Right: Miranda Devine, a media commentator, is quoted as saying of the D'Arcy affair, `Swimming is a mind-numbingly tedious individual sport which doesn't exactly require advanced social skills'. Further implications
Oddly, the Australian media has devoted little time to the question of why Nick D'Arcy was banned from the World Championship team going to Rome. Swimming Australia's by-laws explicitly state that a swimmer may be banned from a team if convicted of a criminal offence. On this basis D'Arcy was obviously likely to be barred from the team. The same by-law also refers to banning on the basis of bringing the sport into disrepute. Here, too, Nick D'Arcy's conduct appears likely to make his inclusion in the team uncertain.Recent condemnation of the way in which some Australian rugby players treat women has provoked renewed debate within this country of what we expect of prominent sports people as role models. There has also been discussion of the extent to which the culture developed within certain competitive sporting codes may actually contribute to antisocial behaviour. We do not normally include sports such as swimming in such discussions; however, the events involving Nick D'Arcy suggest that perhaps it is time we did so.
Miranda Devine, a columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald, has stated, 'Swimming is a mind-numbingly tedious individual sport which doesn't exactly require advanced social skills. Champions are aggressive and single-minded, and the personality profile of a person prepared to swim up and down a pool for 10,000 hours, just to train for the opportunity to perhaps one day swim for their country, is a special type of loner.'
Nick D'Arcy himself has stated, 'I'm not a traditional alcoholic, I don't need a drink in the morning, or a drink to get up and I don't drink every day, it's a problem with binge drinking. I feel like I've got to catch up, like I've got to get all the drinking in that everyone else got in, like in the 12 weeks or so that I haven't been drinking, I get absolutely sloshed. I do lose some of the impulse control that I do have when I am sober. I have grown from seeing a psychologist and realising the wrong in, the wrong in the act that I did commit. No one likes people who get out there and have too many drinks and get into either verbal or physical altercations. It's just not an accepted part of society and it's not something I find acceptable and yet I still found myself in that situation. I selfishly, initially, kind of thought it was, it was just kind of hurting me. But as I went through the process I realised that it was my parents, that it was my family, that it was my friends, it was Simon especially who was heavily impacted by, by the incident and upon realising that I think you kind of grow up and you become a little bit different.'
D'Arcy's explanation of his binge drinking appears to be a description of compensatory behaviour taken in reaction to the weeks' of discipline and denial that his training regime forces upon him. D'Arcy's admission that it took many counselling sessions before he recognised the assault had damaged other people suggests the egoism competitive sport can encourage.
This whole incident should force our sporting communities to consider what, apart from winning, we want of our sports champions. Surely D'Arcy was judged as having brought swimming into disrepute because his out-of-the-pool behaviour suggested a lack of sportsmanship. Perhaps it is time all Australian sporting codes considered defining what sportsmanship actually means.