By Adam Cooper

Swimming New Zealand has axed its national training camp ahead of next month’s world championships in Japan, arguing its top athletes want less time away from home in this phase of the buildup to next year’s Olympics.

That’s despite the country’s leading men’s medal hope in the pool at Paris next year, Lewis Clareburt, crediting last year’s camp in Majorca, Spain, as a key contributor to his three medals at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, including two golds.

It means the 15 athletes heading to Fukuoka from July 23 will have minimal time together, instead of the usual 14-day camp where the full squad assembles to train and gel in a central location with guaranteed lane time. The squad will instead remain in their individual programmes across the country before flying out for Japan.

A historic “Senior Performance Calendar 2023-24″, still found on Swimming New Zealand’s website, shows a “TBC” World Championship Holding camp pencilled in for June 30 to July 16 in Cairns.

However, Swimming NZ Olympic programme lead Gary Francis says the decision not to run the camp was made late last year, when coaches and high-performance staff reviewed 2022 and formed a plan for the buildup to Paris – after some swimmers had spent up to 12 weeks offshore last year.

“Nearly all of the swimmers didn’t want to be away from home for a longer period of time this year, and the coaches certainly felt they needed to be able to have a bit more stability around their preparation” Francis told Newstalk ZB.

“So it was agreed through their feedback that we would cut down on [travel] this year”.

Francis refuted a suggestion the high-performance programme was being scaled back due to financial constraints.

“We’d already made that plan before anybody talked about money and costs … it was about ‘well, what do you guys want’, and we’ve always tried to work with the coaching groups around what they want”.

Francis said a full-scale traditional training camp will return for the next world championships in Doha in February – doubling as Olympic qualifiers – as well as the Olympics themselves mid-next year.

For double Commonwealth Games champion Clareburt, the staging camps have carried extra importance as they provide guaranteed 50-metre lane space for training, something that the 23-year-old medley swimmer has to fight the public for at Wellington City Council-run public pools in the capital.

“It’s always a shame when we can’t do those big camps, it puts you in such an awesome environment where you’re with the country’s best simmers all training together for a few weeks” Clareburt said.

“Last year we were in the sun in Spain and we were in such a cool environment, it really did build an awesome team around us.

“It will be a shame this year that we don’t get that but I think we’re all going to be in a good space anyway leading in [to Fukuoka].”

Clareburt will instead relocate to Auckland with coach Gary Hollywood for the final fortnight of world championship preparation, as the pair continue to battle for adequate lane space at the city’s only 50-metre pool at the Wellington Regional Aquatic Centre.

Crisis talks with High Performance Sport NZ, the Wellington City Council, Swimming New Zealand and Clareburt’s Capital Swim Club earlier this year led to an updated lane space agreement for his Paris campaign, but the reality of using a public pool, catering for all ages, abilities and activities, continues to cause issues.

The pair often have trainings cancelled or shifted to shorter-length pools, with sports such as underwater hockey or water polo often requiring space for tournaments.

The Herald understands Clareburt’s been shifted to different Wellington pool complexes or smaller lanes at short notice a handful of times over the past month as the city council entertains other events or bookings.

The ever-upbeat Clareburt is excited at the reduced day-to-day disruption a stint in Auckland will bring.

“We’re pretty lucky that we’ll be based in Auckland, because long course time here in Wellington is like the price of gold, it’s really hard to get.”

Clareburt says he still would value the chance to head away for a change of scene, even if lane space in Wellington wasn’t at such a premium.

“When you get to build up to a competition if you can change something small like the environment, so go to a different place, it brings that excitement back in.

“So I think the changing of environment is a good thing, even though if I got full access to the 50-metre pool here [in Wellington] it would still be cool if I could go somewhere else”.

High Performance Sport NZ provides $ 1.169 million each year to Swimming New Zealand to deliver success at the Paris Olympics.

Clareburt headlines the squad of 15 heading to Fukuoka for the world championships, alongside Dunedin’s Erika Fairweather who earlier this year became the sixth-fastest woman of all time to swim the 400-metre freestyle.