I’ve been disappointed in the Paris Olympics not to have seen more visual emphasis placed on the swimmers’ waiting area. True, the waiting area appears to offer precious little at face value but, perverse outlier that I am, it is in this very absence I sense a potentially rich world of meaning.
What could be more meaningful, for example, than sitting around? Sitting around is the quintessentially human activity, is it not? Before we could walk, we sat around. Before we ran, we walked and, before that, we sat around.
Where would the Olympic Games be if it weren’t for prolonged bouts of sitting around, pondering upon the possibilities of what life might be like if we weren’t sitting around?
It went like this, more-or-less. One day, sitting around, counting our blessings and whittling our sticks, we watched the tortoise clump across the veld in that ponderous, vaguely drunken way of the tortoise. Soon the tortoise was passed by the hare.
Someone mused that it would be interesting to see the tortoise race the hare, whereupon someone else said that would be no race at all. Tortoises with tortoises, hares with hares.
This made sense to most of us. We got up and started dancing we were so excited. Thus, the idea of the Olympics, where hares race hares, and tortoises pay exorbitant amounts of money to sit in the stands with their mobile phones and watch them.
The truly ordinary, folk who only have a talent for analogy and storytelling, those neither tortoise nor hare, sit at home and, like me, watch it all on TV.
But back to the waiting area in swimming. The waiting area in swimming is the very opposite of what is about to take place in the pool. It is static. It is undynamic. And it is apparently lacking in drama. It is a space in which, for long moments which stack up, end upon end, very little happens.
For this reason, it is boring, unless your definition of drama is watching a giant swimmer unwinding his thousand-yard stare and letting it spool over the wall opposite. Or, unless your definition of drama is the – admittedly exceptionally limited definition – of watching a Galactico in a Speedo don his pair of branded goggles.
The waiting area is, as far as I can see, about two things, sitting and waiting. In this respect the swimmers in the waiting area are like us in many facets of our life, they sit and wait. We sit and wait at the licensing department. We sit and wait to be called to board our flight.
We sit and wait – on bad days – for our day to begin and, on even worse days, we sit and wait for our day to end.
The swimmers’ waiting also has a tasty anti-heroic element about it. It tells us they are not gods of the pool who fly through the water, but – in these excruciatingly elongated moments, at least – mere mortals, and mortally ordinary.
This is because they are, to coin a phrase, waiters. Waiters to the main course of the evening, which are the events in the pool later. And not only do they wait, they have weight. You can see it in their postures in the waiting area’s cheap chairs.
Boy, are those chairs freighted with some heavy shit. Those chairs are positively weighed down with waiting. Maybe they’re also weighed down with meaning – the meaning that comes from the possibility of winning one of those heavy gold medals.
They’re so weighed down, in fact, that for a passing moment it occurs to you that the swimmers might never actually have the strength to get up. Maybe they will never get up because there is a question pressing down upon them: “Will I sink or swim?”
Although not very much is happening in the waiting area, it is wrong to assume that the moments before a race aren’t weighed down with expectation, nerves, drama. As the playwrights, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter have shown us, waiting can be heavy with existential possibility. Heavy with dread.
I use words and phrases like “dread” and “existential possibility” a little too casually. And a little too specifically. The unbearable weightiness of waiting is not really reducible to dread or angst or horror or fear. It’s also more open-ended, vaguer than that.
Although, even as I write and say this, I’m aware that waiting – should that possibly be weight-ing? – is both specific and open-ended.
It is specific in that you could come last in your race. In extreme situations, you might even drown, although coming last in an Olympic final is the figurative equivalent of drowning. By coming last, you sink. You disappear without a trace. You may as well not be there. You have drowned.
It is open-ended in the pure quotidian sense of being alone in the waiting area. You are so alone in the waiting area that you are often have to be there with someone else.
This applies most obviously to swimmers of the same country. You’re so alone with waiting that you bring up your chairs together so you can be just that little bit less alone.
This raises the interesting human and philosophical question of whether it is better being alone by yourself or being alone together. Most swimmers in the waiting area that I’ve seen prefer to be alone together, rather than being alone by being apart.
Finally, though, you are alone, and no amount of sitting together is going to obscure the fact or make it more palatable. You take off your slops alone. You wait for the starter’s gun alone. You dive into the pool alone. You try to finish the race as quickly as possible alone. You stand – if you are one of the lucky ones – on the podium alone.
This is perhaps what makes swimmers sitting together in the waiting area so poignant. It is the temporary denial of the inevitable, the inevitability of having to swim not together, but alone.
Like all swimmers, Tatjana Smith, the breaststroke swimmer most of us are more familiar calling Tatjana Schoenmaker, finally left the waiting area in her races last week. She walked towards the pool before her races in the 2024 Olympics in an ordinary, done-home kind of way.
There was no grandstanding, no showboating, no self-conscious choreography, just a simple A to B thing that suggested she had other, more important, things on her mind.
Smith listens to gospel music in the waiting area. According to the enquiries I’ve made, she and her husband, Joel Smith, are members of Every Nation Church, so it’s not surprising that gospel is Tatjana’s preferred music on her headphones.
Gospel makes you feel less alone. It makes you feel together with a higher being. It takes your aloneness and puts it on a higher plane. It’s not surprising that you have the need to feel together because swimming is so lonely.
All those early morning wake-ups; all that solitary training in the pool. All that self-sacrifice. All that weighty waiting around in the waiting area, waiting for races to start so that you don’t have to be so visibly alone.
More than those lonely lengths, it’s the self-sacrifice that makes you feel lonely. Self-sacrifice is about doing without; it’s about missing out. It’s about missing out socially, about missing out by saying “no” to foods you shouldn’t eat.
Tatjana likes eating chicken wings. She likes gulping down puddings. But both are forbidden when she’s training, so she eats healthily and watches her weight, which is the exact opposite of what she really wants to be doing while you are training so hard and feeling so alone.
You want comfort food. You want to go in for some crazy binge eating. But you can’t. This all conspires – of course, why wouldn’t it? – to make you feel lonely.
It’s about missing out in the more general sense of watching the life others are living pass you by as though you weren’t living a life at all.
And sacrifice isn’t confined to the swimmer. It extends outwards like ripples in the pool, to all members of a swimmer’s family. In Smith’s case the Schoenmakers didn’t go on family holidays because they were saving for swimming lessons.
It was worth it, however, because Tajana’s talent was evident from a young age. Rocco Meiring, her current coach, saw it immediately. Others might not have, but he did. Smith’s relationship with Meiring has had its ups and downs but Meiring was alerted to something in the young swimmer from the very beginning.
The best way to groove this talent, it was felt, was put Tatjana in the hot-house atmosphere of the TuksSports High School at the University of Pretoria. It meant Schoenmaker saying goodbye to her parents, Renske and Rene and sister, Fabienne in Roodepoort, to the west of Johannesburg, for the first time.
Tatjana didn’t want to go but her dad, Rene, sort of bribed her. He promised her a blackberry phone if she did. So she went. She began the long hours alone in the pool, ploughing through the water, a place so lonely it must have made the waiting area feel like the local disco.
Looking back on Smith’s career and you’ll notice two distinct leaps forward, leaps similar to her lurches forward in the pool. For the first we have to go back to August 2017, to the World University Games or, to give them their proper name, the Summer Universiade, held that year in Taipei, Taiwan.
In the World University Games seven years ago, Smith, having just turned 20, found herself competing against the best American, Russian and Australian student swimmers in the world. She finished 12th in the 50 meters breaststroke, fourth in the 100 meters breaststroke and second in the 200 meters breaststroke.
The trip to Taiwan was clarifying on two counts. It demonstrated that the 50 meters event was not her best distance and she was better suited to the longer events. It also told her that she needed to work harder. There was potential to work with but she had a long way to go before she touched the wall first.
Swimming at the 2018 Commonwealth Games was held at the Gold Coast Aquatic Centre in Queensland, Australia. In the Commonwealth Games Smith improved her 12th place in the 50m event at the World University Games to fourth, and took first place in the 100m and 200m events.
The improvement was remarkable. In ten months, between August, 2017 in Taipei, and June, 2018, on Queensland’s Gold Coast, Smith had leaped forwards like a salmon. The 2020 Olympics were only two years away.
Smith’s upward trajectory was confirmed the following year, 2019, where she again finished fourth, first and first in the 50, 100 and 200-meters breaststroke at the World Student Games in Naples.
A couple of weeks later, in the World Championships in Gwangju, South Korea, Smith appeared to stall, fatal for a swimmer. She finished second in the 200-meter breaststroke event but could only manage sixth in the 100-meters. Was this an occasion to get worrled? Did her and her coach need to be concerned? Did she need to go out and bag herself a bucket of chicken wings?
It is difficult to establish with certainty whether the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics was a boon or setback for Smith. We do know, however, that at the beginning of 2021 – the year of the postponed Olympics, in other words – she began to break records. She broke records at meetings throughout South Africa and duly qualified for Tokyo.
We all know what happened in Japan, she won gold in the women’s 200-meter breaststroke and silver in the women’s 100-meter breaststroke – but consider this. The last medal won in the pool by a South African woman before Smith was by Penny Heyns, way back in the Sydney Olympics in 2000.
In sport, with its constantly changing cast of players, with its endless tournaments and seasons, ends and beginnings, 21 years is an eternity. In the period since Sydney in 2000, there were Olympic Games in Athens (2004), Beijing (2008), London (2012) and Rio (2016), four in all.
In none of those games was there a South African swimmer capable of winning a medal. No one built on Penny Heyns two gold medals in the pool in Atlanta in 1996 and her bronze four years later in Sydney. Smith was – proverbially-speaking – out there alone in lane four, with no tradition, no role-model and no history to comfort her.
While she was historically and structurally alone, we shouldn’t be duped into thinking she was emotionally alone. One of the most incredible things about Smith’s two medals in Paris, is the T-shirt she’s been wearing to give thanks to those who helped her along the way.
To those listeners who haven’t seen the T-shirt, it’s a simple design of white letters against a black background with the phrase “Because of you, for you” in slightly larger letters at the top of the list which takes up much of the back of the T-shirt.
On the list are names meaningful to Smith, including that of her first swimming academy, Dorey’s, in Linden Johannesburg. Her parents and sister’s names are on the list, as are those of her husband, Joel’s sister, Rachel and Rachel’s husband, Siya Kolisi and the two Kolisi boys.
Rocco Meiring – whose name is also on the list – privately calls Smith “hoofmeisie” in Afrikaans, which is translated as “head girl.” This is because Smith is an expert organizer and planner.
All of her overseas trips (or those of a team) she plans down to the last detail. Overseas trips are not the only things she organises. She loves board games, so is big on arranging board game evenings. Her love of the Springboks – which pre-dates her sister-in-law’s relationship with Siya – means that she frequently arranges Springbok viewing parties.
The impression one gets of her is of someone with high levels of social intelligence. But to dub her as an “expert organiser” sounds slightly chauvinistic to my ears. Men, for example, wouldn’t be referred to as “expert organisers” even if they were expert organisers. If men are expert organisers, they are called leaders. Or accountants. Or, in some cases, lawyers, but they are never called expert organisers from the gun – as it were.
We started this podcast by focusing on the fact that television doesn’t yet seem to have discovered the dramatic possibility of the waiting area. The weighting area strikes me as interesting because even when you are sitting together with someone you know (often from the same country) you are alone. And you will be alone later, as you dive into the pool and race the race of your life.
With her increasingly famous T-shirt, Smith is saying something else. She is saying that you only appear to be alone. You are powerfully and profoundly not alone. You are not alone because you are the sum total of love and encouragement and influence that you can trace back to the very beginning of your career.
It’s a slightly dangerous business this – this recognition. It’s a bit like the wedding speech that starts out legitimately and sincerely hoping to thank everyone in your journey but invariably forgets someone along the way.
This aside, Smith and her T-shirt is a splendid and profound thing. Why? Well, for many reasons. First, it tells us that she’s not unaware that she has a responsibility to recognize others and not take them for granted. Second, it tells us that she’s aware that she’s part of a whole.
This whole takes many forms. Most obviously, because she’s a Christian, this whole encompasses God. It includes her family, too, who emigrated to the Netherlands in 2021 and now, through their flower-selling business, export flowers to several European countries seven days a week. It includes her extended family, and the swimming family and her followers and her fans.
You can see this as cheesy. And you can see this as cynical. But I prefer to do neither. I see it as preferential to those South African cricketers who open up foundations which look good on paper but in which they have no interest. There’s something wholesome about Smith. We all sense this. And it is one of the reasons why we like her.
Her wholesomeness contrasts well with the underbelly of the Olympics, that dank, smelly, more-or-less hidden place that is full of more questions than answers. At the beginning of this podcast I told a story about hares and tortoises. Except I didn’t tell even half the story about the hares.
Not always – but very often – the hares are full of substances they shouldn’t be. This list of such substances is long, ranging from growth hormones to epitestosterone, to erythropoietin, better known as the wonder drug of cycling, EPO.
The hares frequently run a parallel race to the Olympics which few are privy to. This is the race they run with the dope testers, who are often under-resourced, over-worked and vulnerable to political interference and manipulation.
Take the case of Marion Jones, who won five medals – three golds and two bronzes – at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and her use of human growth hormones in the Olympics themselves. Here her case is discussed by Victor Conté, the founder of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (otherwise known as BALCO) who was the man in Sydney who provided Jones with those hormones and several other banned substances besides.
Testers are not only under-resourced and subject to political machinations they are hamstrung by what their test is framed to find. If, in other words, an athlete is micro-dosing designer steroids or endogenous growth hormones, and they aren’t testing for such substances, it logically follows that testers won’t find anything.
And let’s be blunt, the political and institutional will to look too hard is also sometimes lacking. Look at it this way. The Olympics is a multi-billion-dollar event, wall-to-wall with sponsors and TV coverage, one of the greatest spectacles in the world.
Who wants that spectacle besmirched? Certainly not the athletics inner sanctum. Or the institutional matrix who have invested much in time, reputation and money in seeing to it that the Olympics continue seamlessly without too many awkward questions being asked.
Conté, never one to call a pair of spikes a running shoe, is even more scathing in his analysis of the sport’s underbelly. He says, for example, that in his view the World Anti-Doping Agency, otherwise known as WADA, is less keen on catching the dopes that dope than it is in keeping Olympic sponsors sweet. Listen to what he has to say in this clip from the Insider’s How Crime Works series.
Although Conté’s quote confirms our pre-existing suspicions, does this mean we shouldn’t take pleasure from the performances and human moments from the Paris Games? Of course not.
Who can forget the fluent force of Canadian hammer-thrower, Ethan Katzberg’s technique, marveling at the fact that the British Colombian is only 22 years old? Then there was Femke Bol, hurdler and 400-meter athlete from the Netherlands, who ran the final leg of the 400-meter mixed relay as if others were trudging through molasses.
And let’s not forget Tatjana’s T-shirt, evidence that you are not alone in either the waiting area or the pool. You are there because you are flying on the dreams of others, others who are not there with you in body, but who are there with you in spirit.
