Swimming Australia Facing Financial Cuts to Combat Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic

Swimming Australia is bracing to take cost-cutting measures in order to mitigate the financial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sunday Tasmanian reported.

Though many swimmers were recently allowed  to return to training, the staff within the organization have taken pay and hours cuts, with more on the horizon.

“We haven’t had to lay people off yet but like every other sport, the next financial year looks ominous so we’re making some really prudent financial choices to make sure that we can keep our team of staff together as much as possible,” Swimming Australia CEO Leigh Russell told the Sunday Tasmanian.

“The challenge for us is we’ve got the Olympics and we don’t want to compromise our performance and to do that, we’ve got to have a number of things behind the scenes,” Russell added. “It’s a delicate balancing act so we’re trying to do out modelling for the next financial year from pretty optimistic to ‘this is Armageddon.'”

Australian elite swimmers have been told that their funding will continue through the postponed Olympics, according to the report, but the search for a permanent replacement for longtime head coach Jacco Verhaeren (who will depart when his contract ends in September), is on pause.

Swimming Australia announced the hiring of Rohan Taylor as head coach through the Tokyo Games, but according to Australian outlet The Examiner, the organization is still looking for a longterm replacement.

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BronzedAussie
4 years ago

Get rid of the hierarchy of management and consultants. Give it back to the Australian Institute of Sport and take it away from the State run competitions. Only one state model seems to be working (Queensland) and they contribute 87% of the Olympic swimming team.

Corn Pop
4 years ago

Defunded!

Troyy
Reply to  Corn Pop
4 years ago

Abolished!

torchbearer
4 years ago

If Swimming Australia is in trouble, where COVID is virtually eradicated now, a lot of swimming federations will be really hard hit for a long time yet.

commonwombat
Reply to  torchbearer
4 years ago

Its the same for all Olympic sports in AUS and, TBH, COVID has just fast-tracked the ‘day of reckoning’. Corporate $$$$ have been scarcer and scarcer and generally transient at that. Any corporate $$$ that goes to sport will go where they get maximum “bang” for their bucks ….. and that is most likely in domestic market. AUS will certainly won’t be orphans in this regard.

Verram
4 years ago

Even without Covid 19, their financial woes is probably not helped by the fact that swimming is hardly on tv nowadays .. we couldn’t even get the world championships on tv last year so making money out of swimming is out of the question If it’s not olympics season ..

Interested to know how many people are actually on swimming Australia’s payroll ? Does that include the pool deck coaches or mainly paper pushers ?

About Torrey Hart

Torrey Hart

Torrey is from Oakland, CA, and majored in media studies and American studies at Claremont McKenna College, where she swam distance freestyle for the Claremont-Mudd-Scripps team. Outside of SwimSwam, she has bylines at Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports, SB Nation, and The Student Life newspaper.

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