My friend Chris took up Masters swimming at North Sydney Olympic Pool, largely lured in by the romance of the setting—the grand granite pylons of the Harbour Bridge towering directly above lane one. The romance, however, wore off rather quickly once he realised he was definitively the slowest person in the slowest lane.
Chris had stamina to burn. He could churn out laps until the sun went down, but he lacked anything resembling speed. He didn’t harbour dreams of the Olympics, but pride demanded he not remain the permanent caboose of the squad. That was when he set his sights on Silver Cap.
She was a fellow regular who swam a steady, methodical breaststroke a couple of body lengths ahead of him, her metallic latex cap catching the early morning glare. To Chris, she became Everest. Session after session, he gauged the distance between them until, centimeter by painful centimeter, the gap began to close.
Then came the morning of the showdown.
They turned at the twenty-five-metre mark neck and neck. With barely ten metres left to the wall, Chris spotted his personal landmark on the pool floor: a faded, waterlogged Band-Aid stubbornly adhered to the blue tiles. Now or never. He put his head down, kicked into a thrashing sprint, and gave it every ounce of oxygen he had left.
He slammed his hand against the wall. By the grace of slightly longer fingernails, he had pipped her.
Exhilarated, Chris broke the surface, threw an almighty fist into the air, and let out a triumphant roar beneath the bridge.
He then turned to watch his vanquished rival reach the ladder, hoist herself frail-limbed out of the water, and shuffle unsteadily toward her waiting Zimmer frame.
To say the wind left his sails would be a vast understatement.
Still, Chris’s shame was short-lived. A fortnight later, the woman’s older sister joined the squad—and he gladly handed over the mantle of squad anchor.
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