Suddenly, the new best is out in front of her. Way out in front. And Rice sounds like she’s still trying to figure out who she is.
“I just wanted to get in there in the semis tonight,” Rice said after a slow morning heat. “I knew I was in there against Ye Shiwen. Or however you pronounce her name.”
Ye sports a pair of linebacker shoulders on a tiny 16-year-old frame. After the heats she tootsy-footied through the media throng carrying a small pair of UGGs boots. She was wide-eyed at all the attention.
Ye came into these games a glittering but still unpolished jewel — a powerful freestyler still trying to master the more complicated strokes in the individual medley.
Suddenly, she is the breakout star of these games. Given her low profile outside the sport and the chequered history of China’s swimmers, that’s got people talking. They’re not accusing yet, but they are inserting an audible, arched eyebrow into all comments.
Ye made headlines Saturday when she completed the final 50 metres of the 400 IM — her weaker event — in a blistering 28.93.
“Out of control,” Rice said of the feat, and then lowered to a comic tone. “I didn’t see it. I was way behind.”
Ryan Lochte, the gold medallist from the U.S. team, completed that same distance in that same discipline in 29.1 seconds. This may now be the only power event in world sport in which a woman is the best, period. A girl, really.
Asked if Lochte was taking any stick for his swim, teammate Michael Phelps said: “She outswam me, too. We were all pretty shocked.”
If the legend of the U.S. dream team — the real one — dies here in London, a 140-pound girl will have been the one to drive home the sword.
Ye herself was blasé.
“I didn’t feel at my best. The water was too cold.”
The water is 29C.
Ye shattered Rice’s 400-metre IM world record by more than a second — a seismic shift. It was the first women’s swimming world record broken since the banning of full-body, high-tech swimsuits.
Questions? Everyone has a few.
Asked about doping, Rice first hemmed, but refused to haw.
“I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to get into that at all …” — and then, without pausing, she sort of got into it — “ … I mean, 58 (seconds over the final 100 metres) is an insanely fast swim.”
Ye’s take: “There’s absolutely no problem with doping. The Chinese team has always had a firm policy of anti-doping.”
Despite the sophistry involved in the use of the word ‘policy’, that’s demonstrably untrue. In the 90s, more than 40 Chinese swimmers were caught cheating, inevitably meaning others went undetected. Earlier this year, another 16-year-old Chinese, Li Zhesi, was caught blood doping and tossed from the Olympic squad.
Ye didn’t do herself any favours when she credited her rise to “good, scientific-based training.”
As a child, Ye was apparently tapped for swimming by a teacher who noticed her unusually large hands. China has become famed for plucking very young children on the basis of physical traits and pushing them into sports that can make use of them, rather than leave it to the crapshoot of a kid’s own interests.
Whatever the secret, she took the bookies by surprise as well.
Before the Games started, Ye was on 3/1 odds to win the 200 IM. After dominating Monday morning’s heats, William Hill reduced that price to a virtual lock — 1/20. Those are the shortest odds on any swimmer at the Olympics. The final will go off Tuesday night.
It’s churlish to heap a pile of global suspicion onto the shoulders of a Grade 11 student. Right up until it turns out to be founded in some fact. Then it turns into a frenzy of indignation. That’s a more predictable pattern than the sun rising.
Given her age, her history and her stunning times, Ye’s ascendance understandably prompts a great deal of brow folding.
John Leonard, executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, told Britain’s the Guardian the performance was unbelievable.
“We want to be very careful about calling it doping,” Leonard said. “The one thing I will say is that history in our sport will tell you that every time we see something, and I will put quotation marks around this, ‘unbelievable’, history shows us that it turns out later on there was doping involved. That last 100 metres was reminiscent of some old East German swimmers, for people who have been around a while. It was reminiscent of 400-metre individual medley by a young Irish woman in Atlanta.”
For now, let’s let the doping experts do their jobs. Until they prove otherwise, we can do ours — enjoying the incredible capacity of the human race to meet and surpass every physical barrier placed in front of it.
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