I know attention spans shorten considerably when sat in front of a computer screen, and as one fellow blog host put it recently, "watching a half-hour of video on the Internet is like sitting through all three Lord of the Rings films back-to-back in the theater", but in my hours of idleness afforded by my waning training schedule I've trawled through a swathe of fantastic swimming videos online. Michael Johnson described how he became a master of pausing video cassettes at the exact spot to analyse and piece apart his technique, but in the age of YouTube even the fool has it all at his fingertips. With only a week to go before I'll be in the zone and up in Sheffield I'll share with you one or two videos over the coming week that I've gone back to again and again. The first, somewhat unsurprisingly, is the 4x100 freestyle relay at the Athens Olympics in 2004. The South African team of Roland Schoeman, Darien Townsend, Lyndon Ferns, and Ryk Neethling rewrote the script and the record books by sending the Americans and the Australians home with something to think about. Perhaps I'm slightly biased by having trained with all four of them during my time in Arizona, and I very proudly count them all as friends, but for me it's greater than the famous relay of 4 years ago in which Jason Lezak ploughed to victory for the Americans. Maybe not a better race, nor even a better spectacle, but certainly a bigger inspiration. I don't know the commentators but like the rest of the world they were blown away by the opening hundred; "Roland Schoeman is tramping with 25 to go. I mean these are class swimmers. He's a big body-length up."
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