BEYOND the theatrical aspects of American Michael Phelps’ attempt to emulate Mark Spitz by winning seven gold medals in Athens - and thus relieve his sponsor, Speedo, of $1,000,000 (£550,000) in cold, hard cash - there is another quest taking place that’s in every way as dramatic and significant.
Not only that, if Thorpe could do it, his would be a greater individual feat than that achieved by Spitz in winning the 100-200 freestyle and 100-200 butterfly doubles on the way to his historic seven golds in Munich in 1972 (Spitz’s other victories
came in the three relay events, and they don’t count in this discussion). A treble for Thorpe would be the greatest single performance in the history of swimming - unless of course Phelps tops it in Athens.
However, Thorpe himself doesn’t spend any time at all thinking about swimming history and his place in it. He’s pursuing the golden treble not because it hasn’t been done, but because he wants to see how fast he can go in the sport’s blue riband event: the 100m freestyle. He’s been telling the media for years that his sole interest is to improve his personal best times whenever he swims - regardless of what his opposition might do - and he says this not because he wants to bore everyone to death, but because he actually means it.
In the lead-up to the Barcelona World Championships last year, there was one question on everybody’s lips: who was the greatest swimmer in the world? Thorpe or Phelps? The only person in the swimming world who was apparently completely uninterested in the question was Ian Thorpe. The American, on the other hand, was very interested, and very much determined to prove that the answer was Michael Phelps.
So the treble is more an incidental thing - something that goes with the territory of being one of the greatest swimmers ever - rather than a consuming passion for Thorpe. And it seems the Aussie has a somewhat better chance than Phelps of accomplishing his goal in Athens.
He’s been homing in on it for quite a while. At the 2001 World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, he won his signature events, the 400m and the 200m, and came in fourth in the 100m, 0.48 seconds outside Anthony Ervin’s winning time. When the world’s best congregated again in Barcelona two years later, Thorpe had as usual pocketed the 400m and 200m gold medals before facing a much stronger field in the 100m - which notably included the great Russian, Alex Popov. Thorpe got on the podium for the first time in that event at world level, third behind Popov and Dutchman Pieter van den Hoogenband, and was now only 0.35 seconds off the pace. He was mowing them down so fast at the end, another five to ten metres would have got him that third gold medal. He was just about close enough to taste it.
AUSTRALIA’S best swimmer took out the freestyle treble at the Australian Championships in 2001, 2002 and 2003, and would almost certainly have nailed it yet again this year if not for his ignominious false start in a heat of the 400m. When he pulled it off at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in August 2002, he was the first man ever to do so; likewise at the Pan Pacs in Yokohama a few weeks later.
That’s a good indication of how tough it is, and yet those feats never received anything like the recognition they deserved. It seems the treble won’t really count in the public’s estimation unless it’s achieved for the first time at the highest possible level - and even then, people are going to need some basic understanding of human physiology to grasp why it is such a difficult thing to do.
Before we get to that, imagine for just a moment a similar level of performance in athletics. In terms of its demands on the body, the track equivalent of the swimming treble would be (roughly speaking) the 200-400-800 metres - and if any man or woman were to win gold in those three events in the modern Olympic arena, he or she would no doubt be hailed the greatest athlete of all time, and no argument about it. In reality, it just couldn’t happen.
So that begins to put Thorpe’s mission into some perspective. But comparing the two sports on such a prosaic level is highly spurious, of course. Everyone knows that 200m track sprinters are all built like brick outhouses, and 800m men are all decidedly more streamlined in the muscle department. On the other hand, the design specifications for swimmers are far more elastic. While most of the muscle men congregate around the sprint events in the pool, and the racing-snake types tend to saddle up for the long-distance events, swimming is capable of rolling out the welcome mat for all shapes and sizes (just as long as you’re rather tall). For example, the Olympic 100 and 200m sprint champion Van den Hoogenband is a reed-thin 73 kilos and 193cms in height, far more slender than the world’s fastest-ever 1500m man, Grant Hackett (198 cms, 90 kilos).
There’s a host of complicated factors that determine which event or events a swimmer is best suited to. So in that respect, at least, the comparison with dry-land athletes doesn’t really hold water, and people who make that comparison are exaggerating the degree of difficulty for swimmers. Nonetheless, to make the stretch in freestyle swimming from 100 to 400m at any level is still a very tough task. You might imagine it’s just a matter of racing very fast in the 100, and a bit slower in the 200, and a bit slower still in the 400 - with the guy who has the best technique winning. It’s not even close to that simple, and requires an understanding of the various energy systems that govern how the body operates. This is where our physiology lesson comes in. Stick with me here.
Humans produce energy in three ways. First, the adenosine triphosphate (ATP) system, which is explosive energy existing in the body, good for only a few muscle contractions. Then there’s the anaerobic system, where glycogen in the muscle is the fuel, no oxygen is burned, and lactic acid is produced, which is what causes pain - mostly relevant in the shorter and middle-distance events. Then there’s the aerobic system, where carbohydrate and fat are burned in the presence of oxygen - the main energy source for long-distance racing.
Naturally, every swimmer has to be trained for power, using the anaerobic system, and endurance, using the aerobic system. Science tells them how much of each system contributes, simultaneously, during a given event. For instance, the 100m is 15% ATP, 50% anaerobic, and 35% aerobic; the 200m is a ratio of 10 to 30 to 60; and the 400m is five to 25 to 70.
Now, suppose you have the straightforward task of training for a single event. You couldn’t just swim up and down the pool at some "ideal" pace that involved the various systems at exactly the right levels - because any monotonous training leads to the body’s adaptation and hence stagnation. So you have to do interval training instead - the entire basis of modern swim training - which means having to work out a whole lot of different levels of exertion, and mixing and matching these "sets" in a way that you hope might produce the desired overall result. And there’s not a computer program in the world that could tell you the best combination, since every athlete is different. So even if you’re only shooting for one event, there’s a lot of informed guesswork involved. Then, take into account that you have to train for three events to pull off the treble, with each event making different demands on the three energy systems, and you’re left with the fundamental question: how the hell would you even begin to evaluate the effectiveness of what you’re doing?
But in terms of the treble, that’s only the start of your problems. On top of that you have to overlay this concept: it’s damn near impossible to make incremental gains at both ends of the spectrum, because aerobic training (for the 400m) produces a breakdown of fast-twitch muscle fibre, and you’ve got to have plenty of that to swim fast. On the other hand, if you substitute lots of fast-twitch work for aerobic work, you naturally lose fitness. Distance training is all about quantity over quality - lots of laps at a slower pace, mixing in occasional intervals of hard exertion; sprint training is more about quality over quantity, with more workouts needing to be done at absolute race pace, allowing plenty of rest in between sets, and far greater emphasis on gym work to build explosive power. It’s a swings and roundabouts conundrum. And there is no answer to that conundrum - except that perhaps once in a generation, or maybe a lifetime, a swimmer comes along who might be good enough to overcome all those difficulties and win the treble anyway. Maybe that swimmer is Ian Thorpe, and maybe he’ll do it in Athens.
If he does, according to Don Talbot, the legendary head coach of the Australian team from 1989 to 2001, "from what we know about human physiology and the difficulty of training across all the energy systems, it would be a far greater feat than what Mark Spitz achieved in 1972". (Spitz competed only at distances of 100 to 200m in the "power events", freestyle and butterfly.) And if he does, the vast majority of Australians, although identifying themselves as swimming "experts", will not really appreciate what he’s achieved; they’ll just crank up his level of public adulation to greater heights, even though it’s already off the scale. In a readers’ poll conducted by a Sydney tabloid paper in late 2003, Thorpe was voted the greatest sports star in the history of New South Wales. The runner-up was Sir Donald Bradman. The most fundamental axiom in Australian sport had at last been overturned: nobody tops the Don. Thorpe was deeply embarrassed, and said as much in his acceptance speech.
Anyway, Thorpe has given himself every chance to create this slice of history. When he split from his long-time coach Doug Frost in late 2002 there were personal reasons, but just as important was that he’d come to the conclusion Frost was not a sprint coach, and that as long as he stuck with him, he would never be able to swim 100m as fast as he possibly could. This may be unfair to Frost, and it may not. At the very least, Thorpe has to be given credit for his intelligent assessment. Having done a lot of talking to swimmers and coaches, he formed the view that his training was really preparing him for middle-distance and distance swimming, rather than middle-distance and sprinting. (It’s hard to argue when you consider he broke the 800m world record the first time he swam the race.) In other words, he believed his program was focused more on the 400 than the 200, where it naturally needed to be to bring the treble into sharp focus. Frost was an old-school Aussie coach employing traditional philosophies that emphasised the aerobic "base"; Thorpe eventually opted for the new school - embodied in the form of Frost’s long-term assistant coach, Tracey Menzies. Not surprisingly, it was a less than harmonious transition, considering Thorpe and Menzies continued to train at the Sutherland pool right under the nose of the champion’s former mentor.
It would be a significant upset if Thorpe failed to win the 400 and 200m in Athens - although that double is no certainty either - but the 100m is a very different proposition. While some people are now thinking there’s hope, given the improvements he’s made in various aspects of sprinting under Menzies, Thorpe still doesn’t think he’s going to win the treble in Athens. His personal best is 48.71; van den Hoogenband’s world record is 47.84, Jason Lezak has just won the event at the US Trials in 48.17 ... and the rejuvenated Popov is back in the frame. Thorpe knows he can swim a fair bit faster than 48.71 - he’s hoping to go 48-low in Athens - but he doesn’t reckon that will do it.
So it does remain a bit of a long shot. However, there’s another factor in all this that could yet prove decisive. Ian Thorpe is a fantastic relay anchorman - just ask Gary Hall Jr or Anthony Ervin, both world-class sprinters who were mowed down in seemingly impossible situations by the Thorpedo at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and the Worlds in 2001. For years the big Australian’s 100m times were not within shouting distance of his 100m relay splits, whereas they ought to be no more than 0.7 seconds slower (this is the time it takes to react to the gun).
For instance, when Thorpe swam the last leg of the medley relay at the Pan Pacs in Yokohama in 2002, he clocked 47.20 - then the second-fastest relay split of all time, and one that would have translated to 47.90 off the gun, or just six hundredths shy of van den Hoogenband’s world record. Yet Thorpe’s best for a 100 metre race was almost a second slower than that.
It baffled him for ages, until he finally worked it out. Because he was a middle-distance man in a sprinter’s pool, he could never get to the 50m turn as fast as the other guys; in most 100m races at world level he’d arrive there stone cold last, then power home in the second 50. The trouble was, that slow start meant he’d be hit by a surging wave washing back from the wall as the massed line of humanity smacked it in front of him. Because that wasn’t the case in the relays, where the field would be widely spread by the time the anchorman hit the water, he had no backwash to contend with - and he could fly.
So - Ian Thorpe has the speed. The solution is obviously to get out there quicker, and that’s what he and Menzies have been working on. Fast-twitch fibre is the key to it all - but as always, it’s more complicated than that. According to Menzies, Thorpe’s first 15 metres "hasn’t improved all that much - but his next 25 has". If he can get to that turn in 23-low, rather than his more standard effort of 24 seconds, the big black shark can use his unmatched aerobic fitness to beat the field home in the blue-riband event.
And that would probably mean the golden treble, accomplished at last at the highest level. What’s most intriguing is that even if Thorpe were to do it, he could be eclipsed by the individual exploits of Michael Phelps, who, like the Thorpedo, could well turn out to be the greatest swimmer of all time. That’s why, among the cognoscenti of the sport, there has never been a swimming meet more keenly anticipated than the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Greg Hunter is the author of "Ian Thorpe - The Biography", to be published by Pan Macmillan (Sydney) in early November
A POOLSIDE LEGENDName: Ian Thorpe.
DOB: 13.10.1982, Sydney, Australia.
1995: Aged 13 he sweeps the boards at the Australian National Junior Championships.
1997: Becomes youngest male swimmer to represent country when he appears in the Pan Pacific Championships, Japan, winning a silver medal and improving his personal best for the 400 metres freestyle.
1998: At the World Championships, Perth, Thorpe becomes the youngest male world champion, winning the 400m freestyle. Went on to collect four gold - 200 and 400m freestyle and 100 and 200m relay - at Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur.
1999: At the Pan Pacific Championships, Sydney, he takes another four golds and breaks four world records.
2000: At the Sydney Olympics ‘Thorpedo’ picks up three gold and two silver medals, as Australia break US domination, and the freestyle relay team achieve a new world record. In recognition of his feats, he is selected to carry the Australian flag at the closing ceremony.
2001: Wins an unprecedented six golds at the World Championships in Japan.
2002: At the Commonwealth Games in Manchester, wins every event he enters, except backstroke, finishing second to fellow Aussie Matt Welsh.
2003: Takes three golds, one silver and one bronze at the World Championships in Barcelona. Voted Australian Swimmer of the Year for fifth consecutive time.
2004: Despite disqualification in March during selection trials - he was later readmitted - Thorpe is still a strong favourite to sweep the board in Athens.
