Ervin, 35, gets another shot at gold
Sixteen years after winning gold in the men’s 50-meter freestyle in the Sydney Olympics, Anthony Ervin will compete for another. Ervin, 35, qualified to swim the 50 in Rio de Janeiro by finishing one-hundredth of second behind Nathan Adrian, who won with a time of 21.51 seconds in the U.S. Olympic trials.
Ervin’s career arc is perhaps the most fascinating of any U.S. swimmer in history. He was 19 when he won the 50 free and earned a silver medal as part of the 4x100 relay in the 2000 Games. He won two gold medals in the world championships in 2001, swam in the Pan Pacific meet in 2002 and then essentially disappeared from the sport.
Ervin took a decade away from competitive swimming before making a comeback in 2012. At 31, he made the Olympic team in the 50 free and finished fifth in London. He’ll get a shot in Rio as the oldest member of a U.S. team filled with first-time Olympians. It will be a quite different experience than Ervin had in 2000.
“It seems so long ago. I was a teen!” Ervin said. “My perspective on life and things I valued were so amorphous and vague, and I had a very limited understanding of myself and the world. It’s just a very different experience. With age comes wisdom.”
Ervin, asked how he has stayed fit enough to be a world-class swimmer, referenced Rocky IV.
“I was running in the mountains,” he said. “Running on the beach. Workouts on the beach. Lifting in my friend’s garage. I was in many different pools, exercising and working on different techniques that were helpful. It just became this amalgamation of different kinds of training.”
Over the last couple of years, Ervin trained with multiple programs from the University of California men’s swimming team to SwimMAC Carolina’s postgrad group. He also published a biography, Chasing Water: Elegy of an
Olympian, along with writer Constantine Markides, detailing his upbringing, swimming and decade away from competition.