Strokes of Genius: Swimming

As someone who can’t bear to get his face wet, let alone attempt a racing turn, I am not a natural fit for swimming as a spectator sport. However, with so many medals at stake during the first week of the Games, I always find my attention pulled by some kind of magnetic force to the Olympic pool. I may not be much of a swimmer myself but there’s something elemental about the sport. All the action is contained within a 50-metre tank of water and, whatever the stroke, it’s a straightforward race with the added appeal of a potential record time being achieved.

My earliest memories of Olympic swimming date from 1972. At Munich, two competitors dominated proceedings, hogging the headlines not only in the pool but in the Games as a whole. Australian Shane Gould won five medals, including three golds, each of them in world record times. What made her achievement so astonishing was that she was only fifteen years old! This was to be her first and last Olympics as she bowed out of public life just two years later.

However, even Shane was overshadowed by Mark Spitz who won seven of his events, including three relays, each associated with that WR symbol. Only Michael Phelps at Beijing has matched that incredible feat. The American swimming machine scooped almost half of all medals on offer in the pool at Munich, and has usually dominated every four years, leaving the Aussies trailing a distant second. That just makes it even sweeter when the Stars and Stripes freestylers are defeated.

In 2004, the 200m final provided the hotly-anticipated showdown between not two but four superstars. In the glorious open-air arena, the Aussie man in black, Ian Thorpe eventually reeled in his Dutch friend, rival and 100m champion Pieter Van den Hoogenband on the final lap, leaving a 19 year-old Michael Phelps in third.  What a race!

Britain has rarely excelled in the Olympic front crawl sprints. Billericay-born Mark Foster was an outstanding 50m speed merchant with all manner of titles to his name but when the five rings fluttered, he never even made a podium. Thank goodness for Rebecca Adlington, who swam under even the British media radar in Beijing to win both the 400m and 800m events, also eclipsing the venerable Sharron Davies as our most famous female swimmer.

Up to that point, most of Team GB’s gold medals had come in the relatively sedate breaststroke. David Wilkie became a national hero in ’76 when he reversed the 100m placings to beat John Hencken in the 200m showdown and become the only non-American male champ in Montreal. Incidentally, the East Germans were almost as dominant in the women’s races. Duncan Goodhew (in Moscow, which the USA boycotted) and Adrian Moorhouse (Seoul) kept the British success going into the Eighties but when it comes to global domination, no Brit has hit the heights scaled by Adam Peaty. At the time of writing he has eight world and twelve European titles, plus an amazing eleven world records, and those numbers will surely increase in the next few years. For the casual swimming viewer like me, it’s when he launches Team GB’s gold rush in the Olympics that Peaty comes into his own, as in Rio last time out Currently, no-one in the world can touch him in the sprints and Tokyo beckons next year…

Over the years, the less well-known disciplines have also yielded some classic Olympic performances from nations other than the USA, UK or Australia. The Seventies triumphs of the East German women were sadly tainted by suspected state doping practices but the West German Michael Gross’ reputation as an Eighties great remains unsullied. Had he been American he would surely have scooped umpteen relay golds but it’s for his 2.13m ‘wing-span’ in the butterfly that he is best remembered, and which earned him his ‘Albatross’ epithet.

If swimming was Take That, backstroke is the Jason Orange of all disciplines. Even the Brits have yet to excel at it. Neverthless, when someone is so commanding in their event, sometimes you feel compelled to watch and admire. So it was at Barcelona in ’92 when Hungarian Kristina Egerszegi plundered the IOC’s gold reserves so effectively, not only in the two backstroke finals but also the 400m individual medley. I was surprised to learn that no other woman has surpassed her tally of five individual Olympic titles and she retired after the Atlanta Games at just 22.

Giants of the sport like Phelps, Spitz and Peaty demand respect, of course but, to a chap who has never managed to complete a full length, there is another whose endeavour against the odds elevates him head and weary shoulders ahead of the rest as my personal swimming hero. Arise, Eric ‘the Eel’ Moussambani! The 22 year-old from Equatorial Guinea became one of the stories of Sydney 2000 when he swam his 100m freestyle heat in almost two minutes, appearing to struggle just to finish. The icing on the cake was that he actually won the race, because the other two competitors were disqualified for false starts! That’s what the Olympics is all about…