camp of swimmers. USA Swimming and FINA announcer Michael Poropat once called him “possibly the most naturally gifted sprinter in swimming history.” But when Ervin was nineteen and stepped up to the blocks in the Sydney Olympics, the buzz wasn’t about his speed. It was about his race. With a Jewish mother and black father, he found himself branded as “the first African American swimmer to make the Olympic team.” It was a confusing label as he’d never viewed himself through the lens of race.
Ervin’s gifts, like his heritage, are unconventional: less physical than abstract, less about power than finesse, as much about cognizance as natural ability. After so many years of shunning competition, his return to swimming had reignited his competitive streak. But he was wary of this renewed impulse to win. To even express hesitation over one’s competitive drive is a rarity among athletes. Even the most easygoing tend to be fiercely competitive. Some would even say that competition is to athletes what creativity is to artists: without it they’re stagnant. Competition, after all, invigorates. Though often viewed with disdain or skepticism by the intelligentsia, athletic fervor is more than a predictable by-product of cutthroat capitalism or team spirit jingoism. The absurd particularity of any sport—whether it involves running around and slapping a hollow yellow rubber ball back and forth over a net, or running around and kicking a bigger ball into a bigger net, or even just running around—is simply the incidental stage upon which the passion and physical artistry play out, a clash of wills that rejuvenates both participants and spectators.
But at the same time, competition also favors antagonism over cooperation and necessarily entails winners and losers. Reconciling his zeal to win with his ambivalence over the nature of competition itself is one of the many ways Ervin resists the stereotype of the one-track-minded athlete. He brings to his swimming the analysis and hyper-self-consciousness of the modern intellectual, a self-awareness that facilitates his speed in water, even if it may undermine him on the starting block. Again and again, Ervin deconstructs the socially defined binaries: thinker vs. jock, black vs. white, rebel vs. role model. If there were such a thing as a postmodern swimmer, he’d be its poster boy.
The established story is that Ervin left swimming because he met his swimming goals and wanted to pursue other interests like music; that he auctioned off his gold medal out of humanitarian impulses. All true enough. But truth is like a matryoshka doll, with dolls nested within dolls: take apart the outer shell and you’re left with a severed façade and a deeper truth. His athletic efforts may have transpired under spotlights, but deeper struggles unfolded in isolation. Medals, titles, and records may bestow fame, but a short-lived one; athletes are doomed earlier than most to the fate of time-ravaged Ozymandias. As A.E. Housman wrote in “To An Athlete Dying Young”:
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Or as Charles Bukowski more bluntly put it:
being an athlete grown old
is one of the cruelest of fates . . .
now the telephone doesn’t ring,
the young girls are gone,
the party is over.
By discarding the laurel, Anthony Ervin preempted destiny, cheating it of its cruel withering hand. As with Andre Agassi, another gifted athlete who resented his sport for most of his career, Ervin stands outside the archetype of the driven, striving champion. His story is interesting not for what he achieved and lost, but for what he rejected and rediscovered.
Waiting behind my block before the race, I’m an automaton, body and mind on cruise control. The entire process is ritualized and rote—walking out in line, sitting down, removing the uniform and headphones, standing up, taking deep breaths—every aspect programmed to keep all distractive thought at bay. The official’s whistle calls us up to the blocks. The crowd is loud. I bend down, arms hanging, poised to clutch the block. There are a few final cries and exhortations before it finally goes silent.
“Take your mark” rings out. I hunch down, gripping the block. But I’m unable to obey the simple command of those three words, unable to take my mark, or at least stay on it. Instead I’m off balance, swaying. For whatever reason, I can’t keep my energy coiled and find myself falling forward. It’s a slight movement, but it’s enough. The starter holds the signal for longer than usual. I pull my body weight backward, trying to offset my forward momentum. Just as I lean back, the starting signal goes off. Maybe the official was waiting for me to stop moving. Or maybe someone else took awhile to come down. Who knows.
We all dive off the block, but not at the same time. The seven of them dive and I follow. I’m last off the block, last by a lot, still airborne when the others are already underwater. I was hoping that by some miracle I’d have a great start, one that might put me in favorable position for gold. That miracle doesn’t come. But this time I can’t blame it on my Achilles shoulder. There’s no dislocation, no shockwave of adrenaline in midflight, no need to pop my shoulder back into socket. There’s only the awareness that I had a terrible start.
When I surface, over half a body length behind the others, I do the one thing I know how to do. Or rather the one thing that comes naturally to me. It’s less something I do than a feeling I search for, one of continuous acceleration, a feeling not of fast but faster. It’s the essence of how I train and race. It’s something like what opium addicts refer to as chasing the dragon, the desperate quest for that elusive and irreproducible first high. Except in my case, it’s not a high I’m chasing but a fluid connection. And the vessel isn’t opium but water.
I put my head down and swim.
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1. By reducing drag and increasing buoyancy, tech suits turned humans into hydrofoils, especially in sprints. They were swiftly banned. But by then the damage was done, both to the record books as well as to all the swimmers not around for that two-year tech suit bonanza. Return to text
2.
All in the Game
Go then if you must, but remember, no matter how foolish your deeds, those who love you will love you still.
—Sophocles, Antigone
All in the game, yo. All in the game.
—Omar from HBO’s The Wire
The 50-meter freestyle Olympic final was minutes away. It was the first event of the evening session so Ervin and the other seven finalists were either in the ready room or about to head there. From my height in the stands of the London Aquatics Centre, the blue glassy rectangle below all the thousands of spectators looked more like a dinky hotel pool. And I wasn’t even among the unfortunate ones exiled to the uppermost gulag regions of the two temporary seating wings. These inelegant structures, which had been attached exclusively for one-off expanded Olympic seating and which jutted up vulgarly out of the low undulating body, gave the appearance from the outside that a giant pancake had been dropped upon an open book.2 They had transformed the much hullabalooed 3,000-capacity Olympic Stingray into a 17,500-person
