Brenton Rickard in favour of using underwater footage for stroke checking – Swimming News
The Australian breaststroke expert, Brenton Rickard is strongly in the favour of using underwater footage for the checking of strokes used by breaststroke swimmers.
Apparently, the world aquatics sport governing body, Federation Internationale de Natation (FINA) does not take benefit of the underwater video footage to take notice of underwater kicks used by breaststroke swimmers.
The issue aroused when Australia complained about Cameron van der Burgh’s act of using three dolphin kicks after the dive. He took much benefit from that and even shattered the world record of the discipline by making his way to the finishing wall in a time
of 58.46 seconds.
He was well ahead of Australian swimmer, Christian Sprenger, who managed to climb the podium for silver medal by producing a time of 58.93 seconds.
Nevertheless, the South African swimmer has no hesitation in accepting that he broke the rules. In fact, he stressed that FINA should use the underwater footage to make the sport cleaner.
He also told that, he made a mistake of not using multiple dolphin kicks in 50m breaststroke at the 2011 World Championships and lost the title from Brazil’s Felipe Franca Silva, who used three kicks.
He stressed that he was not willing to repeat the same mistake and put his hard work in jeopardy by not using the kicks, when every swimmer uses them.
Nonetheless, then asked to response on this, Rickard said, “So I mean to me it would make sense that referees have the chance to look at underwater footage and say there is something wrong there. If that rule was put in place, everyone would be much more
straight down the line and that’s ultimately what we want for the sport is to have a sport with integrity where it is very hard to cheat and people I guess need to avoid cheating because sooner or later they will get caught and cost themselves dearly.”
Rickard, who was the former champion of the event but failed to secure the podium, articulated that FINA should take advantage of the underwater video footage, as this would give everyone a fair chance.
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