MASTERS SWIMMING

The crowd’s chattering turned to a hush of anticipation as the starter called the swimmers to their marks. Eight muscled bodies leaned from the starting blocks. At the sound of the gun they were off, stroking furiously down the fifty-meter length of the pool. A quick touch, push off the wall, pull underwater, and then back again. As the winner strained for the electronic touch pad, a roar went up from the crowd: just over one minute and fifteen seconds. A new record!

The picture is a familiar one. You have seen it a hundred times before on Wide World of Sports and similar programs. Only this time it was different. This time the beaming, ecstatic face of the winner belonged not to a twenty-year-old college student but to forty-five-year-old Manuel Sanguily. The scene was the Brown University pool, site of a special national swimming competition, the U.S. National Masters Swimming Championships. Sanguily, a physician living in Tarrytown, New York, had just smashed the world record for the 100-meter breaststroke for men in his age-group.

Throughout this book I have talked about Masters swimming, a phenomenally successful national swimming program devoted to fitness and competition. Its enthusiasts come in both sexes, in all ages, from nineteen to one hundred plus—in all colors and sizes, from every part of the country, from all walks of life. They include bankers, truck drivers, secretaries, psychologists, doctors, housewives, firemen, blacksmiths, judges, writers, artists, nuns, lawyers, clowns, herpetologists, priests, policemen, presidential candidates, cabinet members, rabbis, teachers, accountants—you name it. There are former Olympic greats, like Tracy Caulkins, and there are tens upon tens of thousands of people who never swam competitively before—some who were unable to swim even one lap a year ago. They swim for many reasons: for health, to lose weight, to reduce stress, for the challenge of training and competing, to renew old rivalries and friendships, to make new friends, to look better and feel better, and they all swim for the sheer fun of it.

The Origin

This is not your typical fast exercise fad, in one year and out the next. The brainchild of Dr. Ransom Arthur, former dean of the University of Oregon Medical School, Masters swimming lets swimmers pursue all the motives just listed and puts the emphasis on lifelong physical fitness. It began in the 1960s, when Dr. Arthur and his colleagues at the Naval Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in San Diego developed prototype swimming programs for adults in the area. Unfortunately, like Carl Bauer before him, Arthur met with little success when he attempted to sell the idea nationally to the AAU and the President’s Council on Physical Fitness. Finally, in 1969 he interested John Spannuth, then head of the American Swim Coaches Association, in sponsoring a meet.

Growth

The first Masters meet, held in Amarillo, Texas, in May 1970, drew some sixty-five competitors. Today there are programs in every state and in more than seventy other countries, including all the traditional swimming powers, such as Germany, Japan, Australia, and Russia, and even such unlikely aquatic redoubts as Bangladesh, Pakistan, Fiji, New Guinea, and the United Arab Emirates.

Since 1970 Masters programs have been initiated in other sports, but swimming remains far and away the most popular. The first World Masters Games, held in Toronto in 1985, featured competition in over twenty sports, but more than half of the 5,000 participants were swimmers.

Every year two national championships are held, a short-course (twenty-five-yard pool) meet in May, and a long-course (fifty-meter pool) meet in late summer. Each usually draws upward of 1,500 competitors. National and world top ten rankings are compiled for every event and every age-group, and world records are certified by FINA, swimming’s international governing body. Since 1984 there has been a world-championship meet every two years, typically with 4,000 to 5,000 participants. These meets have been held in New Zealand, Japan, Australia, Brazil, the United States, and Canada. Future meets are scheduled for England and Germany. (For information about Masters swimming programs in your area, contact United States Masters Swimming, Inc. The address and phone number are listed in Appendix F.)

How It Works

All the standard events—freestyle, backstroke, breaststroke, butterfly, individual medley, and relays—are included in a Masters meet. There are even several events unique to Masters swimming: 50-yard and 50-meter sprints for backstroke, breaststroke, and butterfly; the 100-yard individual medley; and coed relays, in which teams are composed of two men and two women. Competition is held in five-year age-groups: for example, men thirty-five to thirty-nine and women fifty to fifty-four. In the United States, the youngest age-group is nineteen to twenty-four. Elsewhere, Masters begins with the twenty-five to twenty-nine age bracket.

In many other sports athletes are not defined as “Masters” until they are thirty-five or forty years old. But since the Masters swimming program places primary emphasis on the promotion of lifelong physical fitness for all, it draws people soon after they leave school and begin their careers. Of course, many top athletes continue to perform at the highest level throughout their twenties and thirties, and sometimes even into their early forties. But few of us are elite athletes, and it makes eminently good sense to have a program geared toward ordinary folks.

In the United States alone, more than half a million men and women have participated since the program began. Even more impressive is the far greater number of people who do not compete at all but simply swim to maintain their physical fitness. As has been noted, every survey conducted on physical fitness over the past three decades has concluded that swimming far outstrips in popularity and participation running, aerobics, tennis, and every other sport. These participants in swimming experience the many benefits the sport has to offer: enhanced health and fitness, resistance to disease, stress reduction, greater peace of mind, a more active love life, and an extended life span.

Mani Sanguily, the balding, charismatic physician who smashed the 100-meter breaststroke record for his age-group, is one of the nation’s most popular Masters swimmers. In 1956 Sanguily was a flag bearer for his native Cuba at the opening ceremonies of the Melbourne Olympics. While studying for his M.D. at the Ohio State University School of Medicine, he won a gold medal at the Pan American Games and several U.S. national titles. In 1959 he set an American record for the 100-meter breaststroke with a time of 1 minute 14.7 seconds. Then, after almost two decades away from competitive swimming, Sanguily clocked 1:15 for the same event. Several years later, at the age of fifty-one, he duplicated this feat. Today, at the grand age of sixty-one, he has added only three more seconds to his time and is the fastest breaststroke swimmer in the world in his age-group.

Yet the thrill of this kind of victory is not what brought Sanguily back to swimming. “I’d always had this crazy desire to swim across the Hudson River,” he told me. (In Tarrytown, New York, the spot where Sanguily wanted to cross, the river is two and a half miles wide.) “I didn’t smoke, and I’d been playing tennis regularly, so I thought I was in pretty good shape. Wrong! The first day in the pool, I swam four laps and could barely climb out.” After this painful experience, however, things got better. “I was surprised how easy it was to get my stroke back; soon I was going about three thousand yards a day.”

The following summer Sanguily swam across the Hudson. Now his river crossing is an annual Labor Day event, a media occasion that draws hundreds of participants, as well as celebrities such as television commentator and former Olympic star Donna DeVarona.

Dr. Sanguily is an energetic man. In addition to his medical practice, he is a leading television spokesman for improving the nation’s health care, particularly among Hispanic Americans, doing shows on topics such as diet, hypertension, and smoking. An asthmatic, he is also active in promoting awareness of asthma as a major health problem and of swimming as the best activity for controlling the disease. Despite having a schedule that would exhaust most people, Mani Sanguily gets in his 3,000 yards of swimming, four or five days a week.