As a former high school swimmer (and not a particularly good one), I can tell you that it is a lot more than just swimming back and forth in a pool. Most people think it's just swimming back and forth in a pool as fast as you can. It may not demand that you sustain the physical punishment of a sport like football or rugby, and you don't necessarily have to have the gift of superhuman hand-eye coordination required for baseball. But to be even a less than good high school swimmer, like I was, you do have to employ muscles from almost every inch of your body. You need strong legs to kick, you need strong arms to pull you through the water. You need to generate power from your chest and shoulders and you have to have a powerful core to speed through turns and tie it all together. For four years in high school (not just the school season), I took part in practices -- ranging from 5,000 yards for a light practice to 12,000 yards for my coach's "Christmas Eve Bah-Humbug Special". And for those that have never seen a practice, this is all done on intervals, so it's not just swimming back and forth until you swim x number of yards -- you swim 10 100 yd free style sprints on an interval, and usually the interval is designed to test you.
America is captivated by Michael Phelps right now, as they should be. The man has more gold medals in his career than any other Olympic athlete. He has tied the record for most gold medals and tonight he will be going for #8. We are witnessing something that is unbelievably rare in sports -- more so than Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Michael Jordan, Joe Montana -- name any great athlete, and I believe that Phelps equals and arguably tops them all. He is the top athlete his sport has ever seen. He is, for lack of a better phrase, a genetic freak of nature that was built to be a World Champion Swimmer. If he wins the gold tonight, he will have turned in a performance more dominant than any single athlete has ever produced. Swimming may lack the flash of the more mainstream sports, and it certainly lacks the marketing blitz that we see for any game of the day or week. But do yourself a favor -- tune in tonight, because win or lose, you're seeing history, and you should enjoy a chance at watching history while it is staring you right in the face.
Esti Ginzberg
Ariel Meredith
NFL Cheerleaders: Week 11
Best Players 6-5 and Under
Comments (0) Add A Comment
Comment
Remember to keep your posts clean. Profanity will get filtered, and offensive comments will be removed.