The swimmer who barely swims: Inside McEvoy’s radical experiment

What lasts 20 or so seconds? It’s the time train doors stay open at a station on most rail systems. The recommended time to take to wash your hands in the COVID-19 days. The time it takes to sing Happy Birthday if you sing it twice.

The 20 and a bit seconds it takes to swim 50 metres was all that mattered in Cam McEvoy’s life. And it is all that is going to matter for a while now that he has an Olympic gold medal to his name and fevered atmosphere of La Defense arena as an earworm and validation of an improbable experimental regime as his calling card.

Cam McEvoy celebrates.Credit: Getty Images

All Olympic athletes are obsessive, but none more than swimmers. After three previous Olympic Games, and despite high-profile favouritism in some races, McEvoy had only three relay medals to show for his efforts. COVID-19 became a natural hiatus that he thought might also be an end. He was 27 after all.

Coaxed back, he radically refined his approach: no more alarm clocks, no more daily sessions, no more countless kilometres in the pool – three or so a week would be enough – and no distance further than the thrash that is the 50 metres. The world record for the 50 is and remains 20.91 seconds.

That’s slightly longer than it took Usain Bolt to run 200 metres, but at least he did variations. It’s the time you have to put up a shot in basketball, with four seconds to spare. Maybe the time it takes to make a golden duck in cricket, in which case, like McEvoy, you might spend the next couple of days training and twiddling your fingers and waiting for your next crack.

American Shawn Achor, who wrote a book called The Happiness Advantage, said 20 seconds was a threshold: if something takes more than 20 seconds to get started, it’s less rather than more likely to proceed. McEvoy starts and finishes in that span.

Cameron McEvoy meets the crowd’s acclaim..Credit: Getty

It took him 21.25 seconds to win gold on Friday night, but also two years. “The route I took to get here, that definitely surpasses just the 21 seconds tonight, getting the gold medal,” he said. “That’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“That act of creation effectively over the last few years to start from not really having much of an idea and then developing something and seeing where I can go, and myself as the guinea pig, going through the motions and seeing where would it take me.

“That’s something that I think I’ll find very hard to replicate in my life. And that’s going to be something that I’m going to be most proud of forever.”

Some Olympic events take hours, some days. Team competitions take all week. McEvoy’s approach is now so refined that he spent barely more than one racing minute at La Defense to win this gold.

A lifetime’s work fulfilled.Credit: Eddie Jim

His way is minimalism to the max, but look where it’s landed him. He is the first Australian man to win the 50 metres, the first Australian man to win an individual gold in Paris, and the oldest Australian swimmer, man or woman, to win a gold medal, all by barely getting wet.

You can open a vacuum sealed pack in 20 seconds, but only if you’re very good. It might have taken you 20 seconds to read this paragraph; it’s a bit contorted. There are other activities that sometimes last 20 or fewer seconds, but ideally should not. If you still don’t get what I’m on about, ask the French.

What McEvoy discovered when he remade himself into the swimmer who barely swims is that there are other things in life. “It wasn’t just transformation as an athlete,” he said. “As a human being, I grew a lot in this process. There’s a lot more time I spent outside of being in the pool, being in the gym and training, in terms of just being in life. And yeah, it really took me a very long way in many different directions.”

It’s not as if McEvoy spends all those regained hours lying around in his Speedos on the pool deck. He’s still obsessive – he’s the first Australian male swimmer to make it to four Olympic Games, after all – but clever with it. Instead of laps without end, he works on resistance training and has in his head a manual of what to do and not do. Some of it he has shared with other swimmers in an increasingly fascinated world, some not.

He was a smart cookie anyway, a student of maths and physics who teammates call the Professor, and now he parlayed that into a close study of his sport. The 50 is a mad scramble, but he intellectualised it.

For all anyone knows, a 50-metre race is already won and lost by the split seconds between the swimmers as they leave the blocks, micro-margins that cannot be made up in a mini-race. If you look at the analysis the way aficionados do, you’ll see that’s how it was on Friday night.

With Swimming Australia’s permission, McEvoy arrived later than the rest of the team to these Games; what would be the point of all those extra faraway laps anyway? Technically, there are no laps in the 50; the turn is the finish. McEvoy concentrated on how to get into his rhythm immediately, because that is the leeway in the 50.

It all worked. Marchand mania was upon La Defense, suffusing McEvoy. “Within four strokes, I hit that rhythm that we’ve been really trying to work on the past two years,” he said. “I held up for as long as I could. I could see Ben (silver medallist Ben Proud) there the entire time in my peripheral. And then under the flags, it was hope that I could line this touch up, lean in and get there first.”

If McEvoy has ever stopped to ask himself why a man would spend a lifetime trying to get from one end of a swimming pool to the other faster than anyone else, he needn’t now.

But then, is he really so odd? The Olympics a parable about people who give their lives over to the conquest of the arcane, the obscure and the exotic. Who, you might ask, pops out on a Saturday afternoon for a quick put of the shot? Who dons jodhpurs and rides a horse in fancy dress to a deliberate standstill? Who travels half-way around the world to swim 50 metres at a time?

McEvoy does, and you only have to look at the phenomenon that French swimmer Leon Marchand has become in these Games to understand why. The world is both their oysters now.

McEvoy is 30, but hasn’t ruled out persevering until the Brisbane Olympics in 2032. It’s a long way off, but taken 20-point-something seconds of time, he thinks it’s doable. He knows.

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