MOss Burmester Critical Moss MOss Burmester Critical Moss

Even now, Moss

Burmester is chasing
Michael Phelps. One
is our best hope for
an Olympic swimming
medal. The other,
part- phenomenon,
part-fish.
This time next year,
they will briefly share
a pool at the Beijing
Games, as Phelps
goes in search of
sporting immortality.
The theory is that
Phelps can’t be
beaten. Burmester
has 12 months
to find a way.
The clock is ticking.

By: ROBERT TIGHE

Pictures: ANDREW CORNAGA

50 51

Moss Burmester looks up.
 “I’m tired,” is all he can say.
Fair enough too. It is just after 6am on a
cold, windy Friday morning at the Millennium
Institute pool on Auckland’s North Shore
and I wasn’t expecting much more than a
grunted acknowledgment to my, “how are
you, Moss?”
Burmester dragged himself out of bed just
ten minutes earlier, answering his pre-dawn
alarm call, as he has done for the last ten
years. He climbed into his white Hyundai
SUV and scoffed a banana on the short drive
to the Millennium for another grueling two-
hour session.
The sponsored SUV is just a couple of
weeks old and one of the few perks the 25-
year-old Tauranga swimmer enjoys. The
silver lettering on the driver’s door proudly
identifies the owner as “Moss Burmester
– Commonwealth Champion Swimmer”. He
has a contract to drive it until next year’s
Beijing Olympics. After that Burmester hopes
to pick up a new model with a new legend
painted on the side. Maybe something
like “Moss Burmester – Olympic Champion
Swimmer.”
Burmester’s gold medal in the 200 metre
butterfly at last year’s Commonwealth
Games in Melbourne and his fourth in the
same event, in the same city at the March
World Championships, marks him out as
one of our best medal hopes, twelve months
out from the Olympics. It doesn’t bother
him that in all likelihood he will be racing
for silver or bronze in the slip-stream of
Michael Phelps, the American phenomenon
expected to be the unbackable favourite for
every swimming event he enters in Beijing.
Burmester has dreamed about winning an
portrait: Andrew Cornaga/photosport
Olympic medal since he was ten. His mother
Bronwen has framed the picture he brought
home from school one day, a cartoon of
himself at the Olympic Games with a medal
around his neck.
“I remember saying to him, ‘oh that’s cool.’
I mean other boys do the same, but you
expect them to grow out of it,” she recalls.
“He pinned it up on his wall, but I wasn’t
aware that he looked at it every morning
when he got up. But Moss always had a
competitive nature and was always a natural
in the water.” Bronwen Burmester took her
boy to a swim safe class when he was two.
While the other kids were trying to put their
head under the water and blow bubbles,
Moss was picking up rings off the bottom of
the pool. When he was five his grandmother
introduced him to a 50m pool. He told
her: “I think I can swim that whole length”,
finished it easily enough, and started back
on the second as his amazed grandmother
watched.
These days, Burmester swims up to 70
or 80 lengths every time he gets in the
water. He swims ten sessions a week, twice
daily except on Wednesday and Saturday
afternoons, and Sunday which is a day of
rest, just as God and Jan Cameron intended
it to be.
Cameron is the matriarchal figure behind
When he was five his grandmother
introduced him to a 50m pool. He told
her: “I think I can swim that whole
length”, finished it easily enough,
and started back on the second as
his amazed grandmother watched.
New Zealand’s recent swimming resurgence.
The Australian Olympian – she won a silver
medal at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 as part
of the 4 x 100 freestyle relay – has spent the
last 17 years with the North Shore Swimming
Club (NSS) and now as the National High
Performance Director of Coaching her goal
is to produce an Olympic medal for New
MOss Burmester Critical Moss
Zealand. Does she care which one of her
swimmers wins a medal?
“No, but they do. They all want it.”
It is just after 6am on Friday and the
swimmers trail in one by one for the start of
their working day, many of them in hoodies
pulled tight around their faces to keep out
the morning. Eight of Cameron’s ten-strong
high performance squad are here. Hannah
McLean and Cameron Gibson are overseas
but in lane one are Melissa Ingram and Liz
Coster. Lane two is shared by Glen Snyders
and Corney Swanepoel, Moss Burmester and
Dean Kent are in lane three, while Helen
Norfolk and Robert Voss are in lane four.
Cameron hands out individual swim
programmes for the morning session
while her assistant coach Thomas Ansorg
circulates among the elite group offering
last minute advice.
“I give them one or two points to focus
on and explain any changes to their
programme,” says Ansorg. “I explain
exactly what they have to do because once
the session is rolling, if they start making
mistakes, they get shitty.”
This morning is a recovery session after
a hard workout the day before. And yet
for two hours the swimmers are relentless,
ploughing a lonely furrow up and down their
narrow strip of water, stopping only to pull
hand paddles or pool buoys from their bag
53

of tricks at the end of the pool, in order to
work on specific techniques.
Burmester spends the first hour
alternating between freestyle and specific
exercises aimed at strengthening his
kick and his pull. Then he launches
into his specialist stroke, the butterfly.
Done by mere mortals, the fly looks
unnatural. It looks violent, painful even. As
Burmester powers through the water it looks
effortlessly graceful.
“When I tell people I swim butterfly the
response is usually, ‘wow, I can’t even do
one length.’ It is tough because you can’t
swim it slowly. If you do, you sink in the
water so you have to swim it quick to stay on
top of the water.”
Cameron explains the technical
requirements to swim good fly.
“It requires a lot of concentration. You need
to have good timing, good core strength and
flexibility. To visualize it is not that difficult,
but it is difficult to execute it.”
That is where Ansorg and Cameron come
in. While Burmester is in the water executing,
the coaches patrol the side of the pool.
“I know what my stroke should look like but
when you are in the water you don’t know if
you are doing it correctly. I can only go on
feel, the coaches are my eyes,” he explains.
This morning Ansorg and Burmester are
working on a few minor adjustments to his
stroke.
“I was trying to widen my arms a bit,”
explains Burmester after the session, as he
watches a video of his stroke on a laptop at
poolside.
“To me it feels like I have gone really wide
and it feels way different but Thomas can
see it is only a tiny adjustment. We keep
making small changes to try and find more
speed because everyone does the big things
the same. It comes down to the little things
you do differently. That is why we spend
so much time training, so we can focus on
going fast when we are racing rather than
on technique.”
Ansorg explains just how difficult it is to
portrait: Andrew Cornaga/photosport
transfer what they learn in training into a
race situation.
“The pressure in a race is unbelievable.
Standing on the blocks and trying to keep
your composure and do exactly what is
required is so difficult,” he says.
“You have to get your turns right, you have
to get your stroke right and you have to get
your pacing right. Some people swim well
here (in training) but can’t do it in a meet.
Some of them, like Moss, are true warriors
and thrive on the crowd.”
Burmester doesn’t look like a true warrior.
With his carefully tousled fair hair, trendy
glasses and permanent stubble, if you
passed him on the street you might think he
was a slightly geeky surfer or maybe a cooler
than average IT programmer.
“No, it is not stick and carrot stuff,
not at this level. They are driven by
themselves, by their own motivation,
by what they want to achieve,”
You certainly wouldn’t pick him as New
Zealand’s leading swimmer. But Burmester
has earned that title with some impressive
performances over the last two years. While
he only made the semi-finals at the Athens
Olympics in 2004, a gold medal at the
2006 Commonwealth Games put him in the
national spotlight for the first time.
His performance at the World
Championships in March catapulted him
onto the world stage. He broke his personal
best by more than a second and a half and
more significantly he improved his world
ranking from 13th to 4th. Still, it hurt that
he missed out on the bronze by just 0.17 of
a second.
“It was bittersweet,” he admits. “I was
stoked with the time – a New Zealand record,
a Commonwealth record and a huge PB as
well but when I saw how close I was to a
medal, I was a bit annoyed. But that was the
best I could swim at that time.”
Next for Burmester is this month’s World
University Games in Bangkok. He’s the New
Zealand team captain and will carry the flag
in the opening ceremony. He also carries high
hopes of bringing home a medal. Though the
World University Games have a lower profile
than the Commonwealth Games or the world
championships, the competition in the pool
promises to be almost as tough. After that,
Burmester has almost three weeks off before
the build up to Beijing begins.
Cameron and Ansorg are obsessed with
MOss Burmester Critical Moss
the Olympics. On the door of Cameron’s
office at the Millennium is a sign that reads,
“Wanted – athletes who have what it takes to
win Olympic gold.” Ansorg wears an Olympic
ring on his finger that was presented to him
before he went to Athens in 2004.
“The Olympic experience is like no other
and to help others experience it, well that is
our goal,” Cameron explains.
Is there a good cop, bad cop dynamic to the
Cameron & Ansorg partnership, I wonder?
“No we don’t need to do that,” Cameron says.
So you are both good guys?
“Both bad guys maybe,” she says with a
laugh. “No, it is not stick and carrot stuff, not
at this level. They are driven by themselves,
by their own motivation, by what they want
to achieve,” she continues. “The swimmers
know exactly the pathway they are on and
what they are doing. They are not that
different from other 25-year-olds except
they are totally passionate about their work
and it involves them sticking their head in
the water for four or five hours every day.”
It is 9.30am on Friday morning and after
a healthy, nutritious breakfast at Subway -
lamb with mint sauce - Burmester and the
rest of the high performance group meet at
the Glenfield Leisure Centre for kickboxing
lessons. Ansorg explains the benefits as the
swimmers work up a sweat on the punch
bags.
“It calls for quick decision making under
pressure. Not only are you required to defend,
you have to think and throw punches. It is
about converting power into speed so you
are not just spinning the wheels when you
are in the water. And look at them, they are
enjoying themselves.”
That enjoyment factor is one of the key
reasons Burmester is still in the sport.
After the Athens Olympics he though about
packing it in, but instead decided to move
from Tauranga to Auckland.
“I had been training by myself in Tauranga
55

for 18 months. I used to train on Sunday
mornings and I would be the only swimmer
in the pool. It was a big call but I needed the
companionship.” He found it in a tight-knit
group of swimmers and coaches.
“You do build a really close relationship.
We all go through the same training. When
it is hard, we all have to face that, we are
all hurting at the same time,” he says. “I’ve
spewed up in training I’ve pushed myself
that hard and that happens regularly. But
you get used to it – the tiredness, the pain,
the fatigue.”
What about the boredom? You are
swimming up and down the same pool,
every day, staring at the same black line at
the bottom. Why do you do it?
“I miss it when I am not in the water,” he
says. “If I have a break, I just want to jump
back in. If I’m not swimming, I want to go
surfing or diving, just to be in the ocean, to
be in the water.”
Cameron has another explanation.
“They have found something they are good
at. It was the same for me. When I was young
I was a bit of a klutz. Not many swimmers
are good at other sports,” she suggests.
Burmester is an exception to that rule. He
played hockey, cricket, rugby and soccer at
school and has represented New Zealand
in underwater hockey and surf lifesaving,
winning a silver and bronze at the 2004
World Surf Lifesaving Championships in
Italy. He didn’t commit to swimming until
he was 15 and it is one of the reasons he
is still enthusiastic about the sport and still
improving.
He shouldn’t be – still improving that is.
Burmester doesn’t have the advantage of a
6’4” inch frame like Michael Phelps (he is
just under 6’) or his size 14 feet (Burmester
wears a size 11) and where Phelps is long
and lean, Burmester is a bit more bulky. In
fact according to his first coach, Clive Power,
from Tauranga, when he first met him as 13-
year-old, Burmester didn’t have much going
for him – apart from the one thing that can’t
be coached, the right attitude.
portrait: Andrew Cornaga/photosport
“Moss didn’t have much natural ability. He
didn’t float in the water and his body type was
not particularly well suited to the butterfly,
but he had a huge capacity to work,” says
Power. “Once I saw he was serious about
going to the top I worked him very hard and
he did not back off.”
He still has that hunger for work, that
desire to improve, according to Ansorg.
“This character of his is outweighing his
talent. There are others who are far more
talented than him but they just don’t have
his determination, his uncompromising will
to win.” Burmester also has stickability. He
didn’t start breaking Bay of Plenty records
until he was 17 or 18. He never held any New
Zealand age group records and yet he never
lost faith in his ability.
“I didn’t look at it that way, I didn’t think,
‘oh I’m not that quick now, I’m not going
to make it.’ I just thought if I can keep
improving then I will make it.”
A major factor in his development and his
improvement were the annual trips to the US
with Clive Power. When he first went over as
a 13-year-old he couldn’t even qualify for the
“I didn’t look at it that way, I didn’t
think, ‘oh I’m not that quick now, I’m
not going to make it.’ I just thought if I
can keep improving then I will make it.”
C final at a Californian club meeting. A few
years later he was making the A final racing
against a young Michael Phelps.
Burmester traveled back to the US in May
this year with Cameron to spend three
weeks at the US Olympic Training Centre in
Colorado Springs with Phelps and his coach
Bob Bowman. It allowed Burmester to observe
Phelps in his day to day environment.
“You realise that he is only human. He
missed one session and you see that it
does happen to everyone. He is extremely
talented and he is prepared to work hard but
you can’t be overawed by him.”
It is 3pm on a Friday and Burmester takes a
deep breath when I ask him about racing for
second behind Phelps at Beijing.
“Anything could happen; he could get
DQ’ed (disqualified). He is perceived as the
one to beat because he is so far ahead of
everyone else, but you don’t want to think
like that.” Instead Burmester is thinking
about what he can do to improve.
“I need to work on minor skill areas
including my dive, my turn off the wall
and my underwater kick. The main thing
MOss Burmester Critical Moss
is to train as well as I have in the past and
better.”
Burmester also takes a lot of inspiration
from other Olympic success stories and
one he keeps going back to is Jon Sieben’s
against the odds gold at the 1984 Los
Angeles Olympics. It is easy to see why the
Australian’s story appeals to him. It was the
final of the 200m butterfly, the same event
that Burmester swims. West Germany’s
Michael Gross – aka “The Albatross” and
the Michael Phelps of his time – was the
overwhelming favourite. And yet Sieben,
who qualified for the final in fourth place,
blitzed the field in the closing 30 metres to
set a personal best by almost two seconds,
a world record and snatch the gold. For a
competitive animal like Burmester, it is the
type of David v Goliath story he loves.
“I am extremely competitive, no matter
what it is,” Burmester explains. “If we played
a game of tennis or something, I’d want to
beat the crap out of you. I might not tell you
that but I would.”
Has he always been competitive?
“I think it has always been there. I think you
are born with it.”
Thomas Ansorg has seen many times just
how much Burmester hates to lose.
“He has to win. Sometimes he gets mocked
because if he is losing a soccer game he
gets all shitty. But that is the sign of a true
warrior,” says Ansorg.
What plans has the warrior after the
Olympics?
“We have a month off after Beijing so I
will assess things after that and I’ll decide
if I want to go back. People ask me what
am I going to do after I stop swimming.
Hopefully it will be another sport. I would
like to give kayaking a go,” he says as he
jumps in his white Hyundai to drive back to
the Millennium pool. Back to work. 
57