The Japan Swimming Federation has apologised to swimmers after handing a 1 million yen prize to the wrong man at the Japan short-course swimming championships in February. The prize should have gone to Hidemasa Sano, who took down two Japanese records. Instead, it was handed to Ryo Tateishi, who won the 50, 100 and 200 breaststroke crowns.

The mistake was spotted by Sano's Mizuno Swim Team: it then contacted the federation and told them that they had been using the wrong FINA points table to make their calculations on best performances. The old FINA points table was badly out of date and caused all manner of erroneous decisions on the world cup circuit in recent years. FINA has since updated its points table.

The matter was reported at the JSF board meeting yesterday. JSF executive director Masafumi Izumi told Daily Yomiuri: "It was a very simple clerical mistake. We're very sorry." He confirmed that the prize money has been retrieved from Tateishi, the poor man.

But don't tell Oleg Lisogor (UKR), who may well feel inclined to ask for his missing money: on the world cup circuit he set a world s/c record over 50m breaststroke but found himself with fewer points than notched up by non-world-record swims because the points table was demonstrably and woefully out of date and miscalculated.  That's just one of the examples of injustice through the use of a a poor points table that spring to mind.