SPECTATOR SPORT
Stroke of genius
Simon Barnes
HE IS that rarest of phenomena, a person whose shoe size is the same as his age that is to say, 17. He speaks with the strange other-worldly blandness you find in a few rare, high talents: behind the polite, colour- less, unrevealing answers is a remote and unknowable person. Behind the common- places is something utterly extraordinary.
And he launched the Olympic Games in Sydney with a perfect couldn't-write-the- script Saturday night and sent Australia into an ecstasy of self-love. This is Ian Thorpe the Thorpedo — and he is a master of sport's priceless art of seizing the moment.
He is a swimmer. I remember a television commentator claiming that swimming was the world's cleanest sport, because there was 'absolutely no bumping and absolutely no boring'. Most of us would agree about the bumping. But Thorpe might almost make you change your mind. He won the 400 metres freestyle to give Australia their first gold medal, but the best came a little later on in that earth-shaking evening.
The United States team had claimed that they would smash the Australian swimmers `like guitars'. The Americans have won the 4x100 metres relay for Olympics after Olympics, as if by right; but in that final 50 metres there was Thorpe swimming lan- guidly past the American, Gary Hall. It was a startling sight: the frenzy of Hall, the long, easy, gliding strokes of Thorpe. He looked like a man enjoying a relaxing dip.
But there is the miracle of it: Thorpe's languid stroke just happens to be the fastest way a human can propel himself through the water. He has huge hands, and an arm-span of 1.9 metres. His build means that while most swimmers take about 35 strokes per length, Thorpe takes just 30.
The truly impressive thing was the way he maintained this sensual, slow stroke in the final frenzies of the race, in a cacophonous pool positively aboil with Aussie jingo. That unearthly calmness is as much a sporting asset as his perfect swimmer's body. It was never better shown than in the few minutes before the start of the relay. He always wears one of those newfangled go-faster body-suits. They are hell to put on. Thorpe discovered a tear in his at the worst possible moment, but changed nonchalantly into his spare and shambled out with the rest of the field already at the start. Most people would have gone into a Basil Fawlty thank-you-God rage, but nothing seems to trouble Thorpe.
And so the victory, and the Australian relay team all playing air-guitar in a glorious counter-taunt permissible in victory. Aus- tralia has lapped it up as if it were all the culmination of the Great Australian Dream.
Which in a sense it is. Swimming is not a once-every-four-years sport here; it is an essential part of the culture. Australia's big centres of population are by the sea; a promising swimmer gets more support in Australia than anywhere else in the world. Swimming is a part of national identity. This land, with its vast and burning interior, is a land of water.
The great Russian swimmer, Alexander Popov, a man who swims very much in the Thorpe manner, said that you must treat the water kindly; you must not battle it. Thorpe became something quintessentially Australian in his victory: like his nation, at one with water. In love with the stuff.
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