SIMON BURNETT strides over to offer the firm handshake you would expect from a man about to trade strokes with the Thorpedo in Australian waters at the Commonwealth Games next month. Honed, toned, tall and tanned, Burnett’s greeting is all white-toothed smile, piercing emerald eyes and mild West-Coast drawl. He might have just risen from the Californian surf.
Looks can deceive. There is no ocean for hundreds of miles and Burnett is British. Oxfordshire born and bred, his home for the past two years has been here at the Hillenbrand Aquatic Center, an oasis of excellence at the heart the Arizona desert. A member of the Wildcats swim squad and business economics student at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Burnett will race Ian Thorpe over 100 and 200 metres freestyle.
David and Goliath, Jonah and the Whale, Simon (81kg) and the Thorpedo (102kg). That it is possible to refer to a British swimmer in the same breath as the great Australian is extraordinary enough. That there is a chance that one might keep up with the Olympic champion and world record-holder over 200 metres surely plunges us into the realms of fantasy. The task is Herculean — but thinkable.
As Frank Busch, head coach of the Wildcats, put it: “He has a gift, an awesome feel for water. He’s working his way up to becoming a world force. I don’t believe we’ve seen Simon’s best swims yet. He’s had a great winter of training and if he doesn’t swim well I should be fired.”
After finishing seventh in the Thorpe v Van den Hoogenband v Phelps Olympic showdown over four lengths in Athens, Burnett broke the US Open 200 yard short-course record that had stood for 17 years to the great Matt Biondi, winner of five Olympic gold medals in 1988 but then fell off the international radar courtesy of a thyroid complaint that deprived him of selection in the spring for the World Championships in Montreal in July.
In August he responded with three British records in Sheffield to make the England team for the Games. If his 50 metres sprint demoted Mark Foster to Britain No 2 for the first time in 15 years, his 200 metres effort would have won the bronze medal in Montreal, while his 100 metres time was only 0.02sec shy of that in which Alexander Popov, the Russian sprint legend, won the 1996 Olympic title. This is the real deal.
Supple, long and lithe, Burnett, 22, might have made Michaelangelo marvel. “I’ve bulked up,” he said, laughing. “I’m 3kg [7lb] heavier than I was last summer but I’m actually leaner. I’m a different swimmer, I’ve got a lot more strength and look physically bigger.”
“I guess you Brits are looking at him as the poster child for swimming,” Whitney Myers, his girlfriend and the Olympic relay gold medal-winner for the US in Athens, said.
Burnett, fresh from posing all-but naked for a fashion magazine on a lake near Phoenix, is not uncomfortable with the thought. “My mission is to bring swimming into the spotlight in Britain,” he said. “I want to deliver on promises, not be someone who goes in highly ranked and falls short.”
Falling short comes easy when Thorpe is in the water. He has yet to fire on all cylinders since making a competitive comeback in November. Expect him to in Melbourne.
“He’s a phenomenal athlete, a very clever guy,” Burnett said. “If we went in with a level playing field you’d be worrying about it — not that I won’t be going in there thinking it possible to win — but Thorpe is 2.5 seconds ahead [over 200 metres] on paper.”
There are others that Burnett must watch for but he believes that “Thorpe is the only one who can lose the race. I have nothing to lose.
“Melbourne will be the first meet at which I’m conscious people are watching me. I’m big on one thing: I don’t want to go down as someone who chokes. I want to stand up and perform.”
Busch believes he can. “If you enjoy eyeball to eyeball then you’re going to thrive,” he said. “Simon is not afraid of racing Thorpe. He’s looking forward to the race. We try to take the watch out of the equation here.”
Here is an amazing place, an environment in which you would imagine it easier to succeed than to fail, particularly for a self-sufficient man such as Burnett, whose parents, Melanie and Ray, split when he was 10. “He was always able to look after himself. By 14 he was cooking his own meals. He’s got a great outlook on life,” Bob Pay, the coach at Wycombe who instilled an obsession with technique in a talent he spotted when Burnett was 9, said.
Pay pointed him in the direction of Tucson, where the conditions — it is forever summer and training is always outdoors — and facilities are enviable. Burnett is the first Briton to be listed on the giant achievers’ billboards at Hillenbrand that boast more Olympic medal-winners than Britain has won over the past 40 years. Some are present training partners, such as Roland “The Blade” Schoeman, Ryk Neethling and Burnett’s room-mate, Lyndon Ferns, all members of South Africa’s Olympic gold medal-winning 4 x 100 metres freestyle relay team.
Burnett surveys his workplace with pride. “They have the budget to do all this here. I get $23,000 [about £13,000] of support a year for this privilege. I get free equipment, free travel, full medical insurance cover. School fees paid . That’s what Britain is competing against.”
“It’s about getting the job done to the best of your ability here and that’s what Melbourne will be about,” Burnett said. “Two years out from Beijing it’s time to figure out what works and what doesn’t for when it really counts.”
The Australian dress rehearsal will be no less thrilling for that.
THE WINNING FORMULA
WHAT BURNETT'S COACHES SAY
Rick Demont, sprint coach: On his gift: “All angles are aligned. He’s very impressive. He has a truly superior kick and pays tonnes of attention to technique. His talent is stand-out. He’s a technical marvel. When you combine that with world-class protoplasm you’ve got a winning formula.”
Bob Pay, boyhood coach at High Wycombe: On his beginnings: “I spotted him at 9. He was a waif of a thing but he liked to mimic our better swimmers even then and he was very coachable: if I said move your little finger a millimetre to the left, he did it.
Frank Busch, Burnett’s main coach and head coach to the Wildcats: On his skills: “He’s in tune with what he’s doing. His technique is awesome. He’s got a great dolphin kick. He leaves the wall with great power and speed.
On his strength: “He’s getting stronger now. Combine that with skill and you have something pretty amazing.”
On girlfriends: “I’m brutal. I go around saying ‘hey, is this really the person you want to spend the rest of your life with? Is this really the one?’”
THE NEED FOR EASY SPEED
To get to Thorpe’s level requires mastery of “easy-speed”, the ability “to get out hard but not too fast”, Busch explains. The challenge is as much mental as physical. Long-gone are the days when 200 metres was an endurance race. Burnett says: “It’s a full-out sprint. Iif you want to live with the best you have to be able to get out in 50sec.”
In Athens, Burnett was 2.08sec down on Thorpe at halfway. The race was over. Burnett’s British record splits last August would have left him a fraction up on Thorpe after the first length, a shade behind him at halfway. The bulk of the loss comes on the third of the four laps. “I’ve learnt about easy speed since,” Burnett said. “Having your body swim that fast and then swim further, using power without killing yourself, keeping oxygenated.”
