Stroke of Genius
As the countdown to Tokyo 2020 enters the home stretch, one American swimming sensation talks training and Olympic expectations.
Michael Andrew crouched on the lane four starting block. To his right stooped fellow American sprinter Caeleb Dressel, three years older and the current national record holder in swimming’s 50-meter freestyle.
Andrew, written off by many as a short-course specialist, had yet to win a major international medal in a 50-meter pool.
The starting buzzer sounded. The swimmers exploded off the blocks and vanished under the water. Dressel surfaced nearly 15 meters up his lane with a noticeable lead.
At his shoulder was Andrew, who was gaining.
“There’s something about a fast pool,” says Andrew of that final heat of the 2018 Pan Pacific Championships in Tokyo. “For every stroke you take, the amount of momentum being generated is more than the amount you put in.”
Seven seconds into the race, Andrew pulled even with Dressel. Ten seconds in, he steamed ahead. For the last few meters, he was swimming at a world-record pace.
Andrew finished in 21.46 seconds, followed by Dressel nearly half a second behind.
“That was the first big international long-course competition that I won,” says Andrew, 20, of his gold-medal race at the Tokyo Tatsumi International Swimming Center, which will be the focus of the swim events at this year’s Tokyo Olympics. “That’s one of my favorite pools in the world. It’s a really special moment to be sure.”
A natural sprinter, Andrew regularly competes in everything fast, including the 50- and 100-meter freestyle, butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke. Occasionally, he’ll combine them all in the 200-meter individual medley.
“It’s really four 50s broken up, so essentially it is a sprint,” Andrew says. “Just a much more painful one.”
To excel in all four strokes takes more than a legendary work ethic. Two meters tall and with a wingspan two centimeters longer, Andrew is built to power through the water.
Even as a teenager, the Kansas native regularly set age-group records in local and regional meets. He is the fastest 16- and 17-year-old in American history to swim the 100-meter breaststroke and the fastest 15-year-old to swim the 50 free. Andrew also holds the record for the quickest in-country 50-meter breaststroke (just a tenth of a second off the overall American record).
“When I dive into the pool and I execute things perfectly,” Andrew says, “I feel such an emotional high. It’s what made me fall in love with swimming.”
As a 14-year-old, Andrew’s personal best in the 50 free put him at 59th among America’s top swimmers. Excitement spread through the fraternity of amateur developmental scouts and college coaches over what Andrew might become one day with the proper training.
Then, one morning in 2013, Andrew accepted a sponsorship with a small nutritional supplement company and announced he was turning pro.
The swimming world was far from thrilled.
“[Michael Phelps] had broken two world records, won a world championship and finaled at the Olympics before he turned pro
#justtobeclear,” tweeted Bob Bowman, the longtime coach of the retired, 23-time gold medalist.
Conventional wisdom lamented that going pro would, at best, rob him of the chance to realize his potential through the tried-and-true route of high school and college development programs.
At worst, many said, it was a cash grab.
“I think the spotlight was because a lot of people didn’t understand why we were doing it,” Andrew says. “It was very easy for people to make assumptions without knowing my family and my dreams and my goals.”
Andrew credits much of his rise to the highest ranks of international swimming to following the ultra-short race-pace training (USRPT) approach under the guidance of Peter Andrew, his father and coach. Rather than swim several thousand meters every day to build endurance, like most swimmers, Andrew treats every training session like sprint races.
“I know in a leadup to a swim meet exactly where I’m at and what to expect when I race,” Andrew says of the benefits of USRPT. “The movements are coded in my brain. Theoretically, when I jump in the pool, it just happens naturally.”
Though USPRT has its proponents, the methodology’s detractors were all too eager to pile on the criticism when Andrew failed to make the team at the 2016 Olympic trials. Part of the near miss was due to his emphasis on short-course races in 25-meter pools (pushing off from a turn invalidates his times, they say), rather than Olympic-regulation, 50-meter events.
“When I have a bad performance and it’s very evident what went wrong, that gets me super motivated, like, I have the opportunity to go home and fix that,” he says. “I find myself wanting to get back into the pool more than anything.”
With eight short-course world championship medals (five of them gold), Andrew is already an elite sprinter in a 25-meter pool. After his victory at the 2018 Pan Pacs and a silver medal in the 400-meter relay at last year’s World Championships, Andrew is looking to challenge the likes of Britain’s Adam Peaty (reigning 100-meter breaststroke Olympic champion), Australia’s Kyle Chalmers (current 100-meter freestyle Olympic champion) and the rest of the world’s top sprinters.
The 2018 duel with Dressel in Tokyo proves his own countrymen need to watch out, too, but as the Olympics approach, Andrew would much rather work together with his teammates to improve upon the nine bronze, eight silver and 16 gold medals netted by American swimmers four years ago in Rio.
“I’m confident in the younger generation [of American swimmers],” Andrew says of America’s potential in Tokyo. “There’s nothing compared to representing the United States at the highest level possible.”
Andrew has no more international meets scheduled before the Olympic trials in June. The plan, he says, is to cut back on travel, maintain a steady training regimen at his home outside San Diego, California and punch his ticket to Tokyo.
Fair or not, Phelps’s legacy is so impressive that any promising young American swimmer will inevitably be measured against the Baltimore Bullet. Andrew is careful to stress that the two are very different swimmers with only a few overlapping events.
But just as Phelps kept defying the odds in the pool, Andrew knows that anything is possible when the buzzer sounds.
“It’s easy for people to accept coming in second to the greatest of all time,” Andrew says. “That’s just the beauty of the sport. Records are made to be broken.”
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Words: Owen Ziegler
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