Morning Splash: Welcome to the Olympic Games

Photo Courtesy: Kirsty Coventry

Editorial Coverage Sponsored By FINIS

By David Rieder

Every single swimmer currently in the midst of their final preparations for the Olympic Games has gone through the same familiar swim meet routine time after time.

They check into the hotel and then spend the next two to five days going back-and-forth between their room, the pool and the same nearby restaurant. They chat with their swimming friends on deck and in the hotel lobby. Maybe there’s a team bus involved. That’s every meet from high school state championships to nationals to World Championships and every other level in between.

But not at the Olympics. Swimmers and athletes in 27 other sports have already begun checking into the Olympic village, their home for the next two to three weeks. Even though this village has been so far best known for its plumbing and electrical issues, living there is still an experience that returning Olympians relish.

“That walk through the Olympic village, just getting to see different team flags and everyone in their different uniforms is really surreal,” said Zimbabwe’s Kirsty Coventry, who is about to compete in her fifth Olympic Games. “There’s this level of excitement—everyone’s getting ready to compete on this world stage.”

Coventry also fondly recalls eating in the village dining hall, where athletes from every sport and every country intermingle, and bussing to the venue along with swimmers from all over. But on competition days, Coventry notes, most keep to themselves with the aid of headphones.

What stands out to Canada’s Brittany MacLean in looking back on her first Olympic experience is the extra walking mileage athletes have to put in with the complicated logistics of the Games—including finding food, arranging transport and getting between the competition pool, warmup pool and ready room. But MacLean felt she knew what to expect come race day after walking through the routine several times in the lead-up.

The biggest difference between the Olympic Games and any other meets? The media commitments.

“No matter who you are, you always have media. It doesn’t matter if you are the biggest fish or the smallest fish—if you’re at the Olympics, you’re going to have media,” MacLean said. “You walk through the zone of hundreds of different reporters.”

And that can be a challenge for those Olympians who are making their first appearance at the Games as they get thrown off their routine. The media commitments mostly come in the mixed zone, which they must pass through before reaching the warmup pool. So instead of beginning warm-down almost immediately, it might take an athlete upwards of 15 minutes to even get past the press.

Ahh, the media. Whereas NFL or NBA players deal with hordes of reporters breathing down their neck day in and day out, swimmers only have to deal with reporters from local outlets and from swimming-focused websites (like this one) at about ten different events during a typical year. A few national writers show up once or twice per year and then perhaps again at the World Championships.

But the Olympic year makes swimming a big ticket item, and the stars share the spotlight with some lesser-known names. At U.S. Trials in Omaha last month, every new Olympian got their moment with the press after clinching their spot in Rio, and the same can be expected for every standout performer in Rio.

But the headlines will undoubtedly gravitate towards those whose stories they find most compelling—the swimmers making history.

In a recent Sports Illustrated roundtable on covering the Olympics, USA Today columnist Nancy Armour and ESPN writer Bonnie Ford both listed Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky as among the top-five most compelling athletes of the Olympics. SI writer Tim Layden considers Phelps’ races among the biggest events of the Games.

“There’s a significant ‘I was there’ quality to these events, and you get to sit at your laptop and document history,” Layden said. “But they’re also a lot like covering the Super Bowl or the World Series or the NBA Finals: Lots of journalists, all trying to eat from the same small bowl of information… But you were there to see it, and write it.”

Layden has covered some of the biggest sporting events in the world, and that was him describing a swim meet. Most of these athletes are only a couple months removed from going through the motions in front of several hundred fans at Pro Swim Series events in Mesa and Indianapolis or Mare Nostrum events in France, and now they’ll have 15,000 in the stands and millions of TV sets around the world tuned in for their races.

With so much attention on the Games, there is naturally pressure to perform. It’s the ability to handle that pressure and thrive that turns good swimmers into superstars. That’s exactly what happened in 2004, when a 19-year-old Phelps entered the Athens Games with the entire world watching as he pursued Mark Spitz’ record of seven gold medals.

But after just three races, the chase was quashed after bronze medal swims in the 400 free relay and 200 free. But Phelps was undeterred—he ran off five straight gold medals, two of them in upset fashion. It was the most medals any swimmer had ever won at a single Olympics, and his legend was born.

As you may remember, Phelps also did a reasonable job dealing with the pressure of the Olympic Games four years later in Beijing.

But it doesn’t take a record medal haul or even one gold medal for a successful Olympics. Undoubtedly, someone in an outside lane will drop a boatload of time and earn a spot in a final that few saw coming. That’s an Olympic success story, too.

MacLean was that swimmer four years ago—she entered as a relatively obscure 18-year-old and promptly broke the Canadian record in the 400 free prelims. MacLean swam just two lanes away from world record-holder Federica Pellegrini, but she managed to keep her nerves in check and actually finished ahead of Pellegrini on her way to booking a spot in the Olympic final.

“It really is just another swim meet,” MacLean said. “It’s something that you’ll be able to trademark for the rest of your life that you competed in, but at the end of the day, it’s a swim meet—with the best competitors in the world.”

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