AUC swim team blasts Egyptian Federation's mishandling of event

Mismanagement, technical difficulties and confusion nearly ruined the Egyptian Universities' Sports Federation Swimming Championship last Wednesday.

Members of the AUC Swim Team said they were frustrated at the Egyptian Sports Federation for refusing to follow proper procedures.

Swimming Coach Louise Bertini said that the university asked the Egyptian Sports Federation to get the swimmers' names and times in advance to be put in the timing system and to have the heat sheets printed out in advance.

"The Federation only gave us the contesters' names on the day of competition. We quickly entered the names and printed out the heats on time," she said.

She added: "The referees of the federation said they wont be won't be following the schedule they emailed to us a month ago."

"All the swimmers and coaches protested since it was impossible to go by the order of events and half of the swimmers still did not arrive yet," Bertini said.

A change of lanes caused a further disruption in the places of the contesters. "The times we organized were coming in for swimmers who were swimming in different lanes that the ones assigned to them," Bertini added.

The Egyptian Federation was not using the proper timing system and was using manual oversight instead. "The problem with the manual timing is that it is not accurate. You cannot judge by hand when it comes to hundreds of a second. You need to judge with the touch pads for it to be fair," Bertini said.

This was AUC's second year to host the event after it was held at Cairo University. The event featured contestants from Cairo University, the German University, Helwan University and 15 other local universities.

Bertini said: "We have done the best we could to organize it and our efforts were for nothing as they implemented what they wanted anyway."

Mohammed Farghaly, a member of the Sports Department at the Ministry of Higher Education, told The Caravan that the problem with the swimming event suffered from the lack of proper coordination of the event.  "There is a delay in the swimmers' sign up for the competition. Swimmers should at least sign up for the competition a week earlier so that they can enter the system early," he commented.