Swimming Blogs - Chris DeSantis

How do you outperform the best swim of your life? Thats the question that has been looming over many of America's Olympians in the past few weeks. With the exception of a privileged few, most athletes who qualified for Beijing did so with the swim of their career. It was the closest to a perfect race they have ever been. Just one month later, they have the chance to create an indelible legacy through Olympic glory. Only the most ardent swimming fans will remember the two who qualified, far more will recall the best from Beijing.

One such swimmer is Gil Stovall, and he addressed the topic specifically in an interview with Garrett. If you haven't watched it yet, check it out:

Gil Stovall dropped nearly 3 seconds off his lifetime best at Olympic Trials to qualify for the team in the 200 Butterfly. His performance rocketed him to second all time in the event. To be sure, he faces a daunting challenge to improve on that swim in Beijing. Alongside him are swimmers like Garrett Weber Gale, who destroyed his lifetime bests in the 50 and 100 to become America's best sprinter, and Allison Schmitt, who dropped almost 5 seconds in the 200 free over the course of this year. The list goes on, and the track record for such swimmers outperforming their trials times at the Olympics is not good.

I looked back four years ago to find a couple examples of swimmers that had big drops in that calendar year or at Long Beach to make the team. One of the most prominent and talked about examples was Katie Hoff. Hoff's best 400 IM time from 2003 had been 4:50, and she went 4:37 to win trials. At the Olympics she added ten seconds and missed making the final by a large margin. That is one extreme example. In hindsight we also know that 4:37 was not as good as it gets for Hoff.

Another swimmer who surprised in Long Beach and turned out to be pretty good was Ryan Lochte. It seems hard to remember, but Lochte was not a lock for the 200 IM that year, and came into the meet seeded behind Kevin Clements. He had shown dramatic improvement during his first season swimming at University of Florida. He made the team with a dramatic run down of Eric Shanteau in the last few meters of the race. He was also a surprise qualifier for the 4x200 relay that would go on to win gold. Ryan managed to improve slightly on his 200 IM in Athens and swim a comparable 200 free relay split to his flat start time.

I think Lochte and Hoff serve as good examples for a number of reasons. Each was relatively young when they qualified in 2004 and did so in somewhat surprising fashion. They each went on to become world record holders leading up to this Olympics. What sets them apart for the purposes of this example was how their Olympic performances compared. Unfortunately, its tough to put a finger on exactly why this happened. People pointed to Katie being somewhat psychologically overwhelmed in her first Olympic swim or poor race management. Unfortunately, even the best coaches in America on the Olympic coaching staff can't ensure that all the swimmers will be prepared to improve in Beijing.

To try and find some kind of answer, I turned to perhaps the greatest trials to Olympics turnaround in recent memory. In 2000, Misty Hyman was an elite level 200 butterflyer but fairly far from the world's best, which at that time was Susie O'Niell. She had missed out on the 1996 team, peaking just a little bit after trials took place. To make the Sydney team, Hyman swam right on her lifetime best to that point, a 2:09. O'Neill was the only swimmer other than Mary T Meagher to go under 2:06. In order to have a hope of medaling in Sydney, Hyman had to make some sort of adjustment to improve her time.

Here's where the story gets good if you love coaching or competing in our sport. In order to get to the level that Hyman was, she had to do so many things right in all aspects of racing and training. As a coach, its the same challenge you face on any day with any swimmer. In order to swim faster, something about the swimmer must change. Most coaches can pick out what changes need to be made, but the application is a delicate process of convincing the athlete it will work and giving them confidence in that change.

Misty Hyman had tremendous success swimming butterfly because she had one of the most devastating underwater kicks in the history of the sport. She had come to the forefront just as the 15 meter rule was being applied to butterfly as well. For a period of time, it seemed like Misty would always be hampered by the restriction, never able to reach the potential she had while being afforded unlimited distance underwater. In 2000, Misty was able to fine tune her best weapon during Olympic training camp and leading up to the games. She took her greatest strength and changed something about it to make her even stronger. She made subtle changes in her race strategy, taking the race out just slightly slower than her trials swim where had struggled coming home. The result was one of the greatest swims in Olympic history:

Excuse the Polish, of course. Hyman's swim teaches us that every Olympian has tremendous room for improvement. While it may be hard to believe, even a swimmer as dominant as Michael Phelps has things he can improve on. Here's hoping that all our Beijing competitors have a little bit of Misty in them.