OLYMPIQUE CHAMPION Janet Evans oh all right, not very funny.

I am a bit worried about this notion of swimmer Michelle Smith now "joining the immortals", or even the ranks of the immortals, as the popular papers have it. Michelle is only 26 and hardly wants to be worried about mortality or its more (stet) depressing relation immortality just yet. Living for the moment is a more sensible option. That is what has got the swimmer to the present Olympian pinnacles.

You cannot be "focused" on some goal too far down the road. Living for ever is a notion that has been quite properly debunked on many occasions and long before Swift's time too.

Anyway, this whole business of immortality is quite comprehensively discussed in Frank Tipler's book, The Physics of Immortality Modern Cosmology. God and the Resurrection of the Dead (Macmillan, £20). I will not say it is essential reading for anyone with ambitions in sport but it does contain useful insights.

For example though some records, like those of Bob Beamon and Mary T. Meagher, stand for years, the world of sport allows for and quite naturally encourages the idea of infinite progress citius, altius, fortius.

Infinite progress is a concept of immense importance in Tipler's world theory. But he sees little to attract in it. He talks about futurologist Freeman Dyson's work which showed how life and thought might continue for ever in an endlessly expanding universe Dyson explained for example that as temperatures continued to fall, information processing would require less and less energy. This is of interest in the light of the soaring Atlanta temperature, the enormous energy expenditure there and the disastrous information processing experience.

So a finite source of energy might be used to process more and more data. However, Dyson's information processing would necessarily occur in separated regions, each finite in complexity. It would therefore have to repeat itself over and over. Tipler sees in this "the horror of the Eternal Return".

As a sometime tennis player I am depressingly familiar with this concept. Continued existence in such circumstances would there fore be "pointless". All tennis players will appreciate this, because a competition could be infinitely prolonged if the server were to be continually foiled. Game points could be reached, but never a set point and therefore never a match point. The horror is hardly to be dreamed of.

The Atlanta organisers, having been fiercely criticised for poor organisation, will also be interested in Tipler's work on chaos theory. Tipler suggests that the engineers of the far future will be able to regulate the wobblings of an entire universe only by exploiting chaos.

They would for example exploit the fact that tiny events can have huge results the classic example often given is that of the butterfly which, if given completely precise information and access to an enormous computer, could deliberately induce or prevent a hurricane some weeks later, merely by fluttering its wings one way or another.

It should be fairly obvious at this stage that Michelle Smith's own butterfly performance relied heavily on the application of such theories (think of how her opponents were largely blown away) and considerably less on the alleged wonders of her swimsuit. After winning her first gold medal, Ms Smith pointedly remarked that she not only trained hard, but "I think I also trained smart." My own theory is that she was misquoted, that the punctuation was faulty (perhaps an error in the electronic transmission) and that she actually said "I think. I also trained. Smart."

There is a difference. It is only mild exaggeration to describe Ms Smith's performance as earth shattering her "fly" on Friday night can bear direct comparison with the butterfly, imagined by Tipler, which could have "complete control over Earth's position in its orbit half a billion years down the road", to quote an enthusiastic critic in the London Review of Books.

I need hardly tell you then that games theory also figures prominently in Tipler's book, and while the Olympic Games are not specifically mentioned, there is much of relevance. The professional sports world has become increasingly egotistic and inward looking, imagining itself as sufficient unto itself. It would do better to delve into Tipler and see what it has been missing.