The Professor with golden touch plots more swim success

West Australian

a day ago

Fittingly for a maths and physics nerd nicknamed The Professor, Cam McEvoy uses a bell curve to describe his swimming success.
The Olympic 50m freestyle champion's latest data point on his curve was entered at Australia's selection trials for the looming world titles.
McEvoy clocked 21.30 seconds, the quickest time in the world this year, to win in Adelaide on Wednesday night.
The 31-year-old's feat extends his unheralded two-year span of swims in the low to mid-21 second range.
"The best way I can put it is, because my training is so hyper-specific, when it comes time to racing, if I were to put everything out on a bell curve, all I have to do is my average to probably get something like that," McEvoy said.
"I don't have to go into a race and hope I'm on that 99th percentile of my best ever.
"And that's a huge amount of confidence that just allows you to relax before the race and trust the process."
McEvoy has a bachelor of science degree, majoring in physics and mathematics.
He aspired to be an astronaut and has worked as a fellow at the Centre for Quantum Dynamics at Queensland's Griffith University.
And he relishes the technical intricacies of swimming and his event.
"Usually I can finish a rep in training and call it down to the microsecond, within 0.02," McEvoy said.
"I know where I'm at each point of the race as well.
"You look at the Olympic gymnasts, they do the most crazy stuff and they can do it down to the millimetre - and they can do it day in, day out.
"It's a level of skill we're hoping to develop here in the water.
"And then what comes with that, there's so many angles you can approach and attack the problem and find 0.03 (reduction) here, 0.08 there.
"Then you have just got to hope that on the day, all of it aligns."
All has aligned for McEvoy since he almost quit swimming after the Tokyo Olympics of 2021.
After an extended hiatus, he returned to the pool and vowed to do things his way.
Instead of traditional training, he embarked on funky pursuits including rock climbing and calisthenics.
And all his time in the water focused on the minutiae of his event in a revolutionary approach that delivered gold in the French capital at McEvoy's fourth Olympics.
"It definitely took a chip off my shoulder that I had for a while," he said of his Olympic triumph.
"But the manner in which I did it gives me a lot of pride; thinking about where I was, especially in 2022, but the years before that as well.
"To go from there, create something and then execute it - that process is more special than the bit of metal at the end.
"Getting that out of the way, to then move on to getting married, having my first born on the way - that's even more special.
"Digesting the marriage, digesting starting a family, that puts the whole swimming gig into comparison; it humbles the whole job here and makes me realise there's so much more to the world."