Michelle fills bill for 20th century archetype

ON Wednesday, when she qualified for the final of the 800 metres freestyle, the British swimmer Sarah Hardcastle said. "At 27, I've just finished in the top eight. For a small country like Britain, which doesn't provide much support, that's an achievement."

If Britain is a small country, what is Ireland? If British support for swimmers is negligible, what is Ireland's? And if Sarah Hardcastle's place in one final in which she finished eighth and last is an achievement in such circumstances, what is Michelle Smith's string of gold medals? Is it any surprise that the keynote of the week has been disbelief expressed in the contrasting forms of American scepticism and everyone else's open mouthed awe?

All great feats of athleticism inspire a degree of wonder but there is something literally unearthly about a great swimmer whose deeds are performed in an element that is not, after all, our natural one. Michelle Smith has the quality of dangerous detachment that turns an impressive swimmer into an icon. The addition of water to her pleasant personality seems to transform her from a recognisable Irishwoman into a ferocious force of nature, utterly indifferent to her opponents, her critics, the normal doubts and hesitations of everyday life. In the pool, she seems not to belong to the world that most of us inhabit.

In this, she fulfills perfectly the demands that modern life makes of its aquatic stars. Unlike running, where the spectator can see every stride, every contraction of the muscles, swimming retains its mystery. In his marvellous book Haunts of the Black Masseur. The Swimmer as Hero, Charles Sprawson fixes the modern image of "the swimmer as someone rather remote and divorced from everyday life, devoted to a mode of exercise where most of the body remains submerged and self absorbed".

He quotes Bachrach, the great American swimming conch of the 1920s. "Much of a swimmer's training takes place inside his head, immersed as he is in a continuous dream of a world under water." The making of a great champion follows the logic of the act of swimming it self taking the plunge, striking for the farther shore, going completely with the flow of an unstable element, never thinking of the familiar things family, country, career that have been left behind.

GARY O'Toole, Ireland's most successful swimmer before Michelle Smith, defines the difference between himself and Michelle in terms of her greater willingness to lose sight of the shores of everyday life. "I never actually severed all my safety nets. I took a year off university, but always knew I was going back to medicine. She had to make it in swimming, or else she was completely bombed out, because there was nothing else there for her.

"I never put myself in that situation where I risked everything. And the more you risk, the higher the payback. She's had the greatest ever payback. My payback my European silver medal, my World Student Games gold medal pales into insignificance. But for the risks that I took, maybe they were adequate repayment. She gambled, and I wasn't prepared to take that gamble."

This quality of reckless risk taking, of complete surrender to an abnormal world, gives swimming a peculiar similarity to art. Painters from Dali and Picasso to David Hockney have been drawn to the pool side and many great writers have been obsessed with swimming. Lord Byron always claimed that he was prouder of swimming the Hellespont than of any of his poetry. Jack London insisted that he would rather win a great race in a swimming pool than write the great American novel.

This idea has occupied the imaginations of swimmers themselves. The Australian Olympic champion, Murray Rose, said that the principal quality of a great swimmer was an instinctive "feel for water". He believed that the swimmer should be able to use her or his "arms and legs as a fish its fins, and be able to feel the pressure of the water on his hands, to hold it in his palm as he pulls the stroke through without allowing it to slip through his fingers ... Like water diviners, only those succeed who have a natural affinity for it." He described the immediate sensual awareness of water as he dived in, the feeling that he was suspended, united with the element, the sudden surge of power".

This perception of great swimmers as almost a different kind of being helps to explain the mythic status they have attained in the modern world. Swimmers were the first truly modern sports stars in the sense that they were the first to be propelled from the athletic arena into the worlds of movies and advertising. The process began with the transformation of Olympic champion Johnny Weissmuller into the celluloid Tarzan "whose mistrust civilisation and sympathy with primitive life", as Sprawson puts it, "seem to epitomise the various romantic notions that have accumulated around the swimmer".

Female swimming champions, too, became icons of modernity, embodying specifically 20th century notions of freedom and sexuality. As late as 1919 the champion swimmer Etheldra Bleibtrey was jailed for swimming "nude" on Manhattan beach because she had removed her stockings. But from the 1920s onwards, the powerful, half naked female swimmer became an irresistible image of liberation. The American swimmer, Janet Fauntz, featured on the covers of glossy magazines, endorsed Camel cigarettes and modelled furs for Saks in Chicago. Ekanor Holm, who won the backstroke in the 1932 Olympics, was depicted as a mermaid in a series of murals by Salvador Dali. In Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade, bikini clad swimmers struck amid plunging cascades of water.

THESE images are ingrained in modern culture, and Michelle Smith has ploughed through the ranks of ordinary swimming champions to take her place among them and fill the form of a 20th century archetype. She has acquired the aura of a modern star, with one foot in recognisable reality and the other in the realms of myth. The words repeated at the end of every race by Jim Sherwin unbelievable, unreal, incredible, like a dream are in this case more than the usual hyperbole of the agitated commentator. In a sense, what all the innuendo about drugs has drawn attention to is the gap between Michelle Smith and mere mortals, a gulf that has to be filled with gossip and speculation or with outraged defensiveness. If she has seemed strangely immune to it, it's because she is. She looks at the gossips now across the 20th century's greatest divide, the wide expanse of blue water that separates the star from the rest.