Word: goulds
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There's little glory on offer, probably none. As the 64th fastest of 69 qualifiers, Gould will need to outdo herself to progress past the heats. And no matter how well she swims she won't be going to Athens - the 50-m 'fly isn't an Olympic event. Australians will watch her, admire her perhaps, and she may inspire some over-40s to get active again. But the future of Australian swimming rests with rivals like Melbourne-based Danni Miatke, whose best time for the 50-m 'fly is 3 sec. faster than Gould's, and who's racing...
...consultant to Australian Swimming, "keep her in the water until she's 21 and she'll excel." By that age, Talbot argues, most women have overcome issues of body image and social awkwardness, and are ready to hit a peak that can last five years or more. But Gould was long gone by 21. She may have appeared happy in Munich; in fact, she felt crushed by expectation. "Anyone with any imagination ... might have seen that a 15-year-old girl from whom so much was expected could have used (some) help," she wrote in her 1999 autobiography, Tumble Turns...
...sport," he says. Still, the first six months in Melbourne were hard: she longed for home and the training felt like drudgery. But an ultimatum from Taylor and her mother - Give it everything or give it up - awakened her to her love for swimming and racing. Had Gould come through such a system, who knows what she might have achieved? Stripped to her costume at Sydney's Cronulla Beach recently, she revealed a taut and tanned body that has changed little since...
...Guiding Gould's re-education is her new partner, 55-year-old American coach Milt Nelms. "She's a physical genius in the water," Nelms says. He's seen many of the greats close up, but no one's impressed him more than she has for beauty of movement and speed of learning. Though her freestyle times are about 6% slower than they were in the '70s, she is "without question" a more efficient swimmer, Nelms says, with improvement still...
Though he chooses his words carefully - and advises Gould to do the same - Nelms seems to regard a lot of what passes for state-of-the art training as outmoded, with an overemphasis on quantity. His own views on this topic aren't easy to grasp. (Both he and Gould use terms - "functional equilibrium," "sensory integration," "chemical energy system" - that don't cast much light.) But for simplicity's sake they might be boiled down to the idea that gifted swimmers know instinctively how to move in water and a lot of instruction only interferes with the process...