City of Edinburgh swimmer hopes years of training will come to fruition before he starts a new life in Australia
THE sunset of Gregor Tait's career can be neatly viewed as the sunrise of his life. Strapped for as long as he can recall to a labour of 5am alarm calls, multiple daily sessions and early nights, the swimmer is bound in November for a new life in Aus
tralia, armed only with a fit body, an incomplete mechanic's apprenticeship and an open mind. But first, there is the small matter of one final tilt at the Olympics.
Tait, 29, flew yesterday to the British team's holding camp in Osaka, where final reductions in training volume – known in the trade as a taper – will smooth the path to what promises to be the fastest and most exhilarating gala in the history of swimming. In Japan, and for the first few days on arrival in the athletes' village in Beijing, the majority of a callow, if talented group will experience various levels of jitters but the tattooed City of Edinburgh veteran intends to maintain a zen-like detachment.
Four years ago, long before his political coronation as a "national hero" at the Commonwealth Games, Tait was attending his first Olympic Games. An adrenalin freak, he fed off the hype, fantasised about the occasion, rolled along on his very promising medal chances and almost vomited in the locker-room on the verge of being called out for the 200 metres backstroke final. Ranked third in the world at the time, he finished seventh.
There is no similarity between the mindset he adopted in Athens and the one he will take into the Water Cube aquatics centre two weeks today, when day one of the Games features the heats of his second-best event, the 100m. This is Tait's last Olympics, perhaps his last major championships of any kind, but a carefree outlook has served him well this year, with a career-best 200m swim – his first in four years, 1:56.67 – arriving bang on time at the trials in March.
"It's a lot different this time. I learnt a lot from the last Olympics where I went into it thinking 'oh my God, this is an Olympic Games'. This time I just approach it as another meet. OK it's the biggest one, but I've been before, done this, done that – it's a much more relaxed way of life for me now, and I'm not concentrating on any targets," he says.
"At the end of the day, I can't control what anyone else does at the Olympic Games, I just have to go there and look after myself. If I can do a best time I'll be absolutely delighted and if that means I get a medal, finish sixth or don't make the final, I can't do anything about that. You have to accept what's in front of you.
"I was unbelievably nervous before Athens, to the point of being sick before my race. I was as close as I've ever been to actually being sick. That's not a good place to be. I know I have to relax and distinguish this as just another meet, and not think that there is pressure on me to do well.
"I don't feel any pressure at all. There was more pressure on me last time because my time ranked me third in the world and people were automatically presuming I was going to get a medal. Then I started to think about it, and that was the worst thing in the world I could have done."
This year Tait, a roamer who was born in Glasgow and brought up in Saudi Arabia, then Stirling, before spending most of his 20s in Wales and moving back up north for two valedictory years in Edinburgh, is ranked sixth-fastest in the 200m when you remove Michael Phelps from the equation. This race is not one of the eight targeted by the oft-invincible American, who has the chance to wipe out Mark Spitz's 36-year-old record of seven gold medals in a single Games. But that doesn't change the essential problem for Tait's prospects: the top two in the world are both American, in any case – Aaron Peirsol and Ryan Lochte – and Peirsol has swum seven times this year faster than Tait's lifetime best.
He doesn't dispute the fact he is an outsider, but correctly points out: "Rankings mean absolutely nothing at a major meet, because it's all about focusing on the day. Someone else might have got their taper wrong and not perform, or someone else might get it right that you didn't expect to do well."
The leap in speed that will be required for a medal is within the gregarious Tait, the Commonwealth champion over four laps of backstroke and individual medley who was embarrassed by Jack McConnell in Melbourne in 2006 when the sweaty First Minister misjudged the epic degree of his medal haul, and quite how widely it would be acknowledged back home. The truest appraisal of his abilities doesn't come from Tait himself or a politician but from his coach, Fred Vergnoux, and training partner Kris Gilchrist, who says he is frequently rendered speechless by the times Tait sets in training.
He has never won a major international long-course medal except for Commonwealth gongs, yet he is idolised within the clique.
The beauty of the present situation is that he could come away from Beijing with nothing and not be disillusioned or descend into a fug about what to do next. "I'm moving out to Australia in November, going out there to live, work and train, live the life and see what happens. My sister (Kristen] lives out there and she's having a baby, and it's a nice place to be – I can see myself living there. So I'm going to give it a shot, basically," says Tait, whose parents live in Cyprus.
"I stayed with my sister for two weeks and that was enough to convince me it was something I wanted to do. With my parents not living in Scotland I don't really have any connections to Scotland family-wise, apart from cousins and so on. It's time to try something different. It's a massive experience and it's not something I'm afraid to go and try – see if I can get work, then maybe swim, or vice versa. Then I'll try and get a sponsorship or anything that allows me to stay."
When it comes to the preceding challenge, though, nothing has been left to chance. Tait claims he is in the best shape of his life, and his gliding passage through the trials in Sheffield, together with the cocky exuberance of his celebrations, backed that up. He will, like the vast majority in Beijing, be wearing the Speedo LZR suit that has coincided with a landslide of world records this year – but a version of it sliced at the waist. And not because he can't bear to hide his tattoos.
"Everybody has their preference and that's mine – it's all about what you feel comfortable wearing. I'm glad I have one of these suits but I still believe I would have gone 1:56 without it. It's very harsh to say that all these world records are because of the suit, because people have been training their whole lives for this and this is the year that counts; this is when they have to swim fast."
Tait's motivation is framed by more than just the obvious incentives of pride and glory. The fruitful City of Edinburgh elite programme is to close down. The Commonwealth Pool needs refurbishing and British Swimming wanted to streamline its elite operations in any case. Stirling University will almost certainly be announced as one of the new national training hubs in the coming days. Vergnoux, a brilliant coach, is off back to Paris and the talents he has nurtured – Tait, Gilchrist and Kirsty Balfour at the vanguard – will spread like pollen.
"We all want to perform in Beijing because we all want to prove how good the group has been, and I guess maybe prove to people that it wasn't a good idea to shut down the programme," explains Tait. "It's one of the best programmes there has ever been in Britain, it's been going for 12 years and it's going to be no more – and that's a shame. It would be nice to go out on a high just to show that from 1996 to 2008, we've performed at the very highest level and succeeded. I've improved as a swimmer and as a person since I've been there, and I guess this is the final journey."
There are, of course, final journeys and final journeys. There is nothing coy in Tait's assertion that he hasn't decided whether to continue swimming after the Games. Australia has almost as many 50m pools as hours of sunshine and the Commonwealths, a heavenly proposition for swimmers who never get to win Olympic and world titles and who like to compete under the Saltire, will be about 18 months away when he joins his sister on the Gold Coast. However, he seems to go against the grain by refusing to stick around for the whale-like, multi-sport extravaganzas heading to this island in 2012 and 2014.
"I could not contemplate going on to London in 2012, if I'm honest," he says with a hint of relief. "I'll take this meet and then I'll think about the rest of my life. I may well finish my race and go 'yeah, that's it', or I might say 'actually, I haven't done enough and think I could do more'."
There are a lot of things Gregor Tait is preparing to do a month from now. But none of them would taste quite as sweet as they would with an engraved circle of metal hung nearby, a memento of the times when life was a selfish, sacrificial struggle.
The full article contains 1679 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
