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Davies: Man For All Seasons And Waters
Nov 28, 2008 - Craig Lord
The only man to ever win Olympic medals in pool and lake - 2004 1,500m bronze and 2008 10km bronze - is set to take on the aquatic scrum as part of his London 2012 campaign and has set a deadline of 2010 to decide whether to keep the 30-lap challenge in his sights
A version of the following article appears in The Times, London, today
David Davies will watch his beloved Wales rugby union team tomorrow with a keener eye than usual. While his heart will be with the battle to put one over on Australia at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, his home town, his mind will be on his own conversion from fly half to prop forward of the aquatic scrum as he attempts to turn the silver he won at the Beijing Olympics last summer into gold at the London Games in the ten-kilometre marathon swim.
“I’ve got to learn to swim in the pack, learn to cope with the physicality of it all. They were swimming all over me. There was a point in the race when a commentator said ‘Davies is like a piece of ham’. It was like I was being fed to the dogs. They were all out to get me and I was really tired. I was really proud to just to have given it my all,” says the 24-year-old with a steely glance back to a two-hour race in Beijing seen no longer through the eyes of a spent man whose desperate disorientation in the home sprint cost him gold by just 1.5sec, the equivalent of the smallest possible margin of victory in a 100m pool race.
“I’ve watched the video – yes, its painful, but I’d say to anyone who said ‘what’s he doing’, ‘you try and swim in a straight line when you’re knackered’.” He had employed just one tactic all three of the 10km races he has ever swum: race fast from start to stretcher to avoid a mauling by the men of might and a mind for open water racing. It almost worked for the novice, but for missing a line in the closing 100m that allowed Maarten van Wiejden, the Dutchman who survived cancer, to slip through for gold.
“You’re going to learn things like that – and a lot more,” said coach Kevin Renshaw, handing a four-year plan across Davies’s kitchen table at his home near Loughborough University. The tear in the swimmer’s eye can be put down to the onions he has just chopped for a homemade lasagne rather than the pospect of pain lying in wait for him.
Between January and September, Davies will be transformed into “an all-round athlete” through the first land-based programme of his life and face the marathon mangle in up to six 10km races. “They will be about learning to be independent. I have to know how to sit in pack the whole way, and wait, wait, wait and sprint at the end; how to work my way through a pack; learn to stop for food gels.” The race in Beijing was the first time that Davies had managed to squeeze a toothpaste-like tube of gunge into his mouth during a race.
MARATHON MISSION
Where Davies will race the 10km in 2009
Of all the six tests, the most poignant will unfold on August 15, when the London 2012 course will be put to a first test in the Serpentine. Renshaw has already sent his apologies. He will be saying “I do” alongside fiancée Katherine Gardener that day. "Great timing - but he's forgiven," says Davies. Renshaw had taken a deep breath when he popped a different question to the swimmer in September after Davies had returned from snorkeling in the Red Sea off the Egyptian Coast and in the midst of a feast of black-tie dinners (10kg worth according to Renshaw; 6kg according to Davies). The commitment he was asking for was sizeable. Davies, over the post-Beijing, anti-climax blues that struck him while drifting on a raft at sea with a beer off the Egyptian coast, did not hesitate. He looked down at the one sheet of paper on which Renshaw had sketched the future and said: “It all made perfect sense to me.”
The year ahead will be about learning to race marathons while doing the speed work in the pool needed to put Davies back in medal contention in the 1,500m after he finished sixth in Beijing. After that final, Davies “sobbed” but resolved to “take on a massive challenge that will keep me hungry” by keeping the pool race in his programme until at least 2010.
"The first thing that was said when I climbed out of the pool [in Beijing] was 'are you going to stop doing that now?'. But I said 'no' ... the thing is, it's a massive challenge now and that keeps you hungry. I was pleased with how i swam the Beijing heat but i still made a lot of errors."
One error that needs putting right is front-end speed. The 1,500m leaders swam through the first eight laps in a time that is not far shy of Davies flat-out 400m best. To be up with them early on, he always has to race close to best 400m speed. After this winter, expect to see Davies cover a 400m in swifter time at some stage in the not too distant future. That speed will be aimed purely at the 1,500m and a 2010 decision.
“We want to test David at the Commonwealth Games, see if he can defend his 1,500m title and then make a brutal and frank assessment,” says Renshaw.
Davies intervenes: “2010 could be my last 1,500m race: If I don't swim under 14mins 40, if I don’t beat Ryan Cochrane [Canadian who won bronze in Beijing], if I don’t see myself being in with a shout of the medals come 2012, I will probably knock it on the head.” Between 2003 and 2007, Davies made the podium in every 1,500m race he swam. “It will be hard to let it go. But I want to target gold in London.”
About to embark on a course in criminology and social policy at Loughborough University, Davies believes he has the right mind for the marathon. “When someone touches you on the feet in training and you’re under pressure, its most annoying thing of all. Imagine that feeling 50 times over and you can imagine what it’s like to get knocked, punched and kicked for two hours. You have to have the temperament to say ‘ok, if you want to swim over me, I’ll drop back, chill out for a moment and then I'll come and swim over you.”
HOW TO SURVIVE THE SWIMMING SCRUM
(not too be taken too seriously, of course, and certainly against the rules!)
Whatever pans out, Davies will spend 2011 racing almost all world and European marathon cup circuits over 10km. Alongside him every stroke of the way between now and a home Games in London will be Daniel Fogg, 21, a man described by Renshaw as “the best athlete in the entire Loughborough programme”.
Some statement: beyond Davies, there's Liam Tancock, world short-course champion, Jo Jackson, Olympic bronze medallist in Beijing, Caitlin McClatchey and Ross Davenport, Commonwealth champions, and Davies’s neighbour, Lizzie Simmonds, the Olympic finalist and world short-course silver medal winner whose fairy cakes sit in front of us on the kitchen table. As I wander out to the car to get a jumper because Davies's boiler has blown at the house in which he has made a wise investment, it becomes clear that Loughborough's squads live in something of a swimming soap opera. The camaraderie and support of group are tangible. Out of the dark comes a "hello there". It's the voice of Tancock, whose girlfriend McClatchey lives just round the corner. Simmonds sprints out of the front door of the neighbouring house to deliver the result of her baking to Davies. These swimmers work hard. They have lots of fun too.
Fogg is one of those on the move but alreday a model of sorts for the experienced Loughborough group about him. "Both me and Ben [Tittley, head coach], are trying in Loughboriugh to make swimmers much more athletic. Most British swimmers are good swimmers but not necessarily good athletes. The Aussies tend to be good athletes ... all-round. We're working on developing that in our kids. David too.
Fogg is expected to join the sub-15-minute club over 1,500m over the course of the next season and will add the marathon to his menu in 2009. The best athlete?” Davies flinches slightly, before saying: "Yeah, he is good. He gets a skipping rope and can do all the fancy stuff. He's good on the bike. He can run. He looks the part - and he's good to be up against because he can beat me in a training set. He has done before. His mindset is right. We get on well together. He's got massive potential.” The competitor rears his head: “There's nothing better than giving someone a good whipping in training. So if I can do the same to him, it works just as well for me.”
Davies can also count on help with his speed work, designed to make the first 400m of his 1,500m much faster: Renshaw’s squad includes Dean Millwain, 200m and 400m specialist, Robert Bale, European junior champion over 200m, and Daniel Coombes.
“It was one of reasons why I went to Loughborough,” says Davies, who was coached to bronze in 2004 by Dave Haller in Cardiff. “Just to be around other swimmers who aspire to the same things as me.”
“He's going to be doing things that he's never done before. We tried some of that when we were working for Beijing but he recoiled a bit from it and we thought it was best not to mess too much with things so close to the Games. We just didn’t have time and there was a risk that it might have blown him of course. Now, we’ve got time. We can take it step by step. The potential is enormous. It makes our jobs very exciting,” said Renshaw.
For starters, no weights, while circuit training is not confined to the gym. “I jump out of the water for sit-ups and press-ups and stuff.” He hesitates before adding through a sheepish grin: “I'm not very good at it ... it's all very new". Incredible that a man who has stood on the Olympic podium twice has never worked in the gym.
“I think my body was so tuned to what it's been doing that it was impossible to get excited by anything ... we've almost ripped up the entire programme and started again. It's a new challenge and because I'm weak in some areas I've still got scope for massive improvement.”
It was Renshaw who persuaded Davies to take on the 10km challenge before Beijing. The risk was high, and when Davies finished 6th in the 1,500m final in Beijing, it may have seemed to many that all was lost. Any falling shy of self-imposed expectation is heart-breaking for any athlete who works so hard for so long. The spirit of the world-class athlete will out, though, and Davies and Renshaw removed themselves from the pool squad and village, took their belongings, their hearts, minds and ambitions down to the lake, fitted in well with the successful British oarsmen down at Shunyi and looked at life afresh. Not easy to do. But essential.
"I knew that I had to put it behind me. I had to do anything I could to get back up. I had ice baths, did some easy swimming, enjoyed the company of the canoeists and the rowers," says Davies. On the second day, he started to feel better. On day three he felt good in the water. By the time he lined up for the 10km, he felt determined and confident. It showed, and but for that lack-of-experience home-swim mistake in his third 10km race ever he would surely now have have a gold medal round his neck.
No matter. Silver medals make swimmers hungry. "Perhaps it was meant to be," says Davies. "I'm not sure thyat I would want to go as far as 2012 if I'd won that day. Now, I have no doubt that I do and the thought will drive me on over the next four years." The 2010 decision on the 1,500m will decide whether Davies takes on a twin challenge in 2012. There is no doubt about him taking on a single challenge and his choice is the marathon.
This time last year, Davies refused to see himself as an open-water swimmer. Renshaw, through a debate with good friend and Britain open-water head coach Sean Kelly change the course of Davies career, while Beijing has swung the pendulum. “I’m really lucky that I came to be involved in it. The marathon’s given me a new lease of life in the sport. It's fresh, it’s challenging and the sport is going to grow enormously. It’s great to be a part of.”
Whatever pans out, Davies and the current generation of open water swimmers will forever be able to look back on their careers and know that they were part of a movement that was destined to grow into a sport that not only deserved its place in Olympic waters but one that caught the public imagination and media’s attention because of the courage and athleticism that poured out of them at Lake Shunyi in Beijing. Where other debut Olympic sports have sometimes faultered at the first step, the efforts of the 2008 class of marathon swimmers prompted a clear cry of “encore”. Davies aims to deliver that in The Serpentine – but his sights are set on going one place better.
FUNFARE FROM THE SWIMMING SCRUM
