QUINIDINE

I’m in the North Sydney Olympic Pool showers looking down on Talbot’s heavy shoulders and busy right hand; he’s crouched awkwardly at my thighs. We’re in a hurry because these are the 1972 NSW championships and I’m meant to be waiting behind the blocks for what’s become my best event, the 400-metre freestyle. (After noticing I hadn’t bothered shaving down for this first big test of the Olympic year, Talbot’s decided to embarrass me with a hurried once-over in the showers.) Up and down my thigh sprints his razor, forehand down and backhand up, a mini-snowplough spreading foam clods either side of a tan runway. Tiny red bulbs ooze and bloom along the odd nick line.

Moments ago Talbot was furious, but he now seems warmed to his task like a bossy hen with its chickens finally in line. As he hacks away, I’m thinking how much tripe this shaving-down caper is: one of the sham rituals greasing the coach–swimmer hegemony. And swimmers are such suckers for coaching palaver. As soon as there’s any hint of boffin-babble (Reduces the drag coefficient! Exposes the nerve ends!), their eyes glaze over as if it’s an edict from God’s lab. But as if a few mangy hairs could slow down a design already as flawed as the human form in water. I mean, what proper hull ever had a big wobbly ball up front, shoulders, hips, and a gooey adipose lining? (The jargon for those particular liabilities is form drag.) Worrying about a bit of leg fuzz slowing you down is the idiocy-equivalent of a snail fretting about the drag of a dewy shell.

At last, I’m back out behind the blocks on glossy new pins in a murky slick of floodlight on damp concrete, bodies, and decaying dive towers; the smell is rust and salt. Under swaying lamps and fine drizzle, I swing my arms in counter-rotation, half in athletic pageantry and half wondering if there’s a point. Straight ahead is the darkening arch of the Harbour Bridge, with its inching headlights; over my right shoulder, the ritzy turrets of Luna Park.

With any luck there are now only the tiniest spots of shaving foam left on the back of my legs, because the Mexico Olympic bronze medallist Karen Moras is directly behind me, leaning back nonchalantly in a row of plastic chairs. She’s stretched almost flat now across her chair’s hollow, arms joined coat-hanger cool behind her head, waiting for her own 400-metre final. At eighteen, Karen’s less than a year older than me, but in girls this can be an extra decade in maturity; and now I can almost feel her inquisitive gaze counting foam flecks on my hammies. But suddenly I’m in luck when one of her club mates jogs past to the girl beside Karen and asks her to check for something on the back of her legs. There’s a hushed urgency with the request, and by the hurried half-pirouette to face away from her appraiser, I can tell it’s for higher stakes than the odd scrap of shaving foam. When she’s given the thumbs-up, she trots back to her chair almost whinnying with enthusiasm.

I don’t know how Karen can look so cool, knowing Shane is the new world record holder, and that they’ll be splashing it out straight after me. In fact, Shane now holds the complete suite of freestyle world records, from 100-metre to 1500-metre, a feat once thought impossible. But silly me — I now see one girl’s rise explains the other’s resignation. The spotlight’s shifted.

People don’t mind Karen. She has these big never-miss-a-trick doll’s eyes and an expression always seemingly braced for banter. Her family’s a team: Mrs Moras can often be seen fussing over her parka-clad daughters between races, diving into bags or twisting thermos caps. You know you’re at something big with her around.

‘What time you gonna do, Brad?’ Karen asks flatly from behind, as officials fuss over another hitch in the starting trolley. (She spoke my name, I marvel; maybe she saw me smash Windeatt’s world 800-metre record last night.) In the same automatic tone, I turn and reply, ‘Hmmm … exactly 4 minutes 4.7 seconds, Karen,’ and she’s all chuckles at this mild parody.

After finishing two body-lengths clear of Windeatt, I glance up to see Karen quizzing my timekeepers in the light rain, nudging in under their umbrella; now she returns my gaze, suddenly hands-on-mouth, to cackle, ‘It’s … oh my god … 4 minutes 4.7.’ I’m thrilled such a freakish fluke has impressed Karen.

As Karen’s final is called to the blocks, I crow, ‘Good luck,’ divining that she will lose to Shane.

The next night I’m leading my 1500-metre freestyle final when, six laps from the finish, something snags in my gut and I stop breathing. I hug myself into a ball to relieve whatever’s making my insides feel like a gaffed fish, before treading water across to the lane-divider, where I throw an arm over its beaded discs. Thirty seconds later, with my breathing relaxing and heart rate slowing, I continue the race, though now a lap behind the new leader, Graham Windeatt. At the finish I find my time almost a minute slower than I’d hoped for when I dived in.

A day later I’m sitting across the desk from a doctor Talbot has scheduled for me at a sports-medicine clinic, and I’m slightly embarrassed he should be pondering a whacky ailment which has intruded on my entire life perhaps a dozen times, and only in swimming races. By his strange harrumphing I suspect he has his doubts, and who can blame him? Hang on — he’s actually putting pen to paper for a prescription. But I’m not really sick, I feel like protesting as he rips out the scrip and pushes it into my hand before seeing me to the door. In his brief muttering of a diagnosis, I hear the term ‘diaphragm spasticity’, and marvel that there could be such a thing. Visiting a pharmacy on the way home, I pick up a course of quinidine tablets. When I phone my father in the evening, he asks, ‘Isn’t quinidine some sort of drug for heart problems?’ I reply that the GP merely called it a muscle relaxant, and insist he must have known his stuff because he was from the Lewisham Sports Medicine Clinic. I take my first tablet before bed, but the following day I throw the whole bottle away in disgust because I don’t want to take drugs just for sport, recalling Ashley’s past disparagement of prescription users. (‘Christalmighty,’ he’d gasped in the car when I was nine, having apparently peered into the bathroom cabinet of friends we’d visited. ‘They had a pill for every sniffle and a cream for every crack!’ And when he wasn’t putting on a show of mild outrage, he’d simply call such people ‘lab rats’.)

A month later at the Olympic Trials in Brisbane, I break the world record for 400-metre freestyle, beating my NSW championship time by three seconds, and without the help of prophecy. This makes me the swimmer to beat in Munich for the event. I also win the 1500-metre in a time just two tenths outside the world mark. With additional wins in the 100-metre and 200-metre backstroke, I’m a shoo-in for the team, having taken nearly a quarter of the men’s individual gold medals on offer. I’d also have won the 800-metre and likely beaten my own recent world record, had Talbot not instructed me to attempt a further lowering of my new 400-metre mark en route (records can be set during longer distances, with foot contact at the wall at the designated tumble a legal touch). But I failed that attempt narrowly and was so exhausted that I fell back through the field, rallying towards the end to finish second to Windeatt.

I begin wondering about this strange ploy that probably cost me a world mark and another title, and wonder if Talbot merely wanted me hamstrung to guarantee Windeatt the win to secure his spot on the team. But then, maybe he really convinced himself I had a better 400-metre in me, even that I’d be the first under four minutes; the sky’s always the limit with him. He thinks we’re cars that have to be constantly red-lined to get the most out of them. From his perspective, at least, there was nothing to lose and everything to gain.

But it wasn’t my perspective. I’d have liked another world record. As the hours pass, I find it increasingly hard — no, impossible — to believe that someone of Talbot’s experience could think that after giving my all to break one of the toughest records in the books, I could do even better just twenty-four hours later. What an insult! In my mind, he told me to throw a race, to betray the whole idea of competing, just for his plans, whatever they were.

My dreaded breathing problem showed no sign of a return during the trials. But then, they were at the Valley Pool, where I’d trained and competed for several years, trouble-free. It’s one of my ‘friendly’ pools.