FINE TIME

Only in the forty-eight hours before flying home do I find time and any inclination for reflection. Fully relaxed for the first time in a month, I range perspectives so trivialised by recent events.

First, there were the uncanny medical parallels between all 400-metre placegetters: DeMont with his well-known wheezing; me with my breathing arrhythmia; the bronze medallist, Steve Genter, with his collapsed lung on arrival in Munich (though some say it was Genter himself collapsing with a lung infection). Diving in for our final, none of we three could have been confident of even finishing, let alone monopolising the spoils. And after DeMont lost his medal, the former world record holder and legally blind American law student Tom McBreen was drafted to the bronze, having come in fourth behind Genter. Had such a musical chairs of Olympic swimming infirmity ever occurred before?

Another big oddity was the absence of the 400-metre world record holder. Barely a month ago, Kurt Krumpholz swept all before him in the heats of his American Trials with a new world mark of 4 minutes 0.11 seconds, erasing my 4 minutes 1.7 from our Trials. But his nation’s Darwinian selection rigour didn’t care about world records set in heats; it took only swimmers who could deliver medals in finals. Krumpholz’s inconceivable sixth in his Trial final fell three places short of selection. Rubbing salt into the wound, his world record was still intact after the Olympic final, though barely: DeMont had swum 4.00.26; and I, 4.00.27.

And another likely-but-absent finalist was the West German former world record holder Hans Fassnacht. His own three-year-old contribution to the fastest falling record in the books was a still-respectable 4.04.0. That time would have qualified him among the first few into the final, but he’d gone nowhere near it in the heats and would barely have made a B final, had there been one. It wasn’t Fassnacht’s swimming that had kept me shaking in my boots these past few years, however, but his kicking prowess: he also held the unofficial world record of 4 minutes 40 seconds for 400-metre freestyle kicking. So freakish was that kickboard dexterity that his fabled mark was only a few seconds slower than my routine freestyle training 400s. I’d long harboured a real fear that he, or some obviously comatose aspect of his physiology, would one day suddenly twig that swimming should be a couple of minutes faster than mere kicking. But then, maybe he’d simply made a bizarre fetish of his kicking prowess at the expense of swimming.

Touching after McBreen was my teammate Windeatt. In last place was the 200-metre bronze medallist Werner Lampe, whose bold pre-Games statement of shaving his head bald was unheard of before Munich. But apparent remorse saw him sporting a luxuriant toupee around the Village, taken off only at the last moment and with pathetic surreptitiousness before mounting the blocks. When its last removal for our final brought rowdy valedictory hoots from a section of the stands, that globe burned with the wattage of his surname. Lampe’s sensitivity was in stark contrast to fellow finalist Genter, the collapsed-lung swimmer who’d quickly followed the ‘chrome dome’ example of the German, but preceded him in the battle to the wall for the 200-metre silver behind Mark Spitz. On the presentation dais, the unapologetically wigless Genter had routinely flouted new Olympic sponsorship covenants by wearing Adidas on one foot and Puma on the other.

There’s also my memory of the 400-metre itself. What memory? comes the shocking reply. I’m no longer sure which lane I was in, though it must have been one of the centre ones, always kept for the fastest qualifiers — DeMont to my right as we dived in. My first vague hint of how things were going was at halfway when I felt DeMont and I had inched ahead, the rest evidently hitting their pain thresholds and falling away. Not that you see the field with chessboard clarity, since, without goggles, any sudden play of light on an outside wall could be a swimmer you’d overlooked. You just don’t have the reserves of concentration at this pitch of effort to check — watching is for spectators — and you trust there are no barnstorming finishes because everyone’s had years to find their best pace. So it was all doubt, trust, and desperation. Then more doubt, the same shaky species of rational scepticism that kept you on your toes over the seasons as you watched true believers quit in bitterness at failed locker-room credos. In our last lap it was blur vs blur to the wall, with me hoping against hope I wouldn’t arrive and see lane eight — that play of light — already propped on lane ropes with arm raised. What I saw was worse. Two identical times on the display board; a moment of confusion — now a hundredth-of-a-second difference but thinking it’d gone my way, when, with the shock of acceptance and the reflexive sportsmanship of a pat on the back for the winner, I knew it’d gone DeMont’s way forever.

Then there was the race to leave my regrets about the new electronic timing in the shade. My fingertips had touched the wall one-hundredth-of-a-second soft, but the system was skinned to a thousandth. Just two thousandths separated American Tim McKee from the 400-metre medley winner, Sweden’s Gunnar Larsson (yet another former 400-metre freestyle record holder). McKee was inconsolable after seeing the results board, rocking in a kind of foetal position beside the pool afterwards.

Shane’s effort of three gold medals, one bronze, and one silver has been called everything from disappointing to heroic. I guess if you were naive enough to expect her to win every Olympic event for which she held the current world record, she’d have taken the four freestyles — the 100, 200, 400, and 800 — but this may or may not have excluded the surprise 200-metre medley win. There were too many American girls close to Shane’s level coming into the Games, and all it needed was for one of them to have the swim of her life to cause the upset. And the job of preparing Shane for such a range of distances, each requiring its own bias of endurance and speed, would have been challenging. But this is where Talbot’s at his best, because he’s quite good at judging the right mix of speed and endurance. (‘Tapering’ for race day is likened to a plane dumping fuel for an emergency landing. Ditch too much and you won’t get there; keep too much and you’ll hit the runway in a ball of flames. In the final stages of preparation, a swimmer’s workload is severely cut to reclaim speed and vitality compromised by months of grind. Crash landings are not uncommon.) In the end, he probably tried to focus on Shane’s middle events, the 200 to 400 range, in which Shane had most of her races, while hoping she would retain just enough speed for the 100, or just enough endurance for the 800. It’s one thing to set records for every freestyle distance at different points of the calendar when all your ducks are lined up in a row — but all in the same meet? As it turned out, the 100-metre and 800-metre were bridges too far, even for Talbot to conjure. Had he gone for a distance-only preparation, Shane may have won ‘only’ the 400-metre and 800-metre freestyle. Had he gone in hard for the sprint, she may have won only the 100-metre and 200-metre freestyle. For her part, Shane didn’t falter. You couldn’t possibly fault her nerve. And this was after some American team members had been going around in T-shirts with ‘All that glitters is not Gould’ emblazoned across the front. Of her losses, the least surprising in hindsight was to Keena Rothhammer in the 800-metre, because Keena broke Shane’s world record by five seconds.

When not pondering all these Olympic vagaries, I’m taking an interest in the modern Olympic movement itself, its template hatched by public-minded European aristocrats around the same time as that other global cause for youthful betterment, Boy Scouts (my brothers dumped swimming for Scouts the week our parents separated). Scouting teaches duty and hygiene, but even the elitist Games has its own propaganda wing of Olympism. I discovered this by accident after a squiz at some flashy brochures in the room I share with the Mexico Olympic sprint-freestyle double gold medallist Mike Wenden, a seven-year veteran of national teams. Ever since the swimming program ended, he’s been out and about networking with Olympism’s youngest and brightest from around the world.

From what I’ve read, Olympism’s charter strives for a better world by making sport an integral part of everyone’s lives. Fair enough, I think, though I’m hardly the best judge, because I have no idea of the alternative: life without sport. How could you even begin to do a study on that sort of stuff? Maybe all those sedentary types are similarly chuffed with their No-Sportism, but are too considerate to rub our noses in it. Maybe that’s where hippies come into things. Go figure.

Not that Wenden’s the only one pushing the Olympic spirit here. I’m not entirely sure how this happened, but our entire dorm seems to have channelled the ancient Greeks almost overnight, because we all decided — by apparent telepathy — to go starkers around the dorm for the rest of the Games. We got back from the pool one day and it was suddenly birthday suits all round, how do you do. It’s obvious our manager’s not impressed, because you only ever see him last thing at night when he just rocks in and crashes. You wake next morning to see him pulling on his trousers and he’s out the door. But that’s fine, because having intergenerational nudity mightn’t have been good for anyone’s morale. Anyway, there’s loads more laughter around the dorm now that the duds are off. Or maybe its just that the competition is over and the pressure’s off — along with the clothes.

Chatting with Wenden can be like some charming Old World benediction, with his kindly musical voice and eyes constantly twinkling as if piloting a punchline down for a landing. He’s a natural storyteller, but you won’t hear the really good ones from his own lips (like the time he won his race in Mexico before momentarily blacking out with the altitude problems) because he doesn’t like to blow his own trumpet; you have to hear those stories from someone else. The yarn I have to settle for today is from his old uni marketing degree days, where some tutor said that just by colouring a humble potato peeler blue instead of brown, sales instantly doubled. Which is pretty cool, but also a tad alarming when you think about it, because it means we’re all just bower birds making decisions based on some deep reptilian chromatic response rather than informed judgements.

Wenden hasn’t been able to repeat his Mexico success here, though he still made the finals of the 100-metre and 200-metre freestyle, even bettering his Mexico time for the 200-metre by almost a second. Except that the rest of the world — namely Mark Spitz — has moved on by three seconds. He’s been doing it uphill all year anyway, after getting married and starting work in a bank. I don’t know how he’s managed to do as well as he has in Munich. But at least the pedants are finally happy. They couldn’t stand it when he won in Mexico with his fierce overreaching freestyle and uneven kick. When he goes helter-skelter up the pool like that, he reminds me of fast-forward footage of a climber going up a precipice with picks. What a hoot! The pedants were so righteously pissed off with him beating the classical stylist Don Schollander in Mexico that if an official had joked that he had the power to disqualify Wenden for incorrect technique, they might have fallen for it.