Gavin Cooney

OLYMPIANS WILL MAKE you realise that time is our great luxury. 

Conor Ferguson, for instance, has given years for less than the amount of time it has taken you to read this sentence. 

To get specific: Ferguson needs to find 0.16 seconds. But this is the rarified level where diminishing returns is the law. Everyone’s aim is to break it. 

Ferguson is a swimmer who specialises in the 100m backstroke, and he is lining up at the Irish Olympic trials this week in what his final shot at qualifying for the Paris Olympics. 

As a 16-year-old, he missed out on a spot at the Rio games by half a second and five years later he missed out on Tokyo by slightly less. This week’s meet at the National Aquatic Centre in Dublin marks his final chance to meet the Olympic qualification time for Paris. 

The golden number is 53.74 seconds. Swim within that this week, and Ferguson will forever be known as an Olympian. It’s a case of three strikes and out: he has to make it once over either his heat, semi-final, or final this week, or else he is out. 

“I know I am capable of doing this time, if not going faster”, he says. “I believe that because of what I am seeing every day in training. It is just doing it on the day. That’s what it comes down to.”

He came close to meeting the time at the recent world championships in Doha, clocking 53.9. If he can shave 0.16 seconds off that time in Dublin this week, then he will have reached his goal. 

Ferguson, like Irish Olympic medal hope Daniel Wiffen, trains out of Loughborough University, and the good news is he and his coach Ian Hulme have found the precious 0.16 seconds. It now comes down to Ferguson’s ability to execute at the right moment. 

Loughborough is regarded as one of the best swimming programmes in the UK, and as a result it has the use of a £500,000 kistler machine to precisely analyse performance from within the water. Previously, the university had to rely on a Go Pro and a coach’s hovering eye, but now they can avail of the kistler, which features 12 cameras that offer angles from underneath, above, and from the side, all displayed on a 50-inch screen beside the pool. 

It was by using this machine that Ferguson and his coach had their eureka moment after Doha. They believe they can find up to 0.2 seconds by improving his turn, and so that has been the focus of training in the four weeks leading into the national Olympic trials. The footage showed that Ferguson’s arm to collapse rather than pull in his final movement before rotating and kicking against the wall. It is a minute, tiny thing over barely five metres, but having that arm pull rather than fall will give Ferguson more momentum both into and then from the wall, and it is what will allow him kick for the Olympic Games. 

The issue is that Ferguson has had only four weeks to learn it, which isn’t very long to re-programme a years-long habit. While his coach has drilled it and drilled it and Ferguson now knows exactly what he should do and when he should do it, the biggest challenge will be to execute in the middle of a race without it imbalancing any other part of his performance. Even the prospective Olympians who are underwater are ultimately walking a high wire. 

“If you strung Conor’s best five swims together and put the best components in each together, he would get the time no problem”, says his coach, Hulme. “But he has to do it all in one time and that’s the difficult bit. You train for so many years and it comes down to 53 seconds: that’s how brutal this sport is.” 

For Ferguson, this is a kind of last dance. He came outrageously close to qualifying for the 2016 Games when he was only 16, missing the mandatory qualifying time by half a second. But then he ran into the brutality of diminishing returns, as his hitherto upward trajectory flattened. 

“Being so close to Rio in 2016 I sort of just expected Tokyo to be … not an easy ride, but I expected it just to come”, he says. “It was the first time in my career that I experienced a plateau for four years.

Having missed out on Tokyo, Ferguson took a lengthy break from swimming. He didn’t do anything for three months and then dipped in and out for another three months during which he veered from a vow to quit forever to diving right back in, and then back again.

“That was a real low point, missing out [on Tokyo] and I felt lost around that time”, says Ferguson. “That’s when the doubt creeps in.

“’Am I good enough? Am I cut out for this sport? Am I cut out for the hard mornings in winter? These are the sort of questions that run through your head when you’re at a low point in your career.

“During my break from swimming, I was having to work to make a bit of money for the first time in my career alongside swimming so that was a low and I knew if I was to really give this a shot then going into Loughborough was like a last hurrah, a last dance.” 

The link-up with Hulme precipitated Ferguson’s move to Loughborough. Dave Thompson, whom Hulme coached, set up a sit-down at an Edinburgh meet, from which the relationship bloomed. Hulme is a former international-standard swimmer himself: he represented Britain at the 2009 World Championships and 2010 Europeans, but he too narrowly missed out on a place at the Olympics. 

“I got success very quickly, especially in 2016″, says Ferguson. “I suppose [a plateau] was always going to come when you get to that 53/54 second barrier. During that time, I was dealing with changes in programme, dealing with inconsistency, whether through illness or injury. I was missing training here and there.

“I have a big say in my programme now, because I have the knowledge. Whereas back then, I didn’t know what I needed to do or I was going to respond to different methods, I just sort of went with the flow, so I suppose there is a bit of maturity there as well.

“It always happens at some stage in your career and I am really thankful that I did come through that period, because it has brought me on so much. It has changed me, not only in swimming, but outside of the pool as well in my personality and character.”  

The final part of that development is the hardest: even if there are only 0.16 seconds left. 

The Irish Open Swimming Championships and Olympic Trials start on Wednesday 22 May. Full details available here