world
Julian Drew Swimming
It was somehow appropriate that Penny Heyns should achieve what was arguably her finest hour at the Janet Evans Invitational Meeting at the University of Southern California last weekend. Evans herself was a four-time Olympic champion and multiple world record holder who knew what it was like to come back from disappointment and reach the summit once again.
For Heyns, her performances last weekend – four world records in as many races – announced, in the most emphatic manner possible, that she too was back from the brink.
Following her stunning form of 1996 which brought two world records, an Olympic record and two Olympic gold medals, Heyns struggled in 1997 and 1998. Back then the halcyon days of Atlanta seemed but a distant dream and she began to despair that she would never again be a major force in world swimming.
“There were times when I really thought I would never swim like that again. Not because I thought I didn’t have the talent but because I thought I’d screwed up in the season after the Olympics and lost a lot of valuable time. I thought I’d paid the price for that and I didn’t know if I could get it back again,” Heyns told the Mail & Guardian from California this week.
Several factors contributed to her decline, including the endless round of functions and sponsor commitments and the fact that, for the first time since she moved to the United States in 1993, she didn’t have the collegiate swimming season to get into shape and focus her swimming.
More importantly though, was the departure of her long-time coach Jan Bidrman, the former Czech swimmer who had honed her talents at the University of Nebraska.
Bidrman moved to the Canadian National Sports Centre in Calgary at the beginning of 1997 to coach the Canadian national squad, while Heyns remained behind in Lincoln. Heyns worked with a new coach, Paul Nelson, and tailored her training to what she believed worked best for her. She also put emphasis on the 100m breaststroke event rather than the 200m. She failed to defend either her Pan Pacific or World Student Games titles, and at the World Championships in Perth in January 1998 she was a sorry fifth in the 100m and sixth in the 200m.
It was after this setback she decided to return to Bidrman, and last April she moved to Calgary. “I think with everything that happened after the Olympics, the things I was trying on my own, I kind of got messed up. But since I’ve been back with Jan everything has been corrected. Jan knows me very well. He grew as a coach while I grew as a swimmer and we learnt together. It was very hard for Paul to coach me after Jan and myself had had such a great swimmer-coach relationship. I always knew that he really understood exactly what I needed to do. He has a great sense of that.”
But while the synergy between Heyns and Bidrman has certainly worked its magic once more, she is quick to point out that her circumstances in Calgary have also contributed to her return to form. “I have a great support network here. Lincoln was basically a collegiate swimming system, whereas Calgary is a centre for national athletes and that makes a big difference. I have a specialist coach looking after my weight training and somebody advising me on my nutrition. That kind of support all helps.”
The first indication that Heyns had turned the corner came when she won both her events at the Goodwill Games in New York last July and also broke the world record in the non-Olympic distance of 50m breaststroke with a time of 30.95 at the halfway stage of her 100m final.
She was unable to carry that form into September’s Commonwealth Games though as she had missed the national championships in March and was therefore not selected. Despite these improvements, not even Heyns was prepared for what happened last weekend.
“I had really been battling with my mind for the last season and a half, to really believe I could go under 1:07. I knew when I did it [her 1:07.02 at the Olympics] that I could go under it but the last few years I wasn’t sure anymore. Then in May I decided to stop wondering and just train really hard in every single workout and not worry about anything else. Going into this meet my focus wasn’t on time or anything like that. It was just to swim good races, use good technique and strategy and swim for the glory of God. I just told myself to swim every stroke to the best of my ability. It was as though I was swimming the race from inside myself, from the heart, rather than with my head.”
The most satisfying aspect of her swimming last weekend was not the records, however, but the fact that she had managed to improve her performances in the finals after swimming well in the heats. In the past Heyns had broken her records in the heats but has never been able to translate that form to the final. “I think that was the biggest breakthrough for me. It’s probably more important to me than the records themselves and I think it all goes back to that focus of not worrying about time.”
Astonishingly, Heyns’s performances came when she had not shaved or tapered as she would for a major meeting like the Olympics. Just the week before she had been pushing the heaviest weights she has ever lifted in the gym. That’s like setting a lap record at Kyalami with a racing car that’s out of tune and towing a trailer.
So how fast can she go when she does shave and taper for the Pan Pacific championships in Sydney next month? “I have no idea,” she says with a nervous laugh. “I really don’t want to think about it. It’s kind of scary. Part of me wants to think, `Is it possible to swim faster?’ and I know it’s stupid to even think that so I’d rather not even go there. If I continue training with the same attitude and with the same perspective then there’s no reason why I shouldn’t continue getting better.”
ENDS