Alexander Popov

Alexander Popov: Thirty-One Strokes to a World Record

In 2000, at the Russian Olympic trials in Moscow, Alexander Popov swam fifty metres of freestyle in 21.64 seconds and took thirty-one strokes to do it. The time stood as a world record for nearly eight years. The stroke count is the more revealing number. Sprint swimming rewards violence, and Popov won by refusing to supply it, covering the distance with fewer, longer, cleaner pulls than anyone thought the event permitted.

The Boy Who Was Afraid of the Water

He was born on November 16, 1971. From the age of eight he trained at the Children and Youth Sports School of the Fakel Sports Complex in Lesnoy, and he arrived there frightened of water. His father insisted on lessons anyway. Popov's own summary of the outcome is characteristically dry: he has been "stuck there ever since."

He was a backstroker first, and a good enough one to be noticed. The pivot came in 1990, when Gleb Petrov, head coach of the USSR national team, moved him into the squad of Gennadi Touretski, who converted him to freestyle. It is one of the more consequential reassignments in the history of the sport. Popov had spent a decade learning to feel water on his back; he brought that sensitivity to a stroke where nobody was looking for it.

Barcelona and Atlanta

At the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, at twenty, he won gold in both the 50 and 100 metre freestyle. Sprint titles are the most volatile in swimming, decided by hundredths and often by the luck of a start. Popov then did the thing that is supposed to be impossible: he defended both in Atlanta in 1996, becoming the first man since Johnny Weissmuller to hold both freestyle sprint titles across consecutive Games.

His loyalty to his coach was total. He followed Touretski from Russia to Australia to keep training with him. After Atlanta he gave one of his gold medals away, and explained why in terms that say a great deal about how he understood his own success: "I have a title and I'm on the paper, but, you know, Gennadi hasn't gotten anything from Atlanta or from Barcelona... But I know how much this particular medal means for him."

The Knife

One month after Atlanta, in a street dispute in Moscow, Popov was stabbed in the abdomen. The blade sliced an artery, grazed a kidney and damaged the pleura, the membrane surrounding the lung. He required emergency surgery and three months of rehabilitation.

The injury should have ended him. Sprint swimming is a sport of marginal physiological gains, and he had just lost a kidney's worth of margin and a lung's worth of mechanics. Instead he defended his 50 and 100 metre titles at the 1997 European Championships in Seville, set the 50 metre world record in 2000, and took silver in the 100 free at the Sydney Olympics that year. He won both sprint golds again at the 2003 World Championships in Barcelona, twelve years after his first Olympic title. He held the world record at 50 metres for eight years and at 100 metres for six.

Athens, and After

He swam at the 2004 Athens Olympics as the oldest competitor in the pool, carried the Russian flag, and finished ninth in the 50 and eighteenth in the 100. He announced his retirement in January 2005. He had relocated permanently to Solothurn, Switzerland in early 2004, keeping Touretski as a long-distance coach.

His administrative career began before his swimming career ended. He joined the IOC Athletes' Commission at the 1996 Games, was re-elected in 2000, served as Honorary Secretary, became a full IOC member in December 1999, and sat on the evaluation commission for the 2016 Summer Olympics. In 2009 he became chairman of the RC Lokomotiv Moscow rugby league club and joined the supervisory board of Adidas. In July 2019 the IOC accused Popov and eight others of accepting bribes in connection with the Rio 2016 host city vote; he denied the allegations on July 5, 2019.

Why Alexander Is Called a Genius

Popov is routinely described as one of the most technically sound swimmers of all time, and the claim is about craft rather than intellect, though the line between them is thinner here than it looks. What he possessed was an exceptional feel for water: the ability to sense, continuously and unconsciously, where his hand was gripping still water and where it was slipping through disturbed water, and to adjust. That is a perceptual gift, trained rather than reasoned, and it is why the thirty-one-stroke world record matters more than the time attached to it. Everyone else was converting effort into speed at a worse exchange rate.

The backstroke origin is probably the key to it. A decade of swimming blind, orienting entirely by sensation rather than sight, gave him an instrument other sprinters never developed. Touretski's contribution was to recognize that a nervous, technically refined backstroker might out-swim more powerful men in the most power-dependent event in the pool.

The honest counter-case is that Popov's dominance was not unbroken, and that some of his aura is retrospective. He lost the 100 free in Sydney. He was ninth in Athens. Swimmers who are genuinely without peer do not finish eighteenth in anything, and his long career means the record contains several years of decline that the legend tends to skip. There is also the unresolved shadow of the 2019 bribery allegations, which concern his conduct as an administrator rather than an athlete but sit awkwardly beside the reputation for integrity. And technical perfection is partly a story the sport tells itself: he was also very tall, very strong, and coached by one of the best in the world.

Legacy

He holds bachelor's and master's degrees in sports coaching from the Russian Academy, married the Olympic swimmer Darya Shmeleva in 1997, and has three children. His awards include the Russian Medal of Honour, Russian Athlete of the Year and European Sports Press Union Athlete of the Year, all in 1996, along with the Order of Merit for the Fatherland third class and the Order of Friendship. But his real bequest is a demonstration that in the crudest event in swimming, the shortest and loudest race there is, the most efficient man usually wins.