SWIMMING: Julian Drew
WITH a series of brilliant performances this year 20-year-old swimmer Penny Heyns from Durban has swum herself into contention as one of the favourites to win gold at next year’s Olympic Games in Atlanta.
As early as April at the national championships in Durban she showed her intentions for the year with a brilliant swim in her best discipline. She recorded a superb time of 1:08.48 in winning the 100m breaststroke which had only ever been bettered by Australians Rebecca Brown and world record- holder Samantha Riley, whose mark stands at 1:07.69.
That swim and her performance in the 200m breaststroke saw her selected for the six-member team to the Pan Pacific Championships in Atlanta in August which served as a dress rehearsal for the Olympic Games. There she came second to Riley in the 200m breaststroke but won the 100m event. Unfortunately Riley was disqualified in the heats of the 100m race for an illegal kick at the turn and Heyns could not test herself against the world record-holder.
She did, however, have a faster time in the heats than Riley and is confident that she would have won. She saved her best form for later that month when she swam in the World Student Games in Fukuoka. In Japan she lowered her African record for the 200m breaststroke to 2:26.98, just over two seconds outside Rebecca Brown’s world record of 2:24.76, and then went within 0.15 seconds of Riley’s 100m record.
She achieved both those times in the morning qualifying heats but couldn’t improve on them in the evening finals where she won gold.
With last month’s All Africa Games a mere formality, she slackened off on her training in order to get a few weeks rest before starting her intensive build-up for Atlanta, but she still won both events in very respectable times.
“I think I needed to do that because I can’t be expected to go into a season which will stretch beyond the Olympics and still perform well there if I don’t have some kind of a break. My coach and I decided that the most important thing for the country was just to win a gold medal so I didn’t have to be in peak shape,” says Heyns.
It is this form which has made her many people’s choice as the gold medal favourite for the 100m breaststroke in Atlanta, but she doesn’t see it as quite so cut and dried. “I don’t really see myself as the favourite because I’m aware of the fact that Samantha can still improve. I’m sure she can go under the world record again and I know I definitely can because I’ve only really had seven hard weeks of training this summer (United States summer).
“So I know there’s a lot of room for improvement for me and I don’t doubt for a moment that there’s a lot of room for her to improve. I don’t think that she can improve as much as I can though. I hope that before the Olympics I will have the world record,” says Heyns.
Although Heyns rightly considers herself and Riley as the main contenders for the 100m breaststroke crown, there are others who could possibly feature. The Chinese have not shown their faces in the pool much this year after their humiliating exposure at last year’s Asian Games as drug freaks, but they could be quietly plotting something for Atlanta.
The 200m world record-holder Brown has also got the credentials to do well over 100m, but she has been out of the picture for some time now. America’s Amanda Beard has swum 1:09 for 100m and 2:28 for 200m and could also pose a threat.
Heyns, who is on a swimming scholarship at the University of Nebraska, believes it is her three- year stint in America that has made the difference to her swimming career. She went to Nebraska in January 1993 and teamed up with former Swedish Olympic swimmer Jan Bidrman, who was just starting to coach.
“It was sort of an experiment for the two of us because he had never coached before and I was the first swimmer to join him. But now there are others and he seems to be successful. We’re not just swimmer and coach though. We’re friends too so that helps a lot,” says Heyns.
She says it’s not just the coaching, facilities and competition that have helped her to improve, however, but the mental attitude she has developed in America. “When I went to the NCAAs (National Collegiate Athletic Association — the American Universities sports body) for the first time it was the same big deal to me as the Barcelona Olympics. Then I slowly started to handle the pressure and now there isn’t a meet in the world that I could go to and be totally thrown off balance.
“The Americans don’t seem to limit themselves in that they always expect the impossible and I think that has really changed my mental approach,” claims Heyns.
Although she is studying psychology, she has not applied any sports psychology techniques to her swimming and says she is continually psyching herself up. “I find swimming just dominates a lot of my thinking every day. It totally dominates my life right now and that obviously helps.
“I think a lot about my swimming and what I’m doing both when I’m in the water and when I’m out of the pool which even a lot of the swimmers in the States don’t do. It’s like a continual process of self- analysis,” Heyns reveals.
In her build-up to Atlanta she has only two major competitions: the NCAA championships and the South African championships next April. “If the nationals are in Durban then I’m going to go for the world record. If my training and everything goes to plan and I shave and taper my training I believe I can definitely break the record,” declares Heyns.
Shaving her body smooth can give her an extra second over 100m but she says if the nationals are not held in Durban she won’t even bother shaving because there is no other pool in South Africa which is fast enough for a world record attempt.
The South African sporting public will certainly be hoping that the powers that be award the championships to Durban for Heyns would become South Africa’s first swimmer to break a world record since the end of the sports boycott if she achieves her goal.
That would set her up nicely for a shot at Olympic immortality.