When You’re Great — and Anonymous
Call me an Olympic fortnight nut. I’m one of the 3 billion people who sit down in front of a TV every four years to watch the Summer Olympics. And for the two weeks between the opening and closing ceremonies, I rarely change clothes, eating where I can, sleeping in fits and starts, trying to avoid missing a minute of the competition as the world’s greatest athletes in 32 sports go head-to-head, nation-to- nation.
For the other 1445 days of the four-year cycle, I have zero interest in the world’s best in badminton, fencing, team handball, taekwondo or Greco-Roman wrestling. And I couldn’t tell you a single competitor in this year’s “new sports” – breakdancing, sportclimbing, surfing and skateboarding.
But put those folks in an Olympic Games and I turn into a megafan. I watch the profiles of them (overcoming injury or disease, abuse or heartbreak, agedness or youthfulness or whatever generic adversity can be conjured) and my eyes well up.
I watch them perform and am amazed to see people at the top of their craft. I exult with them in the thrill of their victories and feel the crash in the agony of their defeats.
And if there are commercials in between performances that involve any sort of Olympic music (especially if there are brass instruments involved), I can generally find my way from happy to tearful in less than 30 seconds.
So I figure I owe it to the people who make that kind of experience possible to learn a little bit more about what their lives are like during the 206 weeks I’m not watching. How do they get there? And who are the people that support them through it all?
I found a little bit about both answers last weekend.
In the leadup to the Olympics, the US Swim Team spent two weeks training a few miles away from my house (they left July 11 for their next training location — in Croatia, of all places). Last Saturday was the one day their training was open to the public, so I had to go. Here’s what I learned:
There is a fanbase: As the 48 athletes came out of the locker rooms to begin their workouts, I saw a bunch of long, tall, broad-shouldered, 8% bodyfat clones. The crowd of about 1000 saw their heroes and knew every one of them by name. As each one emerged the people on either side of me murmured: “There’s Phoebe!” “It’s Ryan. I saw him in the grocery store!” “Look, it’s Shaine!” They beat noisemakers. They filled out swim bingo cards (sample square: “I see someone doing two kick, one pull breaststroke drill.”)
Turns out that while I’ve been ignoring the sport, a niche fanbase ranging from 6-year-old dog paddlers to 80-year-old swim geezers has been following these athletes online and via obscure cable channels. They knew their trials, tribulations and tattoos (ask a swim fan if they know the origin story of every one of Caeleb Dressell’s tats. Prepare for a ten minute response).
The crowd at the Triangle Aquatic Center was rabid — and hyper-educated about the US Swim Team.
The open house was a chance for them to meet the kings and queens of Swim Nation. Outside the center at 9:00 am, while the workouts were going on, a line of 200 people sat outside in sweltering heat waiting for autographs that would open at 10 am. The first twenty or so told me they’d been there since 4:30 am. “It wasn’t that early,” a mom told me. “And we get a chance to meet Katie!” (I think she meant Katie Ledecky — one of three names I am familiar with — but it could have been Katharine Berkhoff, Kate Douglass or Katie Grimes).
If you want an autograph with your Olympic swim hero, be prepared to get up at 4:30 am.
Most of an Olympic swimmer’s life is incredibly boring: Depending on the event, Olympic swimmers average swimming 5-9 miles a day in the least scenic environment possible. Swim 50 meters, flip, swim another 50 meters. The view is only slightly more scenic in the weight room, where they lift, squat, dip, plank and stretch for a couple of hours every day. Then they do breathing exercises ans sit through analysis of their performance for the day. In between they eat – A LOT.
Michael Phelps famously had to eat 10,000 calories a day to keep his weight on with all the training. How do you do that? Here’s what he ate: three fried egg sandwiches, with cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, fried onions and mayonnaise, three chocolate-chip pancakes, a five-egg omelette, three sugar-coated slices of French toast, a bowl of grits, and two cups of coffee. And that was just breakfast.
All that leaves swimmers just enough time for sleep.
At the open house, we saw only the tip of that training iceberg. Athletes came out. They stretched, jumped in the water, practiced their strokes, dives, kicks and turns, then took a break and talked about it with their coaches. And then they jumped back in. Bless them.
These people are beasts: The pain and suffering (and boredom) they endure for this sport they love makes it possible for people like me to see human beings performing at a shocking level. I’ve never before been close enough to a pool with world-class swimmers to be able to fully appreciate how beautifully they move through the water. You can see almost every muscle in their bodies, tiny or grand, firing as they stretch and kick and breathe, slicing and gliding with no wasted motion. They are gorgeous machines when they’re warming up. When they are actually swimming all out, they create a wake behind them like a small motorboat (at top speed they are going 6 miles per hour).
A world-class athlete in motion, in any sport, is a thing of beauty.
I left the practice imagining the other training camps going on in the other 31 Olympic sports right now, with their own “open houses” drawing their own loyal fanbases, giving just enough encouragement to the athletes to stick it out till the next Olympics.
In a few of the sports – basketball, soccer, tennis, golf – playing in the Olympics is a distraction from a ridiculously high-paying job in the same sport. But not for most. The swimmers I saw, all quite nearly the best in the world at their job, with only a few exceptions, have no significant endorsements, no leagues with he salaries or competitions with huge prize money. They make it by on a salary that has just gone up to an all-time high: $40,000 a year (that is only if they are ranked in the top 16 in the world in their event; in other sports like fencing that money is only available to fencers ranked in the top 4 in the world). That’s less than 1% of what the average NBA player makes. And swimmers still need to spend about half of those salaries paying for coaching and training expenses.
Why do they do it? For love of sport? For glory? Because they’ve always done it or they don’t know what else they could do? I think maybe more than any of those it is because they realize this is the thing that their body and mind were put on this earth to do. And so for the past ten or twenty years they have persisted, strengthening and sculpting and shining up that gift: doing honor to it.
You’ve heard about the “10,000 hour rule” which suggests that anyone who masters any craft — from violin to computer programming to swimming can’t just be innately talented: they have to have great coaching and put in the time — what experts find generally adds up to about 10,000 hours of purposeful practice.
Olympians are the people who have done all that. And for 14 days every four years, I get to see them share their gift. I thank them for the other 1445 days they put in — and all the days before those — to make it possible.
Notes:
US Olympic Swim Team trains in Cary, NC: https://myfox8.com/news/north-carolina/fans-gather-in-cary-to-watch-meet-the-u-s-swim-team-during-practices-for-upcoming-olympics/
US Olympic Swim Team members: https://www.usaswimming.org/utility/landing-pages/2024-olympic-team
Olympic swim training: https://www.strongfirst.com/preparing-swimmers-for-the-olympic-games-a-three-year-strength-and-conditioning-plan-using-strongfirst-principles/
Michael Phelps training diet: https://olympics.com/en/news/michael-phelps-10000-calories-diet-what-the-american-swimmer-ate-while-training-
How swimmers make money: https://blog.myswimpro.com/2021/01/29/how-much-money-olympic-swimmers-really-make/
Fencing pay: https://fanarch.com/blogs/olympics/how-much-money-do-olympic-fencers-make-per-year