REPORTING FROM ...
THE U.S. SWIMMING TRIALS IN OMAHA

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As if Michael Phelps really needed help breaking records.

A 20-year-old swimmer named Chris Brady snuck into the Olympic trials with a 51.96 in the 100-meter freestyle. Wednesday morning, in the very first heat of the day, he clocked a 50.01, lowering his all-time mark by nearly two full seconds. A few minutes later, Jason Lezak broke the American record in the same event. In the following heat, Garrett Weber-Gale broke that new record and set his own. Then Michael Phelps dove into the pool and nearly broke Weber-Gale's mark. This all happened not in the finals, but in preliminaries, after six world records fell in only three days of competition. The fifth-fastest 100-meter freestyle Wednesday would have won gold at the World Championships last year.

What in the name of Speed Racer is going on here?

There are two knee-jerk answers: gotta be the suit and gotta be the steroids.

The suit is the Speedo LZR Racer, which pretty much everyone agrees has made racers faster. Rowdy Gaines, a gold medalist in the '84 Games and commentator for NBC, thinks the suit drops a half-second per 50 meters for most swimmers, and up to 0.3 second per 50 for elite racers. In a sport where hundredths of seconds determine legends and losers, that's a lot. "The suits even take away a lot of mental baggage," says Erik Vendt, who took home silver medals in the 400 IM in 2000 and 2004. "People think they are going to go low."

Then there's the elephant in every Olympic room: performance-enhancers. Swimming has largely avoided the raised eyebrows of skeptics since the East German doping scandals of a prior generation, but the same drugs that would help a cyclist in the mountains would also help a swimmer underwater. Anything that assists the delivery of oxygen would help a swimmer fight through the final meters of a race. And with so much new money coming into the sport—many of the swimmers you'll see on NBC this week earn six figures—the incentives for cheating have never been greater.

"I'd be naïve to say I've never raced against someone who uses," says Vendt.

Gary Hall Jr. angered many in the U.S. swimming community when he questioned why Amy Van Dyken's name appeared on a list of athletes asked to testify in a grand jury probe of BALCO, but he's right when he says, "As a nation, we would like to be suspicious of other countries. Let's make sure our own house is clean."

Gotta be the suits, gotta be the steroids? Well, not quite.

This rush of records started not this week, but in Melbourne last year at World Championships, before the LZR came out. Melbourne and Omaha have one thing in common—deep pools. While nearly all Olympic pools are two meters deep, the pool here at Qwest Center is 2.65, and the pool in Melbourne was a whopping 3. (The Beijing pool, like the Athens pool, will be the standard two.) Deeper pools usually mean faster times. The Omaha pool also has other advantages, like a state-of-the-art filtration system that relies on powder instead of sand, thus making it easier to see underwater. And the Qwest Center pool has been calibrated to all but eliminate waves. While a cement pool contains its water and creates ripples, this one does not. "As soon as the water comes out of the pool," says Murtha Pools president Trevor Tiffany, who designed this tank, "it's gone." Also notice something about the crowd: fans are closer and on all four sides, creating a basketball court or boxing ring effect that means more noise and more adrenaline for swimmers. All of it adds up to make this venue perfect for fast swimming. (Only one very slight drawback: the pool is actually 50.012 meters, instead of 50, to make sure swimmers are going the full distance.)

Now as for the people in the pool, most of the record-breakers—Michael Phelps and Natalie Coughlin and Aaron Piersol, to name three—have set standards consistently in the past. Coughlin became the first woman to swim the 100-meter backstroke in less than 59 seconds on Tuesday night, but she was also the first woman to swim the event in less than 60 seconds. We all know what Phelps has done in his career. So this isn't Brady Anderson hitting 50 home runs out of the blue. This is the best swimmers in history getting incrementally better.

And in prior generations, most of those swimmers would be retired by now. Only very recently has swimming become viable as a career. Gaines won gold at the age of 25 in 1984, and was the third-oldest swimmer ever to win an Olympic title at that time. Swimming takes six or seven days a week of practice every week for 11 months, and that doesn't allow time for waiting tables. So if this was 1988 or even 1998, Michael Phelps might be finished by the age of 23. Instead, someone like Piersol can make one Olympics, hone his craft for four years, make another Olympics, work even harder as he hits his prime, and now make a third.

The extra years of training have gone to more than endless laps. The four years since Athens have brought new training techniques, including much more core work and weight training than ever before. "These have been the best practices I've ever seen or heard of," says Texas coach Eddie Reese. Strides are longer in this era, and every coach's call to "Swim Big" has made earlier generations of swimmers look like frantic water bugs. "We understand a lot more now about power in the water," says Peter Vanderkaay, who won a gold medal in '04 as a member of the 800m relay team.

Chris Brady, who obliterated his personal best Tuesday, did not lift a weight until he got to the University of Michigan two years ago. This year he trained at altitude in Colorado Springs with Phelps and Vanderkaay and the rest of Club Wolverine. Throw in advances in nutrition— the PureSport concoction Phelps drinks before every race wasn't even invented until last year—and all the records go from dubious to logical. In fact, there might have been more records in 2004 if the Athens pool was faster and deeper and indoors.

So is it the suit? Probably. Is it the steroids? Still a possibility. But is a world record still worth celebrating? Definitely.

Oh, and one final thought: John Naber won four gold medals in Montreal in 1976 wearing a nylon suit, mutton chops and no cap. No offense to Naber, who is a great ambassador for swimming, but do we really want that world back? Forcing Olympic swimmers to take Mark Spitz's suit out of mothballs would be just as pointless as asking them to take off their goggles, which also lowered times significantly in the 1970s. Sometimes what looks like cheating is better labeled as something else: progress.

Eric Adelson is a senior writer for ESPN The Magazine. E-mail him at eric.adelson@espn3.com.

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