The elite of any athletic discipline are exceptional, with their laser focus and purposed physiques. They are, in a word, different from you and me. Champion swimmers are especially distinctive. “Wide shoulders, thinner waist—some people have thicker thighs,” the American Olympian Cullen Jones has told me, perfectly describing his own inverted-V shape as well. “But they’re very defined. We’re very, very defined. You should have a six-pack for sure.” A cutout core where you can count every muscle: pecs, abs, obliques for openers; bulging lats that strain the straps of even the trimmest women; thick traps that broaden the back. At the 2010 Golden Goggles awards—professional swimming’s version of the Oscars—three-time Olympic gold medalist Nancy Hogshead, still shapely in a floor-length, scoop-neck burgundy gown, looked out at the buff assembly of former and current athletes and said she loved the event because “I can come here and my arms are average!” As she flexed her right bicep, the audience roared its approval.
Height helps, too: Jones stands six foot five. Sun Yang, the Chinese teen who owns the world record for the four-hundred-meter free, is just under six foot six. American teenage sensation Missy Franklin is six foot one. Six-medal Olympian Ryan Lochte, six foot two. And then there’s wingspan. Michael Phelps’s arms reach out to six foot seven, three inches wider than he’s tall. Others beat their height by six inches. Swimmers’ long limbs tend to land in oversized hands and feet, flipper-sized appendages (Franklin: size 13 shoes) that scoop up oceans of water. Their legs bow backwards; their gaits give away their strokes. Freestylers tend to be pigeon-toed; breaststrokers walk like ducks. They are flexible—very, very flexible. Phelps famously can bend his ankle so that it’s almost flat in line with his leg, a perfect paddle. Olympian Dara Torres’s toes look as if they function like fingers. Almost all are double-jointed where it counts, including the very cheerful and accommodating young Dutch woman completing her laps in the pool.
“Oh, sure,” Ranomi Kromowidjodo says, giggling, amused at my request to see her elbow in action. She nonchalantly twists it forward, an unnatural angle that would pop a bone from my skeleton but that helps her execute the freestyle that has made her a champion. At twenty-one, Kromowidjodo is the second fastest female swimmer in the world, finishing the fifty-meter freestyle in 24:27 during the World Championships in Shanghai in 2011. She lost the gold to Sweden’s Therese Alshammar by 0.13 second. Kromowidjodo’s teammate, Marleen Veldhuis, who touched the wall 0.22 second later for the bronze medal, is swimming one lane over here in Curaçao.
That’s how you measure success in the swimming world: by slivers of time that are useless in, oh, everything else. Michael Phelps won his jaw-dropping eighth gold in Beijing in 2008 by 0.01 second. It takes three times that long to blink. The fraction would be even more infinitesimal if the race clocks measured beyond two decimal points. In competition swimming, you don’t round off the times the way you round off the pennies at the grocery store; you stretch every tick of the clock for every extra fingernail length you can wring out of it. In Age Is Just a Number, her book about her comeback at age forty-one, Dara Torres writes, “Swimmers know full well that every second has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
On this gentle, tropical afternoon, with the setting sun and the rising moon equidistant from the earth, and the infinity pool merging into the tiny creampuffs over the horizon, time is irrelevant. True, coach Jacco Verhaeren, an older but equally fit version of his talented charges, checks his stopwatch every lap or so, confirming the numbers he has already clocked in his head. But this part of the workout, their second two-hour swim of the day (bracketing an hour of dryland weights), is more about form and strength and endurance. They exchange kickboards with pull buoys to work on legs, then arms; they use snorkels to concentrate on balance without breathing; they grab bungee cords that are anchored on the deck to work their muscles even harder.
“Yes, it’s tiring,” Ranomi Kromowidjodo tells me as she towels off and unleashes her long black hair from its cap, gulping a swig of sports drink between perfect white teeth. “But I like to be in the water, to flow and just swim really slowly, easy. With my head submerged, it makes me feel like a fish.” She recounts her addiction to the water, starting when she was just three. “I got a swimsuit, and I thought, ‘I can swim!’” she recalls, laughing. “So I jumped into the pool. My mom gasped and said, ‘Oh no!’” And then enrolled little Ranomi for her first swim lessons. By fifteen she was a European Junior champion. Now she spends eight or nine hours in the pool every day but Sunday, swimming some 45,000 meters (nearly 28 miles) a week. I ask if she ever wakes up and does not want to work out. “No,” she says quickly, echoing what her coach has already told me. “There is never a time I don’t want to swim. I feel the water; I feel the power against my hands. I think of swimming and I. . . .” Her voice trails off as she tries to explain its significance in her life. “The swimming is most important. Everything else is secondary.”
It’s About Time
Teri McKeever, head coach of the women’s swim team at the University of California, Berkeley, is head coach of female swimmers for the 2012 Olympics. At fifty, she is the first woman ever to hold the job.
How does being a woman influence your coaching?
I think good coaching is empowering your athlete—mentoring, not coercing. You see more partnershipping. You see more nurturing. But also, “Get your ass in gear!”
What’s the secret to swimming?
It’s not about overpowering your environment. The water isn’t the same as the ground, where the harder you push on it, the more successful you’ll be. I always tell the girls, if you get in a fight with the water, who wins? You have to find a way of working with it.
Why do you take your athletes to body-surf and paddle in the ocean?
So they can understand the power of the water. To get an awareness that there’s energy and a rhythm there that, when you vary it, it hopefully. . . .
Makes you faster?
Well, I think so, but don’t tell anyone!
You also take them to swim with dolphins, to observe penguins and whales.
I think you can learn by just watching. With dolphins, I said, “See if you can do what looks and feels like them. They have no bubbles coming off them. Try to mimic it.”
Tell me something you love about swimming.
To be the first one in the pool when the sun is out, and you break that seal on the water, and then you can see your shadow on the bottom.
Kromowidjodo’s next big performance will be at the London Olympics, where she hopes to win an individual gold medal—to join the one she won as part of the 4 x 100 freestyle relay team in Beijing in 2008. “You always want to have more,” she explains. “Gold. It’s human!”
Like most of the elite swimmers I meet, Ranomi Kromowidjodo avoids the bone-jangling impact of nonaquatic exercises. Most don’t run, don’t play basketball or tennis. One reason is muscle types: long, stretched fibers for the water that don’t perform well on land. Another reason is floppy wrists and ankles. All that flexibility makes it hard to handle a racquet or hit the track without risk of injury. Rowdy Gaines, the affable three-time Olympic gold medalist who has broadened our understanding of swim races with his commentary for NBC, says he’s awkward when he’s not swimming. “I was a clodhopper on land,” he tells me. “In high school I tried out for five sports—football, basketball, baseball, tennis, golf.” Didn’t make any of the cuts. “Look at The Superstars,” he adds, citing the TV program forcing athletes to compete outside their own specialty. “Swimmers always finished dead last. I did.” Today Gaines still swims almost every day. “I was born and raised in Florida, so I grew up with water all around me,” he says. “I learned to swim before I could walk. I love the feeling of being in the water.”
Although swimming was not part of the original Olympics, it has been a mainstay of the modern Games since they reappeared in Athens in 1896. During the mid-nineteenth century, top British champions regularly solicited competitors with classified ads in the newspaper. They were adult play dates for money prizes, accompanied by such heavy betting—it was “rife,” one source reported, “of more importance than the swimming”—that abolishing it was one of the first orders of business when an amateur swimming society was formed.
How fast is fast?
In the past three decades, in the race usually considered that of the fastest swimmer in the world (fifty-meter free), male elite swimmers have shaved almost 2 seconds off the record; females, more than 2 seconds. In swimming, that’s huge. Just for comparison, Mark Spitz swam the hundred-meter fly in 54.27 for one of his 1972 gold medals. The record today is 49.82. Olympian (and future Tarzan) Johnny Weissmuller made headlines around the globe when he broke the 1-minute mark for the hundred-meter freestyle (held by another American, Duke Kahanamoku) in 1922. Weissmuller’s time was 58.6. Today’s world record is 46.91. I could go on.
And the swimmers will, in their endless race to lower the times. “It’s so cool to be able to push my body as far as it can go,” explains Nathan Adrian, a week before his twenty-third birthday. Already an Olympic gold medalist, he tells me that lifting more weights, doing more reps, “is a rush of endorphins. That’s why I do it.” When I ask if his love of swimming is all about going faster, his handsome face widens into a huge grin. “Yeah! Obviously! What else would it be about?” And why does he like going fast? Nathan, a pre-med graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, pauses playfully and says, “I don’t know. Is that a Darwinian question?” Then he goes on: “It’s just testing myself against the rest of the world. We all swim freestyle differently—Michael [Phelps], Ryan [Lochte], myself. It’s testing my race strategy, my body, my prep, my physiology against theirs. And that’s exciting. Look at little kids—they race all the time. We’re just like big little kids with technology behind our backs!”
Indeed, strokes that evolved haphazardly in recent centuries have been honed by calculated research. And a modern world obsessed with fins on cars and rockets to the moon has inevitably applied the same aerodynamic inquiry to its human torpedoes. Indiana’s Counsilman used early underwater films to analyze swimmers’ movements, pointing out that stroke mechanics, not just brute force, could improve a swimmer’s speed. Other inquiries helped lead to an explosion of tests and devices that have measured virtually every pore and tic of the body to shave milliseconds off one’s time. Swimmers have been dropped into giant flumes, or streams of current, to test their stroke efficiency, and diodes mounted on their limbs have tracked the trajectory of their arms. Their dives and grips off the starting block, as well as the exact distance fingers should be spread to pull the most water have all been measured and compared. The science behind the latter is called the “boundary layer,” which “closes up” the gaps the way a mesh fly swatter acts like a solid paddle. Optimally, your fingers should be exactly six millimeters apart. Unfortunately, that’s so small that it’s very hard to maintain. So most swimmers I know keep their hands almost flat, fingers almost together, thumb apart. Never cup your hand.
The emphasis on science has made today’s swimmers fluent in the language of fluid dynamics. Many speak with authority about the forces of propulsion and lift and thrust, and about the enemy, drag, the friction that puts on the brakes. Racers will do anything to avoid drag: shave, slither, and don sleek suits. Drag can be the difference between gold and silver. Drag can really be a drag. Learning about it has changed the way we stroke.
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