Michael Bohl, coach to Stephanie Rice, double Olympic medley champ for Australia in Beijing, is among four Australian coaches said to have been "signed by China" to help build national-team strength.
Yao Zhengjie, China head coach, told The China Daily, that Bohl is joined on the Aussie coaching team by Otto Sonnleitner, a former president of the Australian Swimming Coaches and Teachers Association who has been appointed head coach of China's reserve team.
"Sonnleitner watched all the competitions at the National Games and is very hard working, which sets a good example for Chinese coaches," said Yao. "He will take at least 10 young swimmers to train in Australia after the National Games."
Zhang Lin, the reigning men's 800m freestyle world champion and triple gold medalist at the National Games has been training with Dennis Cotterell, coach of Aussie great Grant Hackett, in Australia for a long time.
Liu Zige, who set a world record in the women's 200m butterfly at the National Games last Wednesday, has been training in Australia with Ken Wood, the former coach of butterfly world champion Jessicah Schipper.
"Through the cooperation with these four Aussie coaches we have opened the door to China's swimming and have started to communicate with a swimming powerhouse," said Yao. "We hope to have more communication with the Europeans as well.
"At the World Championships we realized the level of European swimmers has been raised a lot but we still know little about how they improved."
SwimNews is aware of comments that lay behind that last note from Yao. Some in China, in response to suspicions that doping remains a problem in China, responded by suggesting that the place to look for "problems" was Europe. That will not go down well in Europe, of course, not least of all because it is possible just about anywhere you look to arrive at a programme as a tester completely unannounced. That is not the case in China.
Critics of China have also noted that the prizes and rewards on offer to some, unofficially in some cases, remain very high. One commentator noted that there were coaches in Jinan at the National Games who could "probably retire" on the financial benefits received over the course of eight days of racing. If that is correct - and it is all but impossible to confirm whether it is the case without proper investigation of the kind undertaken by FINA's official anti-doping task force in the 1990s - it flies in the face of the Chinese Swimming Association's 11-point plan when it promised FINA in 1998 that it would clean up its backyard. One of the pledges was to make sure that rewards at events such as the National Games would not be so high as to tempt rogues, political and sporting, into the swimming realm. Hard, if not impossible to police such things, perhaps.
One other promise was to engage with the wider swimming world. That, China is doing. Good news - though the next step may be to ensure that it fields her finest team at major FINA events. There have been inexplicable absences on national touring teams, including on occasion the best three or four swimmers, on paper, from China.
There is good news from Yao on that score too: swimmers who emerge in domestic competition as potential international stars will fall under the auspices of the national team and are therefore less likely to be under the influence of provincial programmes that continue to produce surprising and erratic results. Chen Qian, 16, broke Asian records in the 400m and 800m freestyle events with very large gains on the clock to 4:02.35 and 8:20.36 respectively. Her 400m effort ranks fourth in the world.
Yao cited Chen as a "leading figure" in women's middle and long-distance events. "Chen was selected as a reserve junior team member after the Beijing Games and the national team has always kept an eye on her. She did a very good job this time and we will go on watching her closely," Yao said.
The same may be true of Li Xuanxu, 16, on a 4:30.43 in the 400m individual medley, and Li Zhesi, 14-year-old member of world-champion medley relay squad in Rome and on 24.56 over 50m freestyle in Jinan.
"We have learnt that some veterans will retire after the National Games so we hope more young swimmers born in 1990s will emerge to take over their responsibilities," said Yao.
The national team will hold a training camp in December. A new squad will be formed after the National Grand Prix in April next year and the list will be finalized after the National Championships in the latter half of the year. "The main competition for us next year is the Asian Games in Guangzhou," Yao said.
