ROME — Her body was quivering and she was sputtering for breath. The swimmer in obvious distress was not a toddler who took a tumble into the water; it was a future world-record holder in the warm-down pool at the 2004 Summer Games in Athens.
The teenager Katie Hoff was having a panic attack and the fully-clothed man who waded in to rescue her was not a lifeguard; it was the United States Olympic coach, Mark Schubert, who soothed her by saying the anxiety that made her palms clammy, her heart race and her mind a tangled web was a well-known opponent on the world scene.
Whatever their skill level, swimmers often harbor deep-seated fears; the novices of drowning and the national champions of suffocating in a deep pool of expectations.
When the FINA world championships get under way Sunday at Foro Italico’s outdoor facility, there will be medal contenders who obsess over who is wearing what high-tech suit, brood about the pizza-oven-like heat that is burning this city’s fairer tourists to a crisp, or become overwhelmed by the television cameras in their faces and the thousands of fans in the stands.
They will worry themselves right off the awards podium.
To inoculate its team members against any strain of performance flu, United States Swimming officials periodically invite them to seminars on using visualization techniques to achieve optimal performances run by people affiliated with the Pacific Institute based in Seattle. One of their speakers last fall was Brian Goodell, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who weathered a panic attack to win the 1,500-meter freestyle at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal.
The aim is to turn the athletes’ minds into bunkers that fortify them against self-doubts. Rare is the swimmer like the 14-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps who in the crucible of competition can reach a deep state of relaxation on the count of two.
More common is the experience of Dara Torres, the ageless American who is a co-captain of the women’s team here. Her first major international competition was the 1984 Olympics, held in her hometown, Los Angeles. Torres, then 17, qualified to swim a leg on the women’s 4x100 freestyle relay.
In the morning preliminaries, she recalled Friday, “I freaked out when I walked out on the pool deck and saw 17,000 people.”
She swam poorly, but redeemed herself at night after one of the team’s veterans, Jill Sterkel, accompanied Torres back to the athletes’ village and painted her fingernails and plopped her in front of a television to watch soap operas to take her mind off her race.
There are 16 national-team rookies on the 45-member United States squad that will compete in the world championships over the next eight days, and the 42-year-old Torres has been casually taking their emotional temperatures. If she senses a rise in the rookies’ stress levels, Torres said, she reminds them the pool here is the same size as the ones they train in at home and the distance of their races has not changed.
Experience has taught Torres that the key to managing prerace anxiety is being able to redirect one’s mind if it starts down a dark path.
For the Italian Federica Pellegrini, the 400 freestyle, one of two events in which she holds the world record, used to be like a walk in a dark alley at night. The distance used to make her panic.
She found it difficult to trust her own pace because the event attracts both sprinters who set a fast early pace and distance specialists who swim the second 200 meters of the race faster than the first.
The 20-year-old Pellegrini became more comfortable with the 400 freestyle, to be contested Sunday, only after employing a sports psychologist to help her work through her anxieties. She said last week that the schedule makers did her a favor by putting her toughest event first.
“Let’s pull the tooth right away,” she said. “Get rid of the pain.”
Swimmers try to offset such anxieties with mental preparation. Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman, says “structured relaxation” has been a part of Phelps’s prerace routine since he was 12 and is instrumental to his success.
Bowman introduced Phelps, who is scheduled to race in three individual events and three relays here, to a progressive relaxation program based on the recitation of cues. Every night before Phelps went to sleep, his mother, Debbie, would sit with him in his dimly lighted bedroom and command him to relax different parts of his body.
After a while, Phelps could relax without his mother’s cues. He became adept at placing himself in that same meditative state in the ready room before a race. Once he has cleared his mind and loosened his limbs, Phelps will swim each race over and over in his mind.
It is not just the perfect race that Phelps pictures. He sees himself overcoming every conceivable obstacle to achieve his goal time so that when he stands on the blocks he feels as if nothing can stand in the way of him succeeding.
“I do go through everything from a best-case scenario to the worst-case scenario just so I’m ready for anything that comes my way,” Phelps said.
So when Phelps’s goggles filled with water during the final of the 200 butterfly at the Beijing Olympics, he did not panic; he counted his strokes so he knew where the walls were and lowered his world record.
“When I step onto the blocks to race, I switch into a different gear,” Phelps said. “It doesn’t matter what kind of training I have or what’s going on in my life, I’m always going to rise to the occasion.”
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