do not match the times recorded at those championships. Another eight are listed as having achieved entry times in events in which they did not compete or were disqualified from. The 17 athletes are from 16 different countries, and include 11 men and six women.
Fina, the sport’s governing body, said the mistakes were made by the Rio Organising Committee when they were compiling the entry lists. The organising committee, although it declined to make a comment, said ultimate responsibility lies with Fina, whose technical committee, according to the ROC, signed off on all times at a meeting last week. Neither body feels the credibility of the event has been affected.
All of the swimmers in question were selected under Fina’s “universality rule”that allows countries where no swimmer has achieved the qualifying standard to nominate one man and one woman to compete at the Olympics. There are 220 universality swimmers in Rio. Fina said it had already identified and corrected as many as 40 similar mistakes but they missed these 17.
Last August, the Mexican swimming federation admitted it had faked many of its squad’s entry times for those same championships in Kazan.
According to reports, Fina’s executive director, Cornel Marculescu, said there would be no punishment for the Mexican federation as entry times were used only to put swimmers in lanes and no Mexicans advanced to the semi-finals or finals. It was, however, later suspended from Fina and fined after it pulled out of hosting the 2017 world championships.
John Leonard, the executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, said: “Fina clearly does not care about veracity in entry times to its events as it allowed the Mexican delegation to submit false entry times to the world championships with no penalty.”
The president of the WSCA, George Block, described the discrepancies as “alarming” and said the universality rule was “something coaches have been concerned about for quite a few years”. Last week the Guardian reported on the case of the Kenya swimmer Issa Mohamed. He was not selected for Rio even though he had more Fina ranking points than any other Kenyan male. Mohamed took his case to the sports disputes tribunal in Kenya. According to reports the federation “was punished for operating on unclear grounds” but the tribunal felt unable to overturn the selection, so Mohamed is not in Rio.
Kenya picked Hamdan Bayusuf. He is one of the 17 swimmers whose entry time for Rio has changed. Bayusuf’s time for the 100m backstroke was listed as 59.99sec, achieved in the first heat in Kazan on 3 August, 2015. The results sheet from that race shows his time was 1min 07sec. A Fina representative showed the Guardian the original nomination forms that listed Mohamed’s qualifying time as 1min 07sec. The representative said Fina had no idea how the wrong time of 59.99sec appeared on the entry list. There was a suggestion five of the 17 times were too slow for the organising committee’s computer system to process. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing, or knowledge of the changed times, on the part of Bayusuf or any of the other swimmers in Rio.
Several leading US officials have encouraged Fina to use a fully automated system to calculate the entries and heat seedings for the Olympics. Fina prefers to process the hundreds of applications by hand. Fina was not willing to comment but recently released a statement saying it had commissioned an independent report “aimed at guaranteeing and ensuring that good governance principles are properly implemented by Fina in an ever-changing modern sport environment.”
