From Stillness Comes Swiftness

He steps from behind the wheel. His blond hair hides half his ears, his face is tan, his eyes pale green. A red bump rides the bridge of his nose and two pale ovals surround his eye sockets. It's a face designed by sunshine and chlorine and too many hours in swimming goggles. He wears a T shirt with the words L.A. '83, blue jeans with a ROCKY label and blue-and-white Adidas sneakers. He looks like an American—a handsome sun-bleached beach roamer from Spitzland. Then Salnikov kisses his wife, Marina, goodby and kisses a male friend hello and suddenly he's a Russian again.

The friends talk quietly, and then Salnikov goes to the locker room to prepare for the 1,500. It's Aug. 5, 1983, the last night of swimming competition of the Spartakiade, the U.S.S.R.'s national sports festival. He doesn't shave himself. It will cost him a second every 100 meters, 15 seconds in all, but he doesn't need to set new records each meet to live with himself. There are times to ration and times to burn, and he knows them well. He's 24. Most of the world-class swimmers his age in America are now ex-swimmers.

Now, in the twilight, the 1,500 is about to begin. Salnikov walks to Lane 4 and slowly removes his blue robe with the letters CCCP on the back, his warmup jacket and warmup pants, his T shirt, socks and slippers. Unveiled is a 6'5", 165-pound body with the classic swimmer's torpedo hips and sea-fan shoulders, but none of the special external aquatic gifts—the outsized hands and feet, the extra six inches of calf whip—that marked Spitz.

He searches the stands, locates Marina, smiles and waves. "Just a small one," he says. "I do not want everyone to see." If Marina weren't here, he would search for a smiling stranger and smile back.

He scoops a handful of water and rinses his mouth, then sits on the starting platform with his arms hanging loosely between his legs. On either side, the other seven swimmers fidget and stretch and windmill their arms. The champion remains loose and motionless. His is not the concealed compulsion that clenched Spitz's fingers so tightly that he couldn't uncurl them on the platform in '72. Salnikov's is the passive composure of a man in no haste to prove or immortalize himself, a man raised in a country that gave the world 1,500-page novels, that absorbed the thrust of both Napoleon's and Hitler's armies and slowly pressed them back, that patiently tolerates bread and meat lines, a country that subconsciously seems to know everything will eventually submit to the passage of time. Salnikov knows the moment for aggression will come later; now he sits and waits for the race to come to him.

"Some swimmers start the race exhausted," he says. "Maybe I have a little stronger nervous system."

The starter raises his pistol. On the platform, Salnikov bends like a willow.

Mark Spitz's beige '84 Corvette zips across Admiralty Way toward the docks of Marina Del Rey. Sometimes he leans on his right foot, and when the surge presses him deeper into the low bucket seat, and the new speed registers on his computerlike instrument panel, he feels a little like an astronaut. The other day, his first one back home after a nine-week business trip in Europe, he took the car to 123 mph. Not quite the old flush from stopwatches and electric timers—but, man, it felt good.

Spitz turns into the parking lot of the Windjammer Yacht Club. Along the edge of the water runs a woman in a pink top and purple shorts and a man in nylon shorts in the design of the American flag. On the water, ducks play in the morning light and a forest of sailboat masts sway.

Spitz exits the Corvette. He is wearing blue jeans, sneakers, a blue short-sleeve shirt, a red belt, an orange underwater watch, a blue sweater he ties by the arms around his neck, and the black mustache that has not been encroached upon since it became famous in the '72 Olympics. All 11 years that have passed since that staggering seven-gold-medal harvest in Munich seem to have congregated in a doorknob-sized circle of gray on the back of his black hair.