From Stillness Comes Swiftness

"No one has enough motivation on their own to work out like that every day, every year," insists Don Schollander, who won four gold medals in the '64 Olympics. "You have to have a coach who's a great motivator, too. I guarantee that."

Enter Igor Koshkin, 52, a little man wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt, jeans, black clogs and an impish grin: half leprechaun, half lunatic. As a child in Leningrad, he doused fire bombs during the German siege. As an adult he forced himself to concoct new ideas for conditioning his swimmers by setting fire to training booklets he had written. When ideas popped up in the middle of the night, Koshkin would telephone the head coach of the national team at 3 a.m. Six years in a row the U.S.S.R.'s swimming Trainer of the Year has been Igor Koshkin.

Koshkin chases swimmers out of practice when they lag and proclaims sickness no reasonable excuse for absence. "He told us we were to blame if we were sick," recalls Alexei Kudinov, who swam for him with Salnikov. "He is almost a fanatic...and you only say almost to make it sound better." Today the flame in Koshkin's eye so quickly turns into a twinkle that he has become known as a lovable tyrant.

He makes a triangle with his stubby fingers to demonstrate his training philosophy. "One point of the triangle is motivation, one is technique and one is physical and functional preparation," Koshkin says. "All three legs of the triangle must be equal. If one is overdone, it stifles the other two." The twinkle. "We are now getting into an area that would not interest your reader."

Koshkin and the Soviets are more concerned with this balance than are their American rivals. Salnikov's weightlifting work emphasizes repetition and variety—in the U.S. there is an obsession with bulk—and his training sessions are more closely monitored and adjusted. With the aid of government-financed modern equipment, Koshkin constantly takes midsession pulse rates and lactic-acid readings to make sure that he's pushing Salnikov to the limit—but not a single gasp beyond.

"The way the American system is going," Koshkin says, "they'll eventually only be able to swim 50 meters well. One doesn't have a thoroughbred haul a 15-ton weight before sending him out to race. One should work within the rhythms of the body."

Some days, Salnikov will spend 2½ hours on a 25-station, Koshkin-designed weightlifting program. On others he will ski, play soccer, water basketball, land basketball, or undertake a drill of 150 gymnastics exercises. He will swim with a rubber figure-eight-shaped sponge around his ankles or drag a star-shaped contraption attached to a line looped around his waist, both resistance-increasing devices used by his diabolical coach.

"The physical preparation is the only part of the Salnikov triangle I need to concern myself with anymore," Koshkin says. "The technique is there, and one no longer needs to motivate him much."

Besides the biochemical equipment and the white-smocked biochem experts, Salnikov's retinue includes Gorbunov, the international-award-winning psychologist who has taught the swimmer self-hypnosis techniques to use between heavy training sessions, and the masseuse, who rubs five-inch Ebonite sticks over Vladimir's body, creating static electricity to relax his muscles.

The only Salnikov secret that Soviet scientists have discovered is a slightly wider-than-normal aorta. His other distinctive attribute—the ability to accept stress—took them several years to recognize. Koshkin readily admits he took on the young Salnikov as a training pacemaker for a more gifted distance swimmer named Sergei Rusin.