Chapter 5 The Fast Lane - 3

In the late 1960s, Doc Counsilman’s research on drag convinced freestylers to use the so-called S-stroke. That’s where you curve your leading arm in toward the body before moving it back out past the hip for recovery. It was based on an effect in physics called Bernoulli’s Principle, and it was supposed to work because lift-based thrust—pushing water perpendicular to the body—was more effective than drag-based thrust—pushing water back parallel to the body. The prime example is the boat: when you paddle, it’s drag; when the propeller rotates, it’s lift. Which one gets you there faster? A number of coaches voted for lift, and the S-shaped arm stroke, rather than the straight-back deep catch, took over. That was then. A generation or so later, the thinking is different.

“The nice thing about computational modeling is that we can actually test some of these things,” explains Rajat Mittal of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. “So we got underwater video of some Olympic athletes using both strokes, and we simulated both.” That simple sentence belies hours of painstaking research, based on their ability to analyze how water flows past the body. Dr. Mittal and his team animated their study using the same computer program that gave us the movie Shrek. What they learned was no fantasy. “We found that the deep catch [drag-based] is definitely superior,” he tells me. “And I tried it out myself. It does seem to work better.” Dr. Mittal, a recreational lap swimmer who entertains himself in the pool by thinking about the drag he might be creating, adds one more twist to the story. “Even the deep catch actually produces quite a bit of thrust from lift,” he says, “so in some sense half the theory was true! There is some amount of lateral motion in the arms as you complete the stroke. We’ll send it in to a swimming journal.”

 

     Dr. Mittal first came to the swim world’s attention with a study funded by USA Swimming that analyzed American Olympians’ use of the dolphin kick, a major mechanical influence on modern competitive swimming. Now he’s studying fish, trying to learn what kind of noise a fish makes when it swims and how that might relate to human swimming efficiency. He wants to know how fish use their pectoral fins to swim so efficiently; what makes their fins similar to butterfly wings; why dolphins work at 60 percent efficiency in the water and humans only 11 to 12 percent. “A lot of the dolphin’s efficiency is due to its beautifully streamlined shape,” he explains. “And if we could just wear a suit that would make us have the shape of a dolphin, we’d recover quite a bit of that efficiency.”

Dr. Mittal also wonders why dolphins’ speed seems to defy physics. “The amount of power they’re swimming at seems to far exceed the muscle power of the animal,” he says. The meditation turns to fact. “Many fish and cetaceans, and especially the dolphin, exude some kind of mucous from their pores, a little slime layer.” Polymer drag reduction, he calls it. He says it really works, and that both the Navy and DARPA are spending millions to see if it can apply to marine vehicles. Wait till the coaches hear about that one.

Gains in the lane also come from the pool itself. Deep water is faster; deeper gutters mean less splash-back; wider lane lines mean calmer waters. Calm is good. The fastest swimmers get to swim in the middle because there’s less turbulence from competitors. And those colorful markers dividing one lane from another are not just colorful markers: they’re scientifically engineered wave-destroyers to keep the pool from becoming a foamy water park. The patent on the ones you see at your local Y or school is likely held by Adolph Kiefer, the indefatigable Olympian (he won gold at the Berlin Olympics in 1936) and champion of all things swimming (the company he founded in Illinois supplies much of the nation’s aquatic gear) who still swims daily in his nineties.

All those refinements make the swimmers faster and the meets more exciting, which leads to new records and, the promoters hope, bigger audiences. But they’re tough to attract. Swim meets are inherently hard to follow—all you see is a head, arms, the froth of a kick. Underwater cameras help, with clock-stopping images of fingertip touches, but you never get the mid-race close-up of the athlete’s face, can’t get behind the goggles to focus on how he or she might be feeling.

     That’s why, in the tradition of the late, great Roone Arledge, the best television sports programming focuses on the athletes’ stories, to engage the viewer with what’s going on inside that swim-capped head. And with so many sports competing for the attention of a finite audience, it also helps if the team wins. “My philosophy has been to make swimming the centerpiece of prime time,” says Dick Ebersol, the innovative executive producer of NBC’s Olympics coverage for twenty years and now a consultant for the 2012 games. “With swimming, you get American winners.” He puts his faith in USA Swimming, which governs and promotes the sport, to identify and nourish champions. It “has arguably the best grassroots organization of any Olympic sport in the US,” Ebersol says. As a result, “you can rely on the swimmers.”

If they get to that level, they are a breed apart. “The Olympians in almost every single sport are mutants,” a coach tells me with complete awe. “They’re at the far end of the bell curve. And they have the perfect body type, the perfect physio type, and the perfect mind. Did you see The King’s Speech?Remember where he tells him, ‘It’s not about the mechanics’? You know, you get to a certain point, and it’s not about the mechanics. That’s what separates the Olympians. Do they have the heart and mind? And can they be there on that stage and perform at that minute?”

They call it “neck up”—because so many contests are won or lost in the head. Prerace tactics can rattle the brain. “I told everyone in the wait room I was going to ‘false start,’” confesses Donna de-Varona, whose two gold medals at the 1964 Olympics capped her spectacular teenage swimming career. “And I did.” She reminds me that the rules used to allow two false starts—where you go off before the gun—and that she took full advantage. “I wanted to get wet. It made me feel close to the water, and I could breathe better,” she says. She also admits that it was “very self-centered.” Anything out of the ordinary can unsettle finely tuned racers, shaking them out of their concentration. Today a false start gets you disqualified. De-Varona would have prevailed without it. “It’s all about speed,” she says, wincing at the memories. “You’re a Formula One race car. Competitive swimming is the ability to push the pain threshold further in every way.”

For some, it’s life changing. Mel Stewart, who won two golds and one bronze in the 1992 Olympics, today is a passionate swimming promoter and blogger. But after his victories he stopped swimming for ten years. “There was so much pressure, so many tears,” he says. “When I finally made it, it wasn’t joy—it was relief. I maybe swam three hours a year for those ten years afterwards.”

New York Times sports writer Karen Crouse, a former competitor herself, understands the emotional cost of a career in the water. “I came into college thinking swimmers were the most well-adjusted, balanced, sane individuals. But I saw so much dysfunction—I didn’t have the life experience to understand that winning isn’t normal. And now that I’m grown up and covering athletes day after day after day, it is really so rare I see a top-level athlete who I would say is a well-balanced individual. There’s usually some hole in their lives they’re trying to fill through athletic achievement. I used to feel such regret that I’d never become the swimmer I wanted to be; now I’m thinking I just didn’t have enough dysfunction.”

The dissonance between the years of Olympic glory (when “you made the water boil and the whole world hold its breath”) and the reality of resurfacing in the nonswimming world is starkly dramatized in Amphibians, a well-reviewed play recently staged in an abandoned London pool. Creator-director Cressida Brown based it on interviews with past and present athletes, and while the pool is empty, the limber actors, clad in bathing suits and caps, writhe in the virtual water like a team of terrified minnows. “Lane Six is my name,” announces one, stripped of humanity after a lifetime of practice as a teenager. “You’re first, second, third, or you’re nothing,” says another. “There is only time and water, the race and the finish, the black line.”

For Cullen Jones, the drama is his life. Like most sprinters, he holds his breath for the entire twenty-one seconds of the fifty-meter freestyle. Sure, you are thinking; I can hold my breath for twenty-one seconds. Easy. Oh yeah? While trying to cover the same territory on your belly that a quarterback races from the fifty-yard line? “You go from very, very comfortable to very, very uncomfortable very, very fast.” Jones tells me. “Any time that you are missing a bus and you run for the bus, you know that winded, tired, that almost-choking feeling in your chest? That’s what I have to learn to live with. My race is twenty-one seconds. By the first five seconds, I’m hurting. And I’m going, and halfway, you’re like, GASP—you’re like, ‘I gotta get in, gotta get in.’” I ask if the pain is centered in his lungs. “Everything. It’s everything. You’re gonna be kicking so hard your legs are burning. Your arms are moving; your arms are gonna get tired, especially when you’re pulling water. You’re literally pulling yourself up through the water and throwing it back behind you.” He shakes his head at the thought.

“Do you swim for pleasure now?”

“Not right now. I don’t think any of us really do,” he says. A smile returns. “I’m in the pool for four to six hours every day, and then I’m lifting weights on top of that. And sometimes on a Saturday, I’ll sleep for a couple of hours, and friends come by and say, ‘Hey, see you in the pool,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I’ll stay dry. I want to be dry for the next twenty-four hours.’”