Swimming Blogs - Chris DeSantis

Before you read this you should realize I'm heavily biased. As a swimmer I have trained sporadically with different masters programs for the past eight years. I know its wrong to generalize but I have found them to be pretty great people. So I guess I could say I've always enjoyed swimming masters, but for the first time this weekend I had an epiphany and fell in love with watching masters.

This isn't the first time I've dabbled in master's fandom. My initial burst came in and around 2000. I was amazed by the performances of Ron Karnaugh, Wally Dicks and Karlyn Pipes-Nielsen. I simply hadn't even conceived of swimmers maintaining that much speed into their late 30s. I was also too young and ignorant to have any idea that Karnaugh had been an Olympian and that Dicks had once been a highly coveted recruit at Tennessee who never fulfilled his potential in college. I thought naively that they had been average swimmers in their 20s who had somehow discovered the secret to making huge time drops later in their lives.

Amazingly enough, that is the story of Karlyn Pipes Nielsen. If you want to catch up, this link provides a fairly decent look back at her amazing story, from fearing for her life at a young age due to an unhealthy lifestyle to getting best times and setting NCAA records in her late 30s:

http://www.fina.org/project/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=767&Itemid=330

After 2000 my interest waned to a certain extent. I still found it impressive that there were men in their late 40s that could beat me in a 100 breaststroke. My mind wandered to international results. Those were the swimmers that I would see on the world stage, the best of the best.

Still, this weekend I found myself lured in by the siren song of USMS Nationals. Maybe it was the fact that this was a particularly fast meet, with scores of records being bettered at times by more than one swimmer. The weekend was a long reminder of why its great to be fan of master's swimming.

First of all, its great to see former stars still competing at a relatively high level. If you loved watching Josh Davis race when he was the American record holder in the 200 free, then its pretty cool to see a mid 30s Josh Davis competing at about 90% of his peak. If you were a fan of Susan Von Der Lippe back when she was Susan Rapp, you can cheer your lungs out for her this summer when she competes at Olympic trials 28 years after her first one. I know that 39 year old Erik Hochstein (also a reader of this blog) was also an Olympian for Germany. I'm sure there were more past Olympians that I missed.

Master's swimming can also be great to watch on a personal level. There's a very high probability that over the course of your career you will befriend a teammate that will go on to swim masters or make friends with new teammates when you swim masters yourself. If you're reading this and you haven't reached the artificial swimming "retirement" post college, mark my words. You will miss going to the meets, your teammates, and competing. You will get a great feeling going to a meet and cheering for a teammate, old or new, to go a "best" time.

Lastly, Master's swimming offers an interactive look into the history of our sport. In baseball, middle aged men will pay exorbitant fees to attend "fantasy camps" where they can get the chance to play with the athletes they grew up adoring. In swimming, its much easier than that. Past greats are on the pool deck, competing and socializing. My favorite anecdote from the weekend came from Garrett's interview with Rich Abrahams. Abrahams startled me with his admission that he qualified for Olympic Trials in 1964 and proceeded to not train at all for the intervening four months. If this weekend showed anything, its that the greatest part of our sport is the accessibility of our athletes, young and old.

So if you get a chance to see a big time master's competition, don't discount it. You may find there's more to cheer for than you thought.