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Swimming to Atlanta

By Rachel Buchanan, The Age, 8 June 1996

DREAMS start early in the morning. Monday morning, 4.30am.

Five degrees, a frost fogging up the back window of the car.

Daniel Kowalski, swimmer, and Bill Nelson, coach, are up already, tip-toeing around their Aspendale house so they don't wake Jae, Ele, and Kye, Nelson's three kids. Pulling on togs, track pants, sweat-shirts, baseball cap. Packing stop watches, notebooks for writing times down, the white gadget with the spongy microphone on the end of it for checking heart rates, black rubber bands to bind the ankles in pulling exercises, drink bottles, pool buoys, swim cap, goggles.

Twenty-three kilometres to town, hardly a car on the road, the traffic lights blinking red and green to themselves. Time to think. Time to dream. Four weeks till we leave for the United States. Six weeks till Atlanta. Seven weeks till the 1500-metre final.

Up on the blocks, confident and relaxed. Focused. The blue lane ahead, the fat black line down the middle. The gun, the dive, kick, kick, kick, shoulders rising up out of the water as the first stroke touches, pulls back like a half figure eight, goes up again, strong. You feel strong. Breathe, stroke, kick, turn. Twenty-one laps, no more than 15 minutes. You visualise the finishing wall, touching it first. Your chest is squeezed up, like someone is trying to strangle you. Everything hurts. You rip off your goggles, punching the air. Gold. Twenty- one-years-old and the champion of the world.

Monday morning, 5.10 am, a blue-finger kind of a cold at The Fastest Pool In The World. Fog on the Yarra. Sticking up, just out-of-bed hair. Daniel Kowalski slips into the State Swimming Centre with a dozen other young swimmers, some of the 24 members of Nelson's Melbourne Vic Centre swim squad.

Then comes Nelson, carrying watches and sports bags and clip boards, wearing shorts in the freezing cold and smiling, already. On Friday, Nelson and the two Victorian swimmers he is training for Australia's 34-member Olympics team - Kowalski and third-time Olympian Nicole Stevenson - went to Adelaide for a national short-course swim meet.

How did Adelaide go Bill? Good, good, he says opening the centre door, saying gidday to the early shift staff, still smiling. Happy to be at work, a 14-hour day ahead of him. Did Dan and Nic race? Yeah. Nic did the 50 metres backstroke and she went alright.

Fat yellow ventilation pipes snake across the roof of the humming swim centre. The air is warm and close with chlorine and sweat. Below, on the pool deck, Nelson's team, some in school uniform, are pushing their elbows behind their heads and reaching their hands down their backs. Clocks tick everywhere, red hand, blue hand, round and round.

And Dan? Yeah, Nelson marches on, he did the 1500 metres four seconds faster than the time he won the world championships in Rio last year.

Kowalski swam the short course in 14:44, without the added push of the 1500 world record holder, Kieren Perkins (who swam the 1500 in 14.41.66 in 1994). Nelson holds in his delight by spilling out these results in a mumbled rush. He is too casual to be convincing. A coach has his dreams too.

THE training session whiteboard at the end of the pool has the heading: "this week is endurance week". Endurance is underlined. A thick black line. Kowalski will swim 9000 metres this morning and 9000 metres this afternoon. That's just under six hours with only a handful of breaks of no more than 60 seconds for a gulp of sports drink and a heart-rate test. In between is a weight training session or an aerobics class with Sue Stanley, the world champion.

The week before, an adaptation week to stabilise the swimmers after a three-week build up, Kowalski and Stevenson, trained three times a day. Early morning, another hour and a half at 11, and again for three hours in the afternoon, adding up to about 90 kilometres over six days. Up at 4.20 am. In bed by 8.30 pm. Interviews, promotions and physiotherapy in between. Little time for friends or a social life. Just eat, sleep and swim.

Both swimmers have spent thousands of long, boring hours preparing for a tiny amount of time in the spotlight at Atlanta.

Kowalski gets about 23 minutes at the Olympics in the 200, 400 and 1500 metres. Stevenson about three in the 100 and 200 metres backstroke.

Endurance is almost a big enough word to describe the effort and loneliness of their preparation, of the way they have trained their bodies, and minds, to cope with the pressure.

Endurance means fortitude, the ability to stand pain and fatigue without flinching.

"Daniel is an athlete dedicated beyond belief - way above average. Daniel does what has to get done," Nelson says. "You have got to admire the kid for that. A lot of times I have seen people with similar levels of talent but they won't do the things it takes."

This morning though, Kowalski is just another skinny kid - 180 centimetres and only 74 kilograms - with broad shoulders and a flat stomach listening to Nelson outline the training drill. Nelson has the fast monotone of a horse-racing commentator talking through a boring bit. High speed in swimming's own special language. Three hundred kick, 300 split, 1000 fin kick. The idea of today's workout is to just churn up and down through the laps, rather than busting a gut.

Everyone lines up by the blocks, ready to churn.

Elite swimming is for the young. Today, Kowalski is swimming in the same lane as Joscelin Yeo, a 17-year-old butterfly specialist from Singapore who has a criss-cross pattern tatooed around her right ankle. Yeo swam her first Olympics at 12.

Shane Gould was 15 when she won three gold medals, a silver and a bronze for Australia at Munich in 1972. She retired a year later.

At 24, Nicole Stevenson, Australia's champion backstroker, is considered a veteran. She has been a member of the Australian team for 12 years. On a rough estimate, she has spent more than 25,000 hours swimming laps. That's a lot of chlorine to breathe in and now, like many other swimmers, she has breathing problems and exercise-induced asthma.

With eight seconds beween them, this morning's swimmers take off. Stevenson, recovering from a chest infection, is not among them but will be back at the pool for afternoon training.

"It's from training too hard but Bill won't say that," Stevensons aid the Friday before Adelaide. "We have been getting flogged for the past 10 days. Racing is easy but training is so long and monotonous. It is really tough mentally."

Monotonous, maybe, but this morning the swimmers attack the water with vigor. They make a nice noise. Like the click, click, click of a train far away. Then every 50 seconds or so a splash and a pause for the turn and off again. Grace in every stroke. A feel for water.

Some swimmers zone out for laps. Some watch the clock or wait for the black T or the flags by the wall. Some hum pop songs to themselves.

Kowalski used to let his mind go off on a tangent, thinking about the rest of the day, about the American sitcoms he likes to watch - Ned and Stacy, Mad About You, Naked Truth, Ellen - or singing Alanis Morissette lyrics in his head.

Not now. For every second of those three hours this morning, he is thinking about his stroke. Perfection is in the tips of the fingers, how they stroke the water, in the tuck of the neck and the pads of the feet on the turn, in the spring of the dive. In these subtleties, a swimmer finds the extra 100th of a second for victory.

"No matter what level (you are at) you still have to work on your technique," Kowalski says.

"To get from age group to national level, you have to increase your training and start looking at things like rest. When you go from national to elite level you have to start looking closely at diet and rest and you hone little things like your turning technique even more so."

Nelson and 18-year-old Robert Iannazzo, his assistant coach, stand by the whiteboard, with session instructions scribbled over it like maths equations, watching their athletes. Nelson has the eyes of an eagle and the whistle of a cow cockie. He can see in the stroke if a swimmer's mind has drifted off their work. It makes him angry.

"If you are on a flight to England and it is 16 hours long, do you say "the pilot can't think about flying all the time?', " he says.

SWIMMING consumes the lives of Nelson, Kowalski and Stevenson, especially in the build-up for the Olympics, the once-in- four-years chance for some kind of a payback for all the hours at the pool.

The three are a mismatched trio but they spend more time together than most lovers or families. Nelson, the no-bull leader, Kowalski, the young star coming into his first Olympics, and Stevenson, the mature athlete, preparing for her swimming swan song. They share an intense little world.

Nelson, the vice-president of the World Swim Coaches' Association and a team coach for the Olympics, is the reason both swimmers are here. Kowalski arrived in November, 1994 from Queensland to work (and live) with Nelson not, as news reports at the time said, to flee Kieren Perkin's long shadow, the constant reminder of being second-best or the bad luck of being born around the same time as one of the world's most extraordinary swimmers.

Kowalski, says Perkins, three years his senior, has never been his idol. "Kieren is someone there for me to chase, for me to race. He has set the standard and I try to meet the standard he has set. He has never really been a motivating force for me."

And, in October, Stevenson left Sydney, where she lives with her husband, Clayton, a former professional cyclist, to return to her hometown and train with Nelson.

Why Nelson? What makes him special? The stocky coach, who arrived in Melbourne 18 months ago after six years at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, has his own answer to this question. "I am intolerant," he says. Tolerant people, he explains down by the Yarra after another session where the two Olympic swimmers power through the water in a lane next to the midday paddlers, are happy with whatever the end result. But not him. He is not always happy.

"I loose my temper, oh hell yes," he says. "But they are more protected here than the institute (in Canberra). I could go to town there, but this is a public pool."

He admits he is grumpy. Hard to live with. Not always Mr Nice Guy. So what? Nelson learnt his lessons the hard way, plugging away at life - the path from miner to professional surfer to elite swim coach - just like Kowalski and Stevenson do in the pool. He grew up in Newcastle, the son of a coalminer, and at 16 left school to take up a Miners Federation apprenticeship.

He spent seven hours a day in a shaft, standing there at the coalface four kilometres under the ground, going down and chipping away at it, making little holes under the earth.

"Coalmining was good for me. I was involved with guys who had gone through life the hard way," he says. "Most guys were 50 years old and they knew what the work ethic was, what pride was. That gave me a great education in those four years."

Work ethic and pride, the language of the mines, make the bond between Nelson and Kowalski, in particular. They look at each other and see something they understand and admire.

In separate interviews, they use the same words and express the same ideas: striving to be your best; the Olympics as part of the process of becoming a great swimmer; the importance of recognising the distance between coach and swimmer.

Kowalski says there are certain barriers he doesn't want to cross with Nelson. If he is angry after a tough training session, for example, he will confide in his friend, Brian Goorjian, the coach of the National Basketball League club, South-East Melbourne Magic or watch the basketball team mucking around.

Swim-talk is off limits in the Nelson home, at the request of Nelson's wife, Joanne. Besides, Kowalski doesn't want to burden Nelson's family with all of that.

"It can be hard. We have had a few heated moments. But I respect Bill more than anyone in the whole world," Kowalski says.

"He is the only person in the whole world, including my parents, who knows exactly what I have been through, what I have done.

"He has been there for me every day. He is like a father to me. In one respect (his kids) are just like brothers and sisters." Kowalski comes from a close family. He has an older sister, Shevaun, a primary-school teacher on the Gold Coast, and his parents, Tony, a drilling engineer, and Penny, an occupational therapist. He waited for their blessing before moving from Queensland to Melbourne and made them promise, please, ring me every Wednesday and Saturday.

He visits when he can. The last time was two days after he won the 1500 metres final in the Olympic trials in Sydney.

It had been a difficult seven days. The crowd and the media backed Perkins. Before the final, Kowalski told Nelson: if I beat Kieren I will be the most hated man in Australian sport.

Nelson replied: "Beauty, I can live with that Daniel. But I don't want it to be at the end of the race, 'oh shit, it's Daniel Kowalski.' I want you to say 'oh shit, I am Daniel Kowalski.' There is a distinct difference."

So the victorious Daniel Kowalski visited Shevaun's school, as planned, and all the five-year-olds came running up to him with bits of paper and chewed pencils, wanting an autograph.

"There was a big cardboard cutout (of Daniel from a Tip Top promotion), and they all said 'oh, this is Miss Kowalski's little brother'." This happy, ordinary memory makes Kowalski giggle. Those kids were just so cute.

The memories of both Stevenson and Kowalski share an interesting blank - neither can remember learning to swim. Kowalski has been told he just always did and Stevenson, apparently, used to run along the pool, jumping in by her older brother and sister. Her first memory is finishing her first 50-metre lap, age nine, at the Oakleigh baths.

"I loved being in the water and I still do. I loved feeling the water. It was something I just did. Like going to school but I didn't muck around with friends after school because I was swimming," Stevenson says.

"I went to my first national age championships when I was 11 years old. I won a silver and bronze in the backstroke and the medley. Then, when I was 12, I won a gold at the open championships and when I was 13, in 1985, I was second to Georgina Parkes in the all-ages. She was number one at the time. She was 21."

Now Stevenson calls herself the old, wise one of the Olympic team. Not that she doesn't want to win as much as the others, it's just that she's seen it all before. As an elite swimmer for 12 years, culminating in a bronze medal at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, she knows how much success can hurt.

On a bad day, the pain starts for a backstroker in the legs, then spreads to the rest of the body. By the third lap of a 200, the body hurts more than anything, the quads tighten up. "In the third turn it is just so painful, being out of breath and exhausted but you have got to hold your breath in the turn and keep the streamline. It is quite a devastating kind of feeling," she says.

But on a good day, a fast day, Stevenson feels only the flow of the water and the swimming is easy.

Stevenson has started to think about life beyond the pain and the flow of swimming - a contract with Optus Vision, commentating for Channel 9 - although she won't let her thoughts go too far before the Olympics. She doesn't want to stand at the blocks in Atlanta and think: This is it. This is the last time I race.

"Life after swimming. It is kind of like part of you dies.

"It's such a big part of your life. When other athletes stop it is such a big adjustment. After swimming I want to live a normal life, to try not to be depressed. But my swimming has to finish, I want it to. I want to move on into life."

Kowalski, too, although far from retirement, has very normal post-Olympic plans. Travel and food. A break from the high- carbohydrate, low-fat regime he sticks to now.

"When all the swimming is finished in Atlanta, I am going to Dunkin' Donuts. They are not like doughnuts. They are light and fluffy. And Dairy Queen for Oreo cookies, with ice- cream in the middle. Oh yeah. I don't buy them here; over there they are the real deal."

THERE are two sides to Kowalski and Stevenson. The land side and the water side. You can see this in training, especially with Kowalski, because he is younger and less experienced, because he spends more time in the silence of the pool, because so much is expected of him and he expects so much of himself.

He drives up to the swim centre in his indigo-colored Ford car, a gift from his sponsor. A nice car for a young guy. He gets out in his baggy clothes and baseball cap, a sporty, clumsy homeboy. He raves with the excitement of a child about the fatty joys of real-deal American doughnuts. He says he likes to chat on the phone and to shop, but laughs: "Oh my God, I sound like a girl. Say I like to read car magazines."

But once the stretching for training starts, the polite, smart, smiling and slightly goofy Daniel is gone.

In the water, Kowalski is something else. His face looks stronger behind the goggles. He slices the water, gently, but fast. He seems bigger. His shoulders loom out of the water, skimming the blue surface, powering his body forward, especially at speed.

At the end of a two-hour Thursday afternoon training session, after seven kilometres of freestyle and kicking exercises, Kowalski does three 200-metre sprints in a row.

Kowalski turns at the far end of the pool for his last 50 metres in his last sprint. Nelson checks the time. It is fast.

He cat calls and whistles into the stale, hot air of the centre. The swimming factory. Kowalski races on, pushing himself, racing himself. Nelson writes the times on the whiteboard: 1.56.2, 1.55.

2, 1.53.5 -each sprint is faster than the one previous.

Kowalski swims on, warming down, flicking one hand at a time out of the water, wriggling each finger. He dives under like a dolphin, he pulls one shoulder right out of the water at a time. He swims on.

The Australian swimming team leaves for Atlanta on 3 July.

Kowalski's first race, the 200 metres freestyle, is on 20 July. Stevenson's is the 100 metres backstroke on 22 July.

The finals are on 26 July.

DANIEL KOWALSKI'S DAY.

4.20 am: Get up. Pack swimming gear. Drive 23 kilometres from Aspendale to the State Swimming Centre on Batman Ave.

5.10 am: Stretching for 20 minutes. In the pool by 5.30 am for a two to three-hour session with coach Bill Nelson and other members of his Melbourne Vic Centre team. Swim about nine kilometres, including sprints, flipper and hand-paddle work.

8 am: Breakfast with team members in the glassed-in VIP room at the pool. Cereal, toast, and Sustagen sports drink.

9 am: If time, a short nap, either back in Aspendale or in the car. 12 am: Back in the pool. About one hour with Nicole Stevenson and Nelson. Session refines speed and technique.

1.30 pm: Lunch, usually pasta and a bread roll, often at the Crown Casino. More Sustagen. In the past few weeks, television and newspaper interviews, then physiotherapy with Ian McIndoe at Alphington Sports Medicine Centre or massage with Brian Taylor at the swim centre.

3.45 pm: The pool again. Start stretching, often with rubber cords to strengthen shoulder muscles. In water by 4 pm.

6 pm: Home to Aspendale. Joanne Nelson has the tea on the table. In bed by 8.30 pm.

Training is in four-week cycles - endurance, quality, sprint and adaptation, a stabilisation, tapering-off week. Kowalski and Stevenson swim about 90 kilometres a week in two or three sessions a day. Sundays are a rest day. In an endurance week, there are two longer sessions each day. In between, on alternate days, there is weight training or aerobics.

Article originally located at The Age

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