TREADING WATER

U.S. Olympic supremacy was once guaranteed. But as we fixated on Michael Phelps, China showed how close it is to passing us by. Time to rethink the way we nurture our future stars?

by Tom Farrey

The most decorated athlete in the history of the modern Olympics, Michael Phelps is, as the galaxy now knows, a genetic freak with the perfect body for swimming. With his extraordinarily long torso, 6'7" wingspan and extreme flexibility, he's been cast as a one-of-a-kind specimen. But don't try to sell that story line to Genadijus Sokolovas, sports science director for USA Swimming. "I'm sure there are 10 more Phelpses out there," he says. Sokolovas will tell you Phelps' success is as much as anything a result of geographic kismet, growing up as he did in a community that happened to include the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, where children have been made into champions for nearly a quarter century. This year alone, 17 of its swimmers qualified for the U.S. trials.

Sokolovas, a thin, graceful man with an easy smile, is an expert at unearthing raw talent, having been educated in the Soviet sports system. "There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of coaches who have really good athletes but are not identifying them or don't know how to develop them," he said on the eve of the Beijing Games. "These athletes are in North Dakota or Iowa or other states, so we don't know about them." Heck, some of the best swimmers' bodies can be found a mere seven miles to the south of Phelps' suburban club, along I-83 in the grittier neighborhoods that ring the Inner Harbor.

"There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of coaches who have really good athletes but are not identifying them or don't know how to develop them."

That's where Carmelo Anthony grew up. He came of age at the same time Phelps did but in a universe where sports options for kids were drying up by the day. Competitive swimming? In Melo's crime-ridden community he had trouble finding a place to play hoops. In the 1990s, two-thirds of the city's 143 rec centers were closed or taken over by police, including a facility down the street where he and his friends gathered. The outdoor court in Anthony's neighborhood was also closed, a victim of neglect. Midnight basketball disappeared. Drug dealers stepped in to fund AAU trips. Melo himself was headed nowhere until his single mother got him placed at a private school in Towson, Md., the same suburb in which Phelps' single mom was raising her son. (Anthony later finished high school several hours south, in Virginia, at a prep hoops factory.)

Moan, if you like, at the futility of competing with a communist regime that subsidizes thousands of sport-specific schools designed to mint world champions. Rage, if you wish, at the injustice of matching up against pixie gymnasts who say they're 16 but look 13. Rationalize, if you must, the gold-medal count as a dubious measure of supremacy, freighted as it is with fevered nationalism and weighted as it is against team sports. The truth is, the U.S. is no longer the world's sports superpower. There is no reason this country should have relinquished the top spot at the Beijing Olympics—that's been American real estate since 1996—and the fact that it now belongs to China (its athletes won 51 gold and 100 overall medals, the U.S. took 36 and 110) says less about the precision of their sports system than the dysfunction of ours.

The problem is the pipeline. It's not ailing. It's failing.

HERE'S HOW we roll stateside: Most children are funneled into a narrow array of sports. Soccer, baseball, basketball, football, maybe hockey (up north) or tennis (down south). These are great games, for sure, but they all favor hand-eye (or foot-eye) coordination and explosive, fast-twitch muscle action, traits that are not yet the strengths of many kids. And organized sports are now pricey, with cuts to public recreation coinciding with a rise in multiseason grade-school-level travel or select teams that attempt to cull child athletes with the most potential. Pushed aside too often is the late bloomer who won't grow into his body until puberty. And the boy from the lower-income household who can't afford to compete in tournaments two states away. And the girl from the single-parent home whose dad isn't around to ferry her to all those games. And the preteen who isn't ready to commit to one sport. Not to mention the kids who need exercise more than anyone—the clinically obese. All of this is certainly bad for the physical and mental well-being of the nation. But it's also bad for the development of future stars, especially in sports that are off the beaten path. We eliminate talent before it has a chance to reveal itself.

Phelps wouldn't put his face in the water when his mom signed him up at age 5 for classes at North Baltimore Aquatic. But instructors kept working with the awkward kid, and eventually coach Bob Bowman recognized an Olympian in the making. Other U.S. medalists found their ideal (often non-mainstream) sports by chance, just by being in the right place at the right time. Keeth Smart of Brooklyn, for instance, who won silver in the men's team sabre, is the latest alum of New York's Fencers Club to gain Olympic glory after being introduced to the sport through a philanthropic program for underprivileged teens. Perhaps a similar future awaits 12-year-old Labar Mobley of Queens (see page 132), whose wrestling development is being bankrolled by a New York hedge-fund manager hoping to bring the sport back to urban schools. But these laudable efforts are too small and sporadic to stock the national pond with fresh, tailored talent.

The U.S. Olympic Committee bears some blame for the haphazard state of affairs. When President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Amateur Sports Act of 1978, he handed the responsibility for coordinating amateur athletics in this country to the USOC. Indeed, one of the bill's co-authors, Alaska's Ted Stevens, argued on the Senate floor, "This legislation is not a bill merely to assist Olympic and 'elite' athletes. Far from it." The vision was of a body that would push knowledge and resources down the chute, all the way to the youth level.

Instead, the USOC came to focus most of its energy on the elite of the elite, the handful who present themselves, usually at adult age, as potential medalists. National sports festivals that catered to up-and-coming athletes in 38 sports were introduced in 1978; by the 1990s, they'd been discontinued. Funding for community groups withered, and USOC dollars from its robust TV contracts—Congress allocates no direct government funds—went to monetary rewards for athletes who medaled. The USOC left talent development in each sport to national governing bodies and encouraged short-term gains with cash distributions based on total medals acquired in the most recent Olympics. "Like every sports league or authority in the country, the last thing the USOC prioritizes is the grassroots," says Tom McMillen, former NBA center, former Maryland congressman and co-chair of the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports during the Clinton administration. "We really need to rethink this thing."

GROWING THE grassroots is much less of a problem with girls than with boys. Thank Title IX, a happy accident that helped populate the medal-winning U.S. women's teams in soccer, softball, basketball, water polo and volleyball in Beijing. But there's more than enough room for new ideas, and one of the most intriguing is called Talent ID. It's a systematic application of sports science and statistical probability software that identifies promising athletes. Coaches input times and training loads, as well as parental heights and body types, to predict what a kid might look like once he gets through puberty. Sokolovas wants to use it to unearth hidden Phelpses at swim clubs around the country. "The length of your arms, legs, torso—all of this stuff is important for swimming," he says. "By age 13 we should be identifying these athletes." At that point, the federation could help coaches develop training plans for prospects.

But Talent ID's real potential lies in a broader approach that looks for teen athletes who aren't already enrolled in club programs. The practice has been associated with the regimes of the former Eastern Bloc and now China, where parents send kids to sports school after being told they have the raw stuff of champions. But the English also have used it in recent years, putting out calls for tall citizens who can be developed into athletes for certain sports in time for the London 2012 Summer Games.

In a democratic society, there's nothing coercive about the exercise—the options presented are a gift rather than an obligation. In Australia, lifeguards who have never seen a snowflake leap at the chance to train as skeleton racers after being identified as prospects through short-sprint testing. Aussie sports scientists have held mass screenings at schools for potential badminton players: girls with the right combination of agility, endurance and power. And they've gone into underserved Aboriginal communities and found boxers, boys with both toughness and quickness. The best are hooked up with top coaches.

Inspired by the Aussies, a Bay Area start-up called Sports Potential created an even better tool a few years ago.Backed by former NBAer and New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, the company's product matched sports to a person's physical, physiological and psychological traits. I submitted to a series of 30 assessments—everything from balance board to reaction test to wrist size—and the data were fed into a software program; results came out in 15 seconds. Fourth on the list was a sport I wasn't surprised to see: tennis, a game I gravitated to as a kid and still play. The list also included volleyball, golf and baseball (pitcher)—all sports that have been part of my life. But at the top was one I'd never considered: fencing.

Fencing? I clicked on the line chart comparing my traits with those of elite fencers. Mine were in blue, theirs green. My body type was nearly a perfect match, our respective lines moving together across 18 category points like arm-locked tango dancers. My test results matched well too, with the only real differences in hand speed (I'm slower) and abdominal strength (shockingly, I'm stronger). There and then, I resolved to someday channel my inner Zorro.

Sports Potential ceased operations in 2006, when it ran out of venture capital and was unable to get enough private gyms to distribute its product. But gyms were always the wrong venue for it. It needed to be adopted by middle schools and high schools, where a variation of the tool could have been integrated into PE classes to help direct teens with ever-shrinking participation opportunities. Just as colleges subscribe to lists of high schoolers who test well on the PSAT, local sports clubs and school-based coaches could be notified of athletic prospects. In a nation of 300 million, surely champions would emerge in second-tier sports that need richer farm systems. Think Shani Davis, the Chicagoan who got hooked up with a speed skating club through his mother's boss and went on, in 2006, to become the first black athlete to win individual gold in a Winter Olympics.

THREE YEARS ago, I had the chance to speak with Peter Davis, an Australian Institute of Sport alum who was then the USOC's sports science chief. "Come Beijing, we're going to be in big trouble," he told me, shortly before returning home to take a position with Australia's rugby association. "The game's not over yet, but we cannot be competitive if we continue to rely on random kids getting into the right sport. Talent identification can work in this country, if it's targeted and regionalized."

Bob Wade, the coordinating director for athletics for Baltimore city schools, would love to get a call from the USOC asking him to participate in such an initiative. "There's a lot of untapped talent here," Wade says of his 81,000 students, who will endure yet another cut in athletics budgets this year. Wade's limited funds can't support sports such as rowing or boys' volleyball. One local hero has stepped up. Carmelo funds his own rec center in town, giving kids and AAU teams a safe place to play.

On the other side of the world, the Chinese government built 60,000 basketball courts last year alone and plans to lay down another 700,000 over the next decade.

But that's not enough. On the other side of the world, the Chinese government built 60,000 basketball courts last year alone and plans to lay down another 700,000 over the next decade. USA Basketball might not have seen its last Redeem Team. We're going to be hearing a lot more about Chinese hoops in the coming generation.

It's possible to pursue both public health and Olympic medals. The formula isn't rocket science: Infrastructure + mass participation + quality guidance = success. The question is whether this country has the resolve to think progressively, starting with the notion that sports is a human right, something that, like education, every kid should have access to. Every kid wants to be good at something. Every kid can be good at something. Make that one shift in thinking, and so much talent will bubble up from the masses that the world's richest nation will have more gold than it knows what to do with.

Much has been made about how these Olympics changed China. Let's hope they changed us.

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How our youth athletes might be developed elsewhere in the world.

ARIEL LEE 9, Orange, Calif.
Badminton national age-group champion (2007)

If she were in Indonesia … Ariel would have plenty of opportunities to play. There, in the world's fourth-most populous country, badminton is the national sport, and when it became medal eligible in 1992, Indonesia grabbed the first men's and women's singles golds. The game is accessible to the masses—all you need are a couple of rackets, a feathered shuttlecock and a bit of empty ground. A long string or draped fence suffices as a net. In places such as Indonesia, talent bubbles up from local clubs, with top teen prospects sent to a national training center.
Because she's here … Ariel is one of just a few hundred children who play competitively. She belongs to the Orange County Badminton Club, which doubles as the nation's de facto Olympic training center because the USOC provides almost no funds to the federation. Lee's grandfather Don Chew owns the club and is a former USA Badminton chief. He is sure this country could medal in the sport if only more kids joined up, particularly by age 10, when motor skills are being refined. Right now, though, about the only young ones who find the game are the offspring of recent Asian immigrants.

JORDAN McCALL 5, Lewisville, TexAS
Recently completed first season of rec-league soccer

If he were in France … Jordan would still be content to kick a ball around the backyard with his pals. Most French parents don't sign their children up for club soccer until they've started school. Even then, games are local and limited in number until the kids are teenagers. The coaches, even at the lowest levels, have likely received training from the French soccer federation, and the emphasis is on developing technique, the foundation of great players.
Because he's here … Jordan is already in uniform—and a fancy one at that. Unlike elsewhere around the globe, the U.S. game gets very expensive very quickly. By grade school's end, traveling-team expenses have pretty much excluded many kids from poor or single-parent homes. Some coaches are trained, but their focus is on winning games, not teaching kids, especially if they're paid—it's winning that justifies the cost of their salaries. So Jordan might well be assigned a position for tactical purposes and will be less likely to experiment with the ball. Who wants to be responsible for the failure that makes coaches and parents groan?

LABAR MOBLEY 12, Queens, N.Y.
New York City wrestling champ, 87-pound weight class (2007)

If he were in Russia … Mobley might already have been identified as having potential and placed on a long-term developmental track. At his age, emphasis is on body awareness and building general athletic ability. As he ages, the focus shifts to learning sport-specific techniques in the two Olympic disciplines—Greco-Roman and freestyle—both of which emphasize lifting and throwing opponents. The goal is for the athlete to reach peak performance in his early 20s.
Because he's here … Mobley will come up through a system built on "collegiate," or "scholastic," wrestling, a style unique to the U.S. in which body slams are illegal and the focus is on moves low to the mat. He's not likely to face many fellow urbanites in national meets; wrestling in the U.S. is dominated by boys from rural and suburban towns, here the sport is supported at the school level. (Mobley was lured onto the mat last fall by a program called Beat the Streets.) Succeeding at the Olympic level will be hard for Mobley because his training will include little focus on Greco-Roman or freestyle wrestling.

REBECCA SCHREFF 15, Greenwich, Conn.
Right-side hitter for high school volleyball team

If she were in Japan … Rebecca would probably be in her fifth or sixth year of volleyball by now. Japan, with fewer people (and fewer tall people) than the reigning world powers, can't rely on pure athleticism, so its system highlights technique. Preteens, with their smaller hands, play with a smaller ball on a smaller court. By high school, practices can be three-hour drill-a-thons, and programs run year-round.
Because she's here … Rebecca took up the sport in eighth grade, and even that's a year sooner than most American girls join up. Volleyball gets huge participation in high schools, but without a widespread club system for younger girls, the skills necessary to succeed in international competition often aren't developed. So USA Volleyball ends up drawing much of its talent from a few regional hot spots, such as Southern California. Rebecca's dad, David, an incoming USA Volleyball board member, confronts the sport's sparse support regularly. Practice for his daughter's club team—one of just three in Connecticut—is an hour's drive away.

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