around the world and ogled over. I’m not saving a life or writing a magnum opus or masterminding some epic heist. I’m just sprinting down a pool, like a prize racehorse galloping around a track. And yet a lot of value is imposed on this. For some reason, the world finds this meaningful.
Who am I kidding, playing the blasé intellectual? For months now I’ve been correcting reporters for labeling my return to swimming a “comeback,” telling them I’m just here to enjoy the journey, to regain a love of the sport. Which is true. And bullshit. As much as I hate to admit it, I want to win. I know it in my overcharged nerves. I was just trying to trick myself into thinking I didn’t want it. It was my way of keeping the pressure off. But here, at the worst possible time, I recognize it, feel overwhelmed by it. I’m trapped by my own ploy.
It’s time. The announcer calls us out one by one. Even through my headphones I can hear the crowd. The memory of my shoulder is hovering over me as I step out onto the stage.
I’m not ready.
On January 14, 2012, a mere seven months before the London Olympics, an unexpected figure stepped up to the blocks at the Austin Grand Prix as the fastest qualifier in the 50-meter freestyle. At 6'3" and 170 pounds, he was the smallest among towering competitors—a cadre of the fastest sprinters in the US—and, with tattoo sleeves, also the most heavily inked. The Universal Sports commentator Paul Sunderland identified him to the viewers at home: “Anthony Ervin. And what an interesting story this is. Tied for the Olympic gold medal at the [2000] Sydney Olympic Games with Gary Hall Jr. and then has had, to put it mil—” he stopped himself, “some difficulties, let’s just put it that way, and has come back to swimming.”
“You know why I love this story, and this is a tremendous story,” interjected the other commentator, three-time Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines. “This guy now can retire from swimming in a good way. He’s going to be happy about it. And he wasn’t happy when it happened the first time.”
It was odd to hear talk about Ervin retiring again. There wasn’t really anything to retire from yet. Except for some halfhearted, abortive attempts to work out, he had only returned to serious training the previous year after eight wayward years. During that time he had purged swimming from his life, including his Olympic gold medal, which he auctioned off on eBay in 2005, donating the $17,100 proceeds to the UNICEF tsunami relief fund. His return to the pool was motivated more out of a need for psychic rehab than any desire for a comeback. But by the end of that sunny January day in Austin, the thirty-year-old found himself in the unlikely position of being the second fastest American sprinter.
* * *
When I first met Anthony Ervin, he was sitting in the bleachers of a Brooklyn pool, reading The Professor and the Madman. He had a gaunt-English-major-turned-tattooed-indie-hipster vibe going. The kind of guy you might find behind the counter in a record store or tattoo parlor on Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue. Not the type you expect to encounter in a swim school, except maybe in New York City.
In short, I thought I had him all figured out. It was early 2009 and I’d just moved to New York from London. A former college swimming teammate had hooked me up as a part-time swim instructor with Imagine Swimming, a thriving swim school that boasted a hip roster of instructors with elite swim pedigrees or—in keeping with the program’s ethos—artistic/creative backgrounds. It was my first day on the job, so when I arrived and saw him reading on the pool bleacher, sporting a bushy goatee, I figured he fell under Imagine’s creative camp.
I went over to him. “Good book. Have you got to the penis part yet?”
He looked at me askance, as if appraising whether or not he should respond. “There’s a penis part?” he said finally.
“You’ll know when you get to it. Hard to forget.”
He shrugged. I couldn’t tell if he was amused or being dismissive.
“I’m Constantine, by the way.”
He paused. “Tony,” he finally said, and returned to the reading.
As I was getting my cap and goggles, the shift supervisor approached me. “So, I see you met Tony,” he said. “You’ll be coaching with him after lessons.” This was unexpected. Not all Imagine instructors have competitive experience, but the coaches do, and often at the sport’s highest echelons. With him? I scoffed to myself. Perhaps he had the ideal creative spirit for working with three-year-olds, but was he qualified to coach? He probably swam freestyle with the earnest low-elbowed chicken-wing stroke one finds at YMCA lap swims.
“Really?” I said, trying to keep the smugness out of my voice. “Did that dude ever swim?”
There was a pause. “Yeah, you could say that. He was the fastest swimmer on the planet for two years.”
* * *
Over the next few months, we got to know each other. He had the engaged, nervy presence of someone who’s had too many cups of coffee, as well as a caustic wit, sharp tongue, and lack of any self-censoring mechanism, which made him come across as more New Yorker than California native. We rarely talked about swimming, but sharing an aquatic history no doubt buttressed our friendship. Though I had dropped out of competitive swimming much earlier than he (sophomore year in college), and though I had been a big fish only in the smallest of puddles (high school state champ in Maine, a state where, with rare exceptions, the only swimmers famed beyond its borders are crustaceans), we had both left the pool to front life on our own terms, taking divergent paths that led into literary territories. As a writer who, for better or worse, had always felt uncomfortable within writer communities and rebelled against its circles and programs, I could relate, at least inversely, to Ervin’s rejection of hypermasculine sports culture. I had spent more time among lobstermen and carpenters than around writers, so it was only natural for Anthony’s unconventional merging of physicality with analytic bookishness to resonate with me. He was intrigued by my compulsion to write and I was intrigued by his rebuff of the golden platter. And what a golden platter it was.
* * *
The 50-meter freestyle sprint—one length down an Olympic-sized pool—is swimming’s glory event, the aquatic equivalent of the 100-meter dash. The world champion can boast, as could the Jamaican runner Usain Bolt after the Beijing Olympics, of being the fastest human on earth. The compound word freestyle is meant literally: any technique is permitted, even doggy paddle, corkscrew, or double-armed backstroke. Freestyle is synonymous with front crawl, the default stroke in any freestyle race, only because it’s the fastest way to swim across the water’s surface.
Though Michael Phelps is heralded as the most dominant swimmer in the history of the sport, he isn’t the fastest sprinter in history, or even of his era. If he were, he wouldn’t dominate as many events as he does. The 50-meter sprinter is a different species of creature, more cheetah than antelope, built and bred for stupendous but short-lived speed. Genetic marvels of nerves and fast-twitch muscle fibers, few can maintain their top speeds for much more than the twenty-something seconds that the event lasts. The current men’s world record, held by Brazilian César Cielo, is 20.91 seconds. He swam this Herculean time in 2009 during the two-year stretch when “tech suits” were foolishly allowed in competition, thus leading to the subsequent shattering of practically every world record.1 While purebred sprinters also often reign at the 100-meter sprint—the distance where one first starts to cross into the vast estate of Phelps’s watery kingdom—their high-RPM engines seize up when revved over longer distances.
Ervin
