Exclusive: A Steady Course for Popov with Touretski at the Helm as the Dynamic Duo Prepare for their Final Challenge

By Stephen J. Thomas

SOLOTHURN, Switzerland, May 17. LAST weekend the czar of sprint freestyle, Alexander Popov and his coach of fourteen years Gennadi Touretski, made a lightening strike on the European Championships in Madrid, just a short flight from their relatively new base in the small Swiss town of Solothurn, to take out the 50 freestyle from lane eight in a pretty useful 22.32. Popov won his first European title – the 100 freestyle – perhaps prophetically in Athens in 1991.

SwimInfo spoke exclusively with Touretski just before he left for Madrid about his training plans for the Russian swimming legend in preparation for what will be Popov’s fourth and final Olympic Games. Touretski said from the outset of our conversation that he did not want to detail the specifics of the program they had decided upon to take him through to Athens. It is clearly quite different from what they have done in the past and it takes into account that the 32-year-old IOC member, who only recently just missed being voted into the top job in Russian Swimming after only deciding to stand two weeks prior to the election, needs to be stimulated by challenges outside of the pool.

“Simply training for swimming is not the most important thing in his life anymore, he needs to be active not walking around the pool like a zombie, the more his mind is active the better he will be in the pool,” Touretski explained. “It is much easier here (in Europe) for him than Australia; he can do a training session in the morning, have breakfast then take a plane and be in Moscow in the afternoon.”

“Technically he is swimming better than ever before, so we work on quality exercises rather than volume, we develop drills and dry land training to maximize the performance. Here in Switzerland we have new equipment, good facilities and our training is done in a 25-meter pool which is more like a laboratory, and it allows us to focus on improving technique.”

Touretski made the point that in his stage of his career competition is not that interesting for him referring to the fact that a decade earlier Popov had around one hundred starts in a year.

In preparation for the Sydney Olympics Popov was clocking up to 70kms per week from January to May 2000 while they were based in Australia then having to make several long-haul trips back and forth to Europe in his competitive phase. This year he will basically compete in the same events that he did four years ago, the European and Russian championships and the Mare Nostrum series. This time round he is building his momentum more slowly having planned only to swim the 50 free in Madrid and again at the Russian Champs starting next weekend then targeting a few races in the Mediterranean series.

In 2000, Popov went under 22-seconds in the 50 free on four occasions before the Games breaking Tom Jager’s ten-year-old world mark to set the existing standard of 21.64 at the Russian Championships in June. In the 100 free, he swam comfortably under 49-seconds also on four occasions, narrowly missing his then world record set in 1994, by six-hundredths, touching in 48.27. However, reflecting on Popov’s 2000 preparation the one key element that was missing from much of his final weeks of preparation when he returned to Australia after producing such impressive form was the intuitive eye of Touretski. Selected as a coach on the Australian team, Touretski was regularly away from Popov with the Australian team in those crucial final weeks of preparation.

Touretski’s contract with the Swiss Swimming Federation gives him far more freedom to focus his efforts on Popov and the benefit of this was exemplified last year when Popov produced a superb performance to take the 50-100 double at the World Champs in Barcelona and anchor the Russian 400 freestyle relay to gold and a silver in the medley relay.

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