WELLINGTON, New Zealand, February 11. DEAN Kent, one of the top performers in the New Zealand arsenal, expressed his displeasure with Swimming New Zealand and Sparc over the weekend. Kent's anger is linked to the confusion last year that resulted in smaller funding for top athletes. Originally, swimmers believed their Performance Enhancement Grants would be based on the results of the Commonwealth Games. In turn, the athletes peaked for that event. Then, it was announced that the PEGs were based on results from the World Short Course Champs, which the New Zealanders hadn't geared prepared for at the same level. <\/p>\n
Due to the mixup with Swimming New Zealand and Sparc, the governing agency that funds sports, many athletes were awarded less bonus money than expected, despite a late compromise that measured results from both events. Kent, according to a report in the Star-Times<\/i>, had his funding cut by about $10,000 and has been forced to borrow money in order to train and continue to represent his country.<\/p>\n
"Really, let's be honest: in New Zealand who the hell cares about world short course championships?" Kent said in the newspaper article. "They are an important event but not as important as the (Commonwealth Games). So we were staggered by the news. We wanted to swim well for our country in both events, but in Melbourne we thought we were making sure we secured funding for next year." <\/p>\n
Swimming New Zealand and Sparc are not commenting on the details of the situation and have not offered apologies for the confusion and the fact that athletes have been hampered by the events that went down. All Swimming NZ has done is issue a statement that claims that it has communicated with its swimmers over the problems.<\/p>\n
"Despite what they say the communication is clearly not good and the team definitely isn't satisfied," Kent said. <\/p>\n
Kent is preparing for backlash for speaking out. According to Sparc's guidelines, PEGs can be withdrawn if athletes threaten the integrity of the organization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WELLINGTON, New Zealand, February 11. DEAN Kent, one of the top performers in the New Zealand arsenal, expressed his displeasure with Swimming New Zealand and Sparc over the weekend. Kent's<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"dois","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world","category-zzzzzzzzz"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\r\n