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 albatross.
But forget the exterior. It was from the inside, at least from within the temporary wings, that its form-over-function character was apparent. Below, one could see the fans and, beyond that, the pool; but in front, instead of a panorama of the far side of the stadium, all one could see were white steel girders and the low gray belly of the ceiling—an impressive ceiling, no doubt, one that “swells and ripples with sinuous energy . . . buckles and writhes,” to use the words of one inspired reviewer, but nonetheless one whose sinuous swelling blocked my view.
In past centuries, people attended athletic events because it was the only way to watch sports. Today, anyone with a TV, or even just a few bills to buy a beer at the local bar, can not only watch the world’s premiere sporting events but also observe them in greater detail and precision than even those with the best tickets. (Think of the mesmerizing and almost voyeuristic pleasure we get in watching vids of Rafael Nadal’s facial contortions as he savages a forehand or the slow-mo replay technology used after the Beijing Olympics 100 fly3 to prove Phelps actually did impossibly out-touch Cavic by 1/100th of a second, without which we’d still be hearing allegations of an American conspiracy behind his octuplet gold medal haul.) Competitions were once exclusive to live spectators: now they include, and in reality entirely cater to, the televised and streamed audience. But though the armchair TV and laptop viewers of the world may have a better close-up on the action, they’re still only watching on a small two-dimensional screen—and “small” includes all rectangularly framed screens, from 4" mobile phones to 64" high-def LEDs. They still aren’t there, and it’s exactly the being there aspect—the immersive sublimation of self into a thousands-strong throng of fellow roaring nationalist barbarians, or in brief the “atmosphere”—that accounts for why we still pay for flights and hotels and $175-per-session tickets for a couple of hours of straining our eyes and hearts while a bunch of kids splash around in a glorified fishbowl.
Though I only had an albatross’s-eye view of the action below, I was in stellar company. In the seat to my left was Katie Ledecky’s brother, who later that evening would sprint down the stairs yelling hoarsely as his fifteen-year-old sister swam the final lap of the 800 free to Olympic gold.4 And directly to my right was Missy Franklin’s uncle, who had tears running down his face after his niece won gold and broke the world record in the 100 back. Stadiums during Olympic finals sessions are essentially giant conductors