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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  As the Olympics beckon, athletes crave an edge
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As the Olympics beckon, athletes crave an edge

As the Olympics beckon, athletes crave an edge

Every fraction counts: Bindra. Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images.Premium

Every fraction counts: Bindra. Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images.

Shooter Abhinav Bindra, a man of religious precision, also listens to his gut. But it isn’t quite speaking to him yet. Only whispering to him about standing at the door of a plane, parachute strapped on, the world a blur below, and stepping out into the cold, thin air.

Bindra wants to “test" himself before the London Olympics, but is this it? He’s not certain.

In the skydive, he’ll be strapped to an instructor and when he’s falling, he’s not really required to complete a specific task. He simply plummets. As a challenge, it’s not equivalent to negotiating a rock face blindfolded, or climbing a 40ft “pizza" pole, all of which he did before Beijing 2008. Then, as fear arrived and adrenalin flowed, he had to learn to control his body and mind. It was a simulation of sorts, of what occurs in a shooting range, of what will transpire at the London Olympics. If I can manage the pizza pole, he told himself then, then these insane Games can’t rattle me.

Every fraction counts: Bindra. Photo by Cameron Spencer/Getty Images.

Almost every Olympic athlete is commencing a last training lap. Tuning their minds, making final adjustments to technique. Can I subtract .03 in a race? Can I find the edge to separate myself from the talented pack? In this pursuit, detail is their God.

At a meet in the US, Michael Phelps wins a 100m butterfly race, but his coach Bob Bowman frowns. Victory is insufficient, he desires perfection and Phelps’ finish lacks it. Bowman deals in fractions because fractions are decisive. Like the .01 by which Phelps won the 100m butterfly in Beijing. Because of a strong finish.

“I can’t stand those finishes like that," Bowman said. “We’re at a point now where the details are important and you can’t just keep blowing them off till later.

“It is later."

Athletes want to leave nothing to chance, yet can never quite predict chance. Noureddine Morceli never knew he would be spiked in the 1,500m at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. Phelps never knew his goggles would leak in Beijing. This is the adventure of sport—athletes challenged by circumstance and still finding a solution. But even if nothing unspools according to plan, athletes can never afford not to plan. To find a fractional advantage, they will even flirt with absurdity. A British Olympic Association doctor even wants to limit handshakes. Hygiene for him is the athletes’ ally, germs their foe.

Everyone is seeking advantage and no athlete comes equally armed to the Olympics. Some are comforted by their history and record (Cubans in boxing, Japanese in judo) and some genetically blessed with fast-twitch fibre. China has a pool of a billion, New Zealand of five million. Pakistan has 20-plus hockey astro-turfs, the Netherlands apparently around 500.

Phelps chase perfection to the last decimal. Photo by Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images/AFP.

A single conversation with David T. Martin, a senior sports scientist at the AIS, becomes like a wander through a sci-fi script written by James Cameron. Except this is reality, not merely imagination. In this world of fractions, equipment selection is a process. But picking the right swimsuits, oars for rowers (stiff or flexible), helmets for cyclists, says Martin, is not just a matter of physics but also of psychology. “It’s like a soldier going to war," he says. “If they know they have the best weapons in the world, it adds to confidence."

So cyclists troop down to a wind tunnel—usually reserved for automobile testing—to assess aerodynamics. Here, chance does not live. Cyclists are tested at competition-specific wind speeds and estimates of aerodynamic drag are calculated as they experiment with a variety of wheels, helmets, skin-suits and riding positions. Certainly, Abebe Bikila would have been astonished. He won the 1960 marathon while running barefoot.

Military analogies might be tiresome in sport; nevertheless, the AIS resembles an athletic Pentagon at work where sporting generals design detailed plans. If this year is competition time, last year was the reconnaissance mission. In 2011, Australian cyclists travelled to London, visited their hotel, met the staff, collected data on weather and terrain and evaluated strategies for winning. Videotape of the course, for instance, allowed coaches to be specific with instructions: Here come the technical turns, here is the best place to drink fluids, here you can expect an attack. You can even sit on a programmed stationary cycle in Australia and pedal through the virtual world of an English course.

The modern athlete, in a way, is a machine disassembled into a hundred parts. He is belief, fitness, diet, technique, recovery...and it is a polishing of these parts which finds him those fractions. If the real athlete can’t be poked and prodded enough, well then they just animate him. As Martin explains, with an undisguised passion, research is now ongoing on laser scans of swimmers which offer scientists a three-dimensional picture of the athlete’s shape.

This image is then turned into a object on a computer whose arms and legs can be manipulated. Already, scientists have filmed the swimmer and know precisely how he moves. Now scientists can measure how the animated swimmer moves through water and estimate drag using computational fluid dynamics. It allows for unique insight into which technique offers the least amount of drag.

It appears a staggering amount of effort for a metal sphere, except that this sphere signifies the best of the world. But in all this deeply serious business, athletes occasionally embrace a less-than-scientific approach once competition is done. Call it indulging the tortured self. I am uncertain what precisely Olympic athletes do, but Eddie Ng, the gifted mixed martial artist, gave me an amusing example of what they might.

Two days before his recent fight, he went berserk in a supermarket, as if after a season of dieting, the ascetic in him was readying to make way for the glutton inside. So he bought himself bags of chips (he had 18 at home), two large packets of peanut M&Ms, condensed milk and bread. As we sat together after his fight, he specifically listed every junk food item he was about to devour.

Evidently, even when rewarding themselves, athletes never lose their sense of detail.

Rohit Brijnath is a senior correspondent with The Straits Times, Singapore.

Write to Rohit at gametheory@livemint.com

Also Read | Rohit’s previous Lounge columns

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Published: 13 Apr 2012, 06:53 PM IST
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