This allows the researcher to conduct true longitudinal research in a few short years.
Excellence is not, I find, the product of socially deviant personalities.
Excellence does not result from some special inner quality of the athlete. “Talent” is one common name for this quality; sometimes we talk of a “gift,” or of “natural ability.” These terms are generally used to mystify the essentially mundane processes of achievement in sports, keeping us away from a realistic analysis of the actual factors creating superlative performances, and protecting us from a sense of responsibility for our own outcomes.
Excellence in competitive swimming is achieved through qualitative differentiation from other swimmers, not through quantitative increases in activity. This means, in brief, that levels of the sport are qualitatively distinct; that stratification is discrete, not continuous; and that because of these factors, the swimming world is best conceived of not as a single entity but as multiple worlds, each with its own patterns of conduct.
Diver Greg Louganis, who won two Olympic gold medals in 1984, practices only three hours each day—not a long time—divided up into two or three sessions. But during each session, he tries to do every dive perfectly. Louganis is never sloppy in practice, and so is never sloppy in meets.
The analysis pursued above can be taken one step further. If, as I have suggested, there really are qualitative breaks between levels of the sport, and if people really don't "work their way up" in any simple additive sense, perhaps our very conception of a single swimming world is inaccurate. I have spoken of the "top" of the sport, and of "levels" within the sport. But these words suggest that all swimmers are, so to speak, climbing a single ladder, aiming towards the same goals, sharing the same values, swimming the same strokes, all looking upwards towards an Olympic gold medal. But they aren't." Some want gold medals, some want to make the Team, some want to exercise, or have fun with friends, or be out in the sunshine and water. Some are trying to escape their parents.
Most swimmers don't want to win an Olympic gold medal. Some may have, at most, a vague, un-acted upon desire to go someday to the National Championships. Of course, if an adult asks what a child wants to accomplish in swimming, the child may say "I want to win the Olympics," but this is more to impress or please the adults than really to announce the child's own intentions. When younger athletes talk about such goals, they are sharing fantasies, not announcing plans; and fantasies are more often enjoyed in their unreality than in their fulfillment.
So we should envision not a swimming world, but multiple worlds,… a horizontal rather than vertical differentiation of the sport… The notion of the horizontal differentiation of the sport… may appear to be refuted by the obvious fact that moving “up” to the Olympic level is very difficult, while moving “down” is apparently easy, as if a sort of gravity obtained… Less obvious, though, is that “sliding back down” is empirically difficult indeed. For one thing, techniques once learned and habitualized don’t deteriorate overnight… Then too, there seem to be permanent or at least persistent effects of hard training; attitudes of competitiveness and strategies for racing once learned are rarely forgotten. And finally perhaps significantly—the social pressures are strongly against "going back" to a lower level of competition. Hotshots simply are not welcome in the country club leagues while they are hotshots, and if their skills do begin to deteriorate, embarrassment will more likely lead one simply to quit the sport rather than continue.
The amount of “talent” needed for athletic success seems to be strikingly low.
“I never looked beyond the next year,and I never looked beyond the next level. I never thought about the Olympics when I was ten; at that time I was thinking about the State Championships.When I made cuts for Regionals, I started thinking about Regionals; when I made cuts for National Junior Olympics, I started thinking about National Junior Olympics. I can’t even think about the [1988] Olympics right now. Things can overwhelm you if you think too far ahead.”
Lundquist gained a reputation in swimming for being a ferocious workout swimmer, one who competed all the time, even in the warmup. He became so accustomed to winning that he entered meets knowing that he could beat these people—he had developed the habit, every day, of never losing.
The visiting coaches would be excited at first, just to be here; then soon—within an hour or so usually—they grew bored, walking back and forth looking atthe deck, glancing around at the hills around the town, reading the bulletin boards, glancing down at their watches, wondering, after the long flight out to California, when something dramatic was going to happen. “They all have to come to Mecca, and see what we do,” coach Mark Schubert said. “They think we have some big secret.”