Swim like a fish

小臭贝

by Daniel Drollette

FORGET RAW POWER

If you want to swim really fast, stop thrashing about, relax and feel the water. Olympic coach Gennadi Touretski tells Daniel Drollette how to torpedo the opposition.

THERE'S humiliation and then there's real humiliation. While swimming in the local outdoor pool in Canberra, a guy swept past me like a torpedo to my tugboat. I felt bad. I actually rocked in the water as he swam by. But the feeling didn't last long once I realised that the torpedo was Alexander Popov, two-time Olympic gold medal winner and holder of the world record for the 100 metres freestyle. In the next lane gleamed the menacing shaven head of Popov's training partner, Michael Klim, who has swum the fastest time ever in the 100 metres butterfly. I had unwittingly crawled into part of the pool where these elite athletes occasionally train for a change of scene from the indoor pool at the nearby Australian Institute of Sport.

Popov seemed to slide effortlessly through the water, elbow bent overhead in classic freestyle position, long arms slicing forward with elegant ease. In contrast, Klim crashed ahead with his arms locked straight as they emerged from the water in his trademark "windmill" version of the freestyle. Each man's style is unique, but both are world-beaters. And both are the products of the unorthodox ideas of the same coach, Gennadi Touretski.

Touretski, a colourful and sometimes controversial character, studies the motion of fish and writes physics equations on the whiteboard of his poolside office to explain the principles of hydrodynamics. His brand of science-based training has done much to promote the idea that it is not raw power that makes champion swimmers, but efficiency. Klim and Popov are taught to behave like fish, to "feel" the water and glide through it.

Now a naturalised Australian, Touretski is a product of the old Soviet system, in which as many as eight scientists would monitor the performance of the national team. He is a former swimming champion with a degree in engineering and training in biomechanics, biochemistry, fluid mechanics and sports physiology. He is known for using unusual props to get his ideas across: he once brought inflated condoms to the pool to show his fellow coaches the importance of maintaining a rigid torso while kicking forward. When deflated, the condoms flopped in the water; inflated, they skimmed across the surface with just a light push.

Touretski's swimmers swear by him. It was Touretski's idea, for example, for Klim to switch to the windmill style. "I've made straight personal bests ever since he made me make this change," Klim told me later. Popov is just as enthusiastic: "He's the reason I left Russia." Popov and Klim have the status of pop stars in Australia, while magazines and newspapers hail Touretski as the man who transformed top-echelon swimming in Australia. But amid all the hoopla, the question remains: how do Touretski and his swimmers do it?

The answers, say Touretski as he paces the poolside, lie partly in genetics and partly in technique. Elite swimmers tend to be born with certain advantages, such as superefficient metabolisms. Some long-distance swimmers, for example, have cardiovascular systems capable of delivering twice as much oxygen to starved muscle cells as the average fit young person, giving them a advantage before even entering the pool.

Olympic swimmers also tend to be tall and long-limbed. When seen on land, 2 Touretski's swimmers are as long and a lanky as basketball players. Klim is 191 a metres tall (6 feet 3 inches), while Popov, 7 at 197 metres (6 feet 6 inches), can touch cc the bottom of the deep end of the Canberra pool and still keep his head above water. The pair are designed for swimming. Or, as Touretski told them: "You have something given to you by God. You must develop it." Fair enough. But how?

There are two ways to swim faster, says Touretski: increase the force that swimmers use to propel themselves through the water or decrease water resistance. Both approaches come down to technique, but he thinks the second is by far the best.

To propel yourself through the water faster you might, for example, increase your stroke rate. But there's a problem here, Touretski says. You'd soon run out of steam. He cites a passage from his favourite book, Fish Swimming by zoologist John Videler of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, which states that energy consumption in water increases as the cube of the stroking rate. In other words, doubling the speed at which you move your arms through the water takes eight times as much energy.

What's more, increasing stroke rate inevitably means taking shorter strokes, which is at odds with how most animals behave. When they want to move faster, they increase the distance covered with each movement. Touretski points to video clips for support: horses, Touretski points out, speed up by increasing the distance they cover with every stride, not by increasing the number of strides per second. Kangaroos do the same hopping on their two feet. Touretski believes swimmers should do what animals do, stretching as far forward as possible to get the longest pull with each stroke. Popov's first gold medal in the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona provided evidence to support this approach. When he beat the American swimmer Matt Biondi, Popov covered 50 metres with just 33 strokes to Biondi's 36.