Cameron McEvoy turns to science to hone his swimming style

When the Rio Olympics didn’t turn out how he planned, Cameron McEvoy did what he always does in a tough situation.

Cameron McEvoy has turned to science to maximise his speed. Picture: Adam Head

When the Rio Olympics didn’t turn out the way he planned, Cameron McEvoy did what he ­always does in a tough situation.

He “scienced the hell out of it”, to borrow a line from actor Matt Damon when he played an astronaut trying to survive after he was left alone on Mars.

The Griffith University physics student put his freestyle technique under the microscope, looking for any tiny improvements he could make to swim “easier, faster and more beautifully’’.

He took his inspiration from a teenage mathematician in Brisbane, Ivan Zelich, who combined with a US teenager to develop a new geometry theory.

“In mathematics and physics the way to improve a theory is to find a faster, easier, more mathematically beautiful way to solve that problem,’’ McEvoy said.

He decided to apply that principle to his swimming after he returned from Rio, where he went in as the fastest man in the 100m freestyle field but fell short of a medal as his teenage teammate Kyle Chalmers triumphed.

McEvoy said he had become “obsessed’’ with improving his swimming technique. “It’s ticking over in my mind in every hour of the day that I am awake,’’ he said.

“I have come up with this new way to move through the water. It’s not a drastic change: it’s getting down to the finer things in my stroke, my hip and shoulder position. But I have got up to the next level in terms of efficiency through the water.

“I have taken where I was last year, which was 0.13sec off the world record (in the 100m free) and I have improved on that.

“I was able to go 47.04sec last year (the fastest time ever swum in a textile swimsuit) and I am going in this year with an upgrade.

“The goal of swimming is to beat my best times and get faster and faster and get to the maximum. I believe my 47.04 (swim) had a lot of flaws in it. I can pinpoint a lot of areas where I can improve upon it.’’

McEvoy said he and coach Richard Scarce discovered that he wasn’t using all his muscle groups as effectively as he might.

“We found out I was not using my glutes much in my stroke or my dive or turn. I would compensate with other parts of my body, my quads, hamstrings and back.’’

He has done “a lot of tedious work’’ to activate different muscles and get more balance and ­efficiency into his technique.

“Not only did I have to learn to use my glutes more, I have to create the neural pathways to get them firing,’’ he said.

He is convinced he is a better swimmer than last year but he said that wasn’t likely to show at next week’s national trials in Brisbane, primarily because he had not rested completely for this competition.

“Next week is about qualifying for worlds,’’ he said.

It is at the world championship in Budapest in July that he intends to reveal McEvoy 2.0.

He said he was confident the improvements he had made would help him to swim “times in the events that I am targeting that have never been done before’’.

In the meantime, he will race Chalmers over 100m next week for the first time since the Olympic final. Chalmers withdrew due to illness at the national short-course titles in November and last month’s NSW championships.

The 18-year-old sprinter may be the Olympic champion but he’s still keen to paint McEvoy as the race favourite on his home patch in Queensland.

“Cam has gone 47.0 (Chalmers’ best is 47.58sec) so I think I still am the underdog,’’ he said from Adelaide, where he announced a new sponsorship deal with San Remo pasta yesterday.

That’s a good fit for a man who ate spaghetti bolognaise every night that he swam in Rio.

Illness has interrupted Chalmers’ preparation in the past five months but he’s still confident he can perform next week.

“At trials last year I was definitely going into it the fittest I have been, but this year there’s been a bit more broken training so qualification for the team is my goal,’’ he said.