Win All Seven? It’s Always the Question : Biondi Can’t Escape Prediction That He Will Match Spitz’s Achievement

Matt Biondi was sitting beside the University of California’s outdoor pool on a recent cool morning in Berkeley, talking about the joy of swimming with dolphins, when a bee buzzed down and landed on his knee.

Noting the nervous glances the bee was drawing, Biondi announced with a hint of irritation, “He’s not hurting anything. Leave him alone.”

And back he went to marveling at the dolphins and the way he was able to communicate with them and share with them and learn from them.

The bee sat and listened for nearly an hour.

Biondi is at his best when he’s allowed to roam freely on his favorite topics, when he can share the excitement of swimming in the open ocean with dolphins that would return to frolic with him day after day, when he can talk about saving the environment or taking a few days off to drive his truck up into the mountains to sleep under the stars.

But reporters keep interrupting the tranquility of his thoughts, dogging him to talk about what he’s going to do in the 1988 Olympic Games. They ask about the possibility of seven gold medals. They want him to talk about whether he is the swimmer who can match what Mark Spitz did in 1972.

It was the favorite topic even before the Olympic trials, but after Biondi went to Austin, Tex., and qualified to swim the 50-, 100- and 200-meter freestyles, as well as the 100-meter butterfly and all three relays, there was no escaping it.

Now, it truly is possible.

Shaking his head and looking absolutely exasperated, Biondi said again and again that it is “outrageously impossible.”

The only thing bugging him more than the reporters was the news that Rowdy Gaines predicted that he would do it. “Did he actually say that?” Biondi asked, making no attempt to hide his disgust. “Thanks, Rowdy. Thanks a lot.”

Maybe Gaines was just trying to make up for underestimating Biondi four years ago. It was Gaines, remember, who took a look at the finish of the 100-meter freestyle at the Olympic trials in Indianapolis in 1984 and posed the question, “Who is Matt Biondi?”

In his only event of the ’84 Games, Biondi hit the water on the third leg of the 400-meter freestyle relay a little bit behind, was still behind at the turn, but finished so fast that he gave Gaines the lead for the last leg, and Gaines anchored for the gold.

This time around, Gaines didn’t make the team, and Biondi will be swimming in seven events. Gaines was simply making the point that Biondi is the most dominant swimmer in the world today.

But Biondi apparently doesn’t need the pressure of someone predicting seven gold medals for him.

As U.S. Coach Richard Quick keeps explaining: “It’s a different swimming world today than it was 16 years ago. The rest of the world has caught up with us.”

When Spitz went to Munich, he held the world records in his four individual events and he had outstanding swimmers all around him in the relays, swimmers who far outdistanced the competition.

Biondi came to Seoul with the world record in the 100-meter freestyle and the year’s fastest time in the 100-meter butterfly, but he’ll be meeting West German Michael Gross, who is out to defend his gold medal in the 100-meter butterfly as well as in the 200-meter freestyle, an event in which Gross is the world record-holder. And in the 50-meter freestyle, Biondi will be swimming against Tom Jager, the former world record-holder who beat him in the trials.

And the United States does not figure to win the three relays. Gross, still smarting from the way the U.S. team upset the West German 800-meter freestyle relay team in Los Angeles, is ranking that relay as his top priority here.

The likelihood of seven gold medals actually falls somewhere between Gaines’ bold prediction and Biondi’s vehement denial.

It is possible.

Cal Coach Nort Thornton, Biondi’s coach, is neither predicting gold nor denying the possibility. It is with the utmost sincerity that Thornton keeps warning against putting any limits on what Biondi can do. “He’s breaking new ground,” Thornton said. “He’s entering into uncharted waters. No one has been there before, so we can’t say what he’ll do.”

No one else has tried to imitate dolphins before, either.

But watch Biondi swim one of the sprint freestyles. While the swimmers on either side of him are flailing away at the water, he’s stroking slowly, smoothly, almost calmly through the water.

Biondi said he learned from the dolphins to take an entirely different approach to swimming. If he ever teaches swimming, he said, he’ll teach the kids to think like water creatures.

“I think you should start with how the water feels, how it moves over your body, how your body moves through the water, what motions block the water and slow you down. Swimmers have a tendency to fight the water. Swimmers put all their effort into working against the water instead of thinking of how to get in harmony with the water. We should work with the water, instead of against it.

“There’s an optimum level to be reached in harmony with the water.”

Biondi said that when he’s in the pool, just experimenting with what he can do, he likes to push off the side and see how far he can glide, how long he can maintain forward motion while expending as little energy as possible. “I would swim alongside this huge animal that weighed 450 pounds, and I’d be working, working to keep up. He was just gliding, and he was going faster than I was.

“I understand that they were built for hydrodynamic efficiency and we were built for walking around on land, but I think we can study them to see how to make maximum use of motion. I think I’ve just about reached the top of the pyramid, as far as human beings go.”

So he went to the Bahamas in search of something better?

Actually, no. He went to the Bahamas because he was invited there by Albert Stevens, who invented an underwater periscope called a “coachscope” designed for videotaping swimmers. He wanted some special videotape, so he asked Biondi and synchronized swimmer Tracie Ruiz-Conforto to swim with the dolphins.

Biondi thought he’d like it, but he fell in love with it.

“We were about 400 miles north of the Gulf Stream,” Biondi said. “A pod of spotted dolphins came to us. The neat thing about it was that they were not in a pen. They chose to be there and they responded to us much better than they respond to snorkelers.

“The free dolphins don’t like to be touched, but they liked to touch me. I felt real special about that. There was a mother who brought her baby by. We would play little games. I’d do some sort of little trick, and they would imitate it. Then they would do something and I’d try to imitate it. They came back day after day.

“They live so harmoniously and non-violently together. I think we could all learn something from their society.”

Biondi has also gone to the Florida Keys to swim with dolphins, and he plans to do more of that when he finally gets time.

He has already graduated from Cal with a degree that he dreamed up called American Economic History. He pooled courses from the colleges of political science, business, economics and history, studying conservation and natural resources along with political and economic history.

But he has had time to do little besides swim laps as he prepared for the Olympic Games.

Biondi was born to be a swimmer.

At first glance, he looks as if he might be a basketball player. He stands 6 feet 6 inches and has big hands and feet. He tells of the time he passed workers doing repairs on his street and they all started shooting imaginary jump shots, trying to engage him in conversation about Cal basketball. When he told them he was a swimmer, they guffawed and motioned for him to keep moving.

He explains that the last burst of height and all of the 205-pound impressive muscular build he has came late. When he was trying to be a high school basketball player, he was 6-1, 130 pounds. Not at all intimidating.

The big feet made him awkward--he “whacked his shin” on a table the other day, just walking around in his house--but they also make great flippers. Since high school, his sports have been swimming and water polo. He was an All-American water polo player at Cal, as well as an All-American swimmer. In the four years that he played on Cal’s water polo team, the Golden Bears won three national titles.

He is seriously considering trying out for the U.S. water polo team after these Games, so that he might play on the U.S. Olympic team in 1992. He knows, for sure, that he will not continue competitive swimming.

First, though, he has to deal with the ’88 Games, where he will race Gross in a couple of the best matchups in the water.

Although the prospect of seven medals has people wanting to compare Biondi to Spitz, the better comparison is to Gross. Indiana Coach Doc Counsilman, who coached Spitz in college, calls Biondi “the most sensational swimmer since Mark Spitz” adding, “He is much faster than Mark.” Counsilman told Ultrasport magazine, “If you think of the two greatest swimmers in the world, it would be him and the German boy, Michael Gross.”

Gross is 6-7 and has been dubbed the Albatross in Europe because of his 7-foot wingspan that is demonstrated so dramatically when he swims the butterfly. Biondi, too, has a 7-foot wingspan.

“I think we share some of the same attributes that make us good swimmers,” Biondi said. “The large wingspan, the slender, lanky bodies. We have similar strokes in that we both pull a lot of water. The key is efficiency. We both swim at an optimum level. Not 100%, but right below that.”

There is one way they differ, though. Gross showed up on Biondi’s doorstep a couple of years ago, unannounced. Biondi said he never would have shown up on Gross’ doorstep.

“I came walking home from class one day and said, ‘Who’s that tall guy at my house?’ He was just there. He said that he was passing through and thought he’d stop. He needed a place to stay for the night,” Biondi said.

“We went out to dinner and we had a great visit. It’s nice to reflect with someone like that, someone who has had so many of the same experiences.

“I never would have done that. I mean, I’m glad he did. I really enjoyed it. I just never would have thought to just go to his house like that. . . . I’m not very social. I think it is a tribute to him as a person, not as an Olympic swimmer and a champion, but as a human being that he felt he could come, as friends.

“It gets back to what I was saying about my role on the (Olympic) team. I’m not the kind of guy who takes a leadership role by going around and talking to everyone. I’m not like that. I just sort of let things happen.”

Biondi doesn’t expect to be quite as wide-eyed at these Games as he was in ’84. For one thing, he’s 22, almost 23, instead of 18. And some of the mystique is gone.

“For me, the Olympics of ’84 were like Disneyland when I was a young kid,” he said. “Everything was so magnificent and exciting. It was like when I was 5 years old, trying to look in four directions at once.

“When I was swimming, it was all low-key, but when we were done, I was going to the other events, playing all the video games. You could catch a bus and go anywhere and see any event. I thought it was great.

“This time, I don’t know. When it’s all over, I’ll probably heave a big sigh of relief and go home and go to bed.”

With or without seven gold medals?

Biondi said: “My high school coach (Stu Kahn) told me, ‘Hey Matt, how about an Olympic gold medal?’ I feel tremendously relieved now that I’ve qualified and the seven events are all set up, but I get the feeling things are about to heat up again.”

Biondi continues to insist that he is not counting on seven gold medals. He doesn’t want to get obsessive or greedy. He wants to please himself with his lifetime best times, and then he can let the rest of it take care of itself.

As he was saying that day in Berkeley, “Did you ever hear the story of King Midas?”

The bee stayed to hear the whole story, including the moral.