The mastery and music of movement

Katie Ledecky of the US and Ariarne Titmus of Australia during Women's 800m Freestyle Final at the Paris Olympic Games. GETTY IMAGES

- ROHIT BRIJNATH

“Keep dancing.”

Muhammad Ali never did just one thing. If he’s skipping, then he’s also talking, offering defiance, poetry, prediction.

The video is from October 1974, days before he fights George Foreman in Zaire.

Rope taps ground, sweat drips, words rain.

“I’ll be dancing all night.”

Of course, once the fight starts, he decides instinctively not to dance and leans against the ropes and fools everyone and exhausts Foreman, but that’s another story. But in his prime, he was shuffling, circling, leaning, darting, swaying, dodging, ducking, as if he was moving to music.

We’re always watching hands (and faces) in sport, the swishing bat, the dexterous racket, the feinting fist, but the legs are the soldiers. You see it in the sumo pushers and the quarterback shufflers. In swimmer Katie Ledecky subtly altering the beat of her kicks, and Al Oerter, four-time Olympic discus champion, working in the 1970s with an instructor in movement studies. Sometimes it’s obvious, as in fencing, other times invisible, like water polo players—large people in dainty caps—doing an egg-beater kick to stay afloat.

“Flighty steps, unsteady steps, and stomping steps are to be avoided,” wrote the ancient Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. He would have approved of D’Artagnan in the movies, or Michael Jordan and Lionel Messi in real life, all of them studies in body control and deceit. Ten years ago the Argentine felled Jérôme Boateng without even touching him. A dart, a dribble, and the defender, confused, unbalanced, fell over. Later, Boateng shrugged: to be embarrassed by Messi was a strange sort of honour.