Eating, pain, shadow boxing and legends: Schooling talks swimming

"Beast," he says with deep respect. "Classy," he adds.

- Rohit Brijnath

"Beast," he says with deep respect.

"Classy," he adds.

In an office in Marine Parade, one Olympic champion is describing another. Joseph Schooling, 100m butterfly gold in 2016 (we know, it's just nice to say it), is a great swimmer. Katie Ledecky, nine golds, four silver, one bronze, and the person Schooling's been asked to paint in one word, is the greatest female swimmer ever.

"Talk about being able to grind and train," says Schooling, "and put your body through a whole lot of hurt, Katie's one of the first few people that come to mind. Her events, they're not easy events. People go to commercial breaks during the 800m or 1,500m but they don't understand how difficult it is to do what she does.

"Repeatedly."

The world championships are in town and Schooling is being interrogated. Now he's a creature of land, but he was built for liquid. When swimmers talk about a "feel" for water they can sound like the half-dressed children of Poseidon speaking a foreign language. So what are three things we don't understand?

"How difficult it is, how much we eat, how much we sleep."

Eat?

He grins.

"That's one of my fondest memories, going to an all-you-can-eat sushi place with the team in Texas after a hard practice... they saw 30 dudes walk in and were jumping for joy. But 90 minutes later they weren't too happy."

Swimmers arrive at the blocks with blank faces, ambition pounding in their ears. If there's drama, it's in the call room. Schooling's seen shadow boxing, air guitar and "heard multiple times the story that the French relay team would bite their lip and taste blood before the race just to get amped up... Another one would be people excessively talking to themselves, trying to get in the zone".