2008 Olympics Updates

Having competed at the last five Paralympic Games it will be a new experience for me to be a spectator in Beijing. However, as a commentator I will still be close to the action and be able to speak to the team each day.

Trying to pick out ones to watch from the incredibly strong British swimming team is difficult.

Just to qualify onto the team you had to be ranked at least sixth in the world and it is a team that topped the medal table at the 2006 IPC World Championships.

There will be some familiar faces in Beijing who seem sure to medal - swimmers such as Sascha Kindred, Nyree Lewis, David Roberts, Jim Anderson and Natalie Jones.

However 45% of the team are first time Paralympians and they are likely to be in the mix too.

The GB swimming team have maintained their success for the same reasons cycling and sailing were so successful at the Olympics - funding, planning, attention to detail and focused athletes and staff.

Since the release of National Lottery funding to cover more than just capital projects, British Swimming has been able to invest in the development of talented athletes.

Simply throwing money at something will only get you so far. Team members like current head coach Lars Humer focus on getting all of the detail right all of the time and this doesn’t happen by chance.

There will already be a four-year plan in place to move the team on far beyond Beijing.

As with most sports, the athletes put in all the hard work required to get into physical shape but here there is a real sense of team in the broader sense.

Each component of the support team from strength and conditioning to sports psychology, from sports science to the office admin support, everyone is focused and passionate about helping the swimmers be the best they can be.

However, the British team will not have it all their own way. Ukraine has a very strong team of predominantly visually-impaired swimmers and, with stars like Erin Popovich and Jessica Long, the USA will accumulate a substantial medal haul.

Few swimmers will be as dominant as South Africa’s Natalie Du Toit in the women’s S9 events and of course there will be a very strong team representing the host nation China.

There are a couple of races that I am particularly looking forward to.

The Men’s 34-point freestyle relay is always very exciting and although GB won gold in both Sydney and Athens they are likely to be pushed very hard by Australia, with Matt Cowdrey leading the charge.

However, my pick for the entire competition would be the Men’s S8 400m freestyle which will be on 12 September.

It will feature Britain’s Sam Hynd, who is the world record holder for the event and, despite it being his first Games, he will be favourite.

He will face one of the most talented swimmers in the world Xiaofu Wang who will have the home crowd behind him. It is sure to be an exciting contest.

Just a small part of me is envious of this year’s Paralympic swimmers. To race in such a beautiful pool like the Water Cube will be an incredible experience for them.

Thankfully, the larger part of me has come to terms with the fact that my time as an athlete has been and gone and now I can just enjoy commentating on their endeavours.

Beijing

The two questions I have been asked most frequently during the run up to these Games are:

How many medals will the Great Britain swimming team get? And can America’s Michael Phelps win all eight golds in the events he is competing in?

The answer to question one is, as all observant readers of my previous blogs will know, that we will get more finalists than before and take it from there.

Regarding the second query, Phelps is more than capable of bettering Mark Spitz’s efforts at the 1972 Munich Games, but he will have to rely on US colleagues backing him up in the relays and not thwarting his efforts in the five individual events.

It’s a lot to ask and the likes of Ryan Lochte, in the 200 metres and 400m individual medley, and Ian Crocker, the world record holder in the100m butterfly, both want their own piece, or pieces of Olympic glory.

Phelps could come a cropper as early as day two in the immaculate and imaginative Water Cube. Lochte has closed the gap on ‘Superfish’ in the 400 Individual Medley to such an extent that he was less than a second adrift at the recent American trials.

It sounds a lot but this time last year he was some three seconds slower than Phelps and the tousle haired 24-year-old from Daytona Beach has improved beyond recognition in 2008.

If Phelps survives that test, and the other potential banana skins along the way, and progresses intact until day eight there is the spectre of Crocker in the 100m butterfly.

Anyone who witnessed the final of that event at the World Championships in Melbourne last year will recall just how close that race was. Crocker had the race in the bag until the last split second.

Listening to the commentary of Karen Pickering and myself in real time, and watching the pictures on a slight satellite delay back at BBC Television Centre, Vassos Alexander and Mark Foster who were presenting our coverage for 5 Live Sports Extra, heard me call the race for Phelps and both cried in unison “no” as they couldn’t believe the man from Baltimore had managed to get up in the last few metres to win it, but he had.

I asked Crocker whether he could beat Phelps this time. His response was characteristically dry. “We’re getting closer to a tie!”

I wonder if that aside will prove to be prophetic. The two are very different characters, as Crocker acknowledged when I inquired as to whether they get on outside the pool. They share the same agent, but the similarities pretty much end there.

Phelps likes Eminem and rap music, Crocker, Bob Dylan and playing his guitar. Michael is into video games, Ian spends his time restoring his 1971 Buick Riviera and incidently, I discovered, is a huge fan of BBC2’s ‘Top Gear’ and is probably Jeremy Clarkson’s biggest fan Stateside…so if it doesn’t work out for Ant and Dec!

Ok Bob, get off the fence can he or can’t he do it? I think having to swim at least seventeen times, and possibly as many as twenty times over nine days is going to take its toll.

He is not a machine, no matter how well tuned he has been by coach extraordinaire Bob Bowman.

There is also the small matter of the ‘Flying French’ in the 4×100m freestyle, or 400m freestyle relay as the Americans will insist on calling it.

The Gallic smirks of Alain Bernard, Fabien Gilot, Amaury Leveaux and Freddie Bousquet might be very visible on the third day.

So I wish Michael Phelps good luck, it would be churlish to do otherwise, but I concur with the view of Ian Thorpe that it might be just too Herculean a feat to pull off.