From Stillness Comes Swiftness

He's in a hurry. He wants to get his Hobie 33 sailboat launched and sea-ready by noon—he returns home to shower for a cocktail party at 2. He will act as grand marshal of Marina Del Rey's Christmas boat parade at 5:30 p.m., and return to the club for a 9 p.m. dinner with his wife, Susan.

He gets the boat into the water and steers it into its berth in front of the club. He looks at his watch. "Listen," he says to his friend, Bob Bishop. "We got about enough time to clean the mast with acetone and get it up in place. We got about 40 minutes. You ask your questions," he says to his visitor, "while I work....

"Sure, I'm still competitive. We finished third in class in the Trans-Pac race in '81—that was like getting a bronze medal in a whole new sport for me. I was the skipper...Bob, secure that halyard...Can you believe we sailed in that race for 11 days and finished four minutes out of second place? Four minutes! God, this boat is dirty. Normally it's totally immaculate. I can't stand it like this...Of course I still feel terrible when I lose. There's nothing worse than losing. Well, maybe there is, but hell, who knows what it is?...That'll tighten more, Bob. Here, hook it onto this. Keep asking questions, I'm listening.... In '72 I won gold medals in everything and got out as a winner. That's what I went into it for. Period. The end. Now? I'm just fine economically. I've more things going than I can figure out what to do with. I market sporting goods all over the world. I've got real-estate offices in Honolulu, Frankfurt and Los Angeles. I do swimming commentary for ABC. But I don't like to talk about all that, I'm trying to keep a low profile.... Damn, that puncture in the hull really bugs the crap out of me...."

He hops from one project to the next, fingers fretting, eyebrows worrying, jaw brooding. As quickly as he strips tape off the mast, balls it and tosses it into the water, Bob fishes it out and puts it in a paper bag. Then Spitz struggles and grunts the mast into place with the help of four others, and when the mast is up, he cups his eyes against the sun and studies the achievement. "I love it!" he cries. "Just like Iwo Jima! Twenty more minutes of work and we could be sailing. What time is it? Let's pack it up. We gotta get moving."

Pop! The starter's pistol sounds and Salnikov is in the water. He's no better than fourth off the platform—he suffers from a "sleeper start"—but four strokes into the swim the lead is his.

The gap grows from a forearm to an arm to a body length, to two and then three lengths. His right arm, the power arm, lifts and slashes again and again, cutting through the shaft of sunset that jiggles on the pool. He strokes 45 times a lap, every lap, never changing. It's an attack more than a stroke, a thoroughly controlled, disciplined, repetitive attack, and there is some strange mesmerizing beauty in its monotony.

"If you wandered into the stadium you'd swear it was Goodell," says George Haines, Spitz's former coach and now an assistant coach of the '84 U.S. Olympic swim team. Haines was referring to Brian Goodell, America's '76 1,500 gold medalist, who trained with Salnikov during the Soviets' Christmas training junkets to Mission Viejo, Calif. in the late '70s. "I'm sure they took a lot of pictures of our kids' strokes. But what's really special about Salnikov is his mental toughness. I'm sure he learned that from training with the Americans, too. Mark Schubert [the Mission Viejo coach] kicked their tails when they were here. Russian kids usually aren't that aggressive in the water." ("I did see how hard it was possible to push yourself when I was training with Americans," says Salnikov.)

Salnikov's lead in the Spartakiade 1,500 is now so mirthfully long that a journalist from Tass points and says, "It's like he's not even Russian! We are always together in a group—collectivism, you know!" He laughs and hugs the writer from America.

Salnikov finishes in a leisurely 15:17.13, 22 seconds behind his world record of 14:54.76 but 30 feet in front of the collectivists. The world is just a few heartbeats behind him in his other Olympic distance, the 400, but in the 1,500 it has resigned. If there were an Olympic 800, and if the Soviets had competed in L.A., Salnikov would have been the favorite to take that, too. Except for a second-place finish in the 400 at the European championships in '81, he has won the 400 and 1,500 in every national, European, world and Olympic event he has entered since 1978. He hasn't lost in the 1,500 in six years—14 of the best 19 times in the event are his—and he was Swimming World magazine's world Swimmer of the Year for '79 and '82.

"Most of his competitors don't even attack him anymore," says British distance swimmer Andy Astbury. "He keeps pounding out these incredible times, meet after meet, and the people who swim against him are in so much awe that when he makes his move, they seem to say, 'I can't go with him; that's it, he's gone.' His domination has lasted so long it's equivalent to what Edwin Moses has done in the hurdles."