Swimmers Praise Bottom's Methods

It's another Tuesday evening in the Oakland hills home of Mike Bottom, just like any other during the spring and summer months, but so different than perhaps anything the swimming world knows.

American star Gary Hall Jr., the four-time Olympic gold medalist, lies flat on the massage table, blissful as the knots in his shoulders are unkinked by skilled hands.

Bart Kizierowski, a Cal grad from Poland, and Gabrielle Rose, a Stanford grad with dual U.S. and Brazilian citizenship -- a seemingly unlikely pair, engaged to be married -- share the dining room table with friends.

Algerian-born Salim Iles, who came to the Bay Area this spring after 10 years training in France, dodges the smoke of the grill on the patio as he handles barbecue chores.

A half-dozen more swimmers -- from places like Croatia, Malaysia, Serbia and the Philippines -- are plopped on the living room sofa and floor, watching the NBA playoffs on TV.

Bottom, 48, the co-head coach at Cal and member of the 1980 U.S. Olympic swim team that stayed home from Moscow half a lifetime ago because of the boycott, wanders from room to room, touching base with everyone.

He discusses workout schedules and an upcoming meet. He visits with the two doctors and a chiropractor who drop by each week. He offers bits of philosophy and gives brief pep talks. He checks to make sure everyone has enough to eat.

This is Bottom's team and his family -- Bottomline Aquatics -- an eclectic gathering that is, in the words of Stanford grad Sabir Muhammad, a "United Nations of swimmers."

They come from everywhere -- most of them freestyle sprinters -- to train with Bottom, to learn from and become friends with one another, all with the aim that they will be competitors in August at the Olympic Games in Athens.

Bottom has offered this haven for some of the world's fastest swimmers for five years now, all stemming from one basic premise: "My goal was to challenge the way the world looks at sprint training."

Bottom was a sprinter, first in Santa Clara under the guidance of legendary coach George Haines. But when he got to USC, Bottom's progress stalled, he believes, because of the illogical way sprinters routinely were trained.

"It started making intuitive sense to me that a sprinter needs to train to sprint. It's the law of specificity," he said.

Bottom didn't invent the idea -- he says Dave Salo of Irvine has long preached a similar approach. But Bottom pushed the envelope, and the results speak for themselves.

At Auburn in the early 1990s, he tutored Bill Pilczuk, who several years later ended Russian Aleksandr Popov's seven-year unbeaten streak in the 50-meter free.

"I would not have qualified for one Olympics without Mike. I was at the brink of quitting when I first met him," said Hall, who lives in Florida but spends every spring working with Bottom in the Bay Area. "He's the most underrated coach in the world -- he's the greatest coach in the world."

Cal sprinters have continued to excel under Bottom, with Duje Draganja of Croatia and Milorad "Mike" Cavic of Serbia competing well at the NCAAs and anticipating return trips to the Olympics for their respective countries.

Still, Bottom has been viewed as an unwelcome maverick in some quarters of the swimming world.

Why?

"Politics," Hall said.

Translated, that means "fear," said Bottom, who believes many coaches aren't comfortable having their methods challenged. "I'm different. What I do is very well accepted now," he said. "Who wants to swim

8,000 yards a workout? I can understand why a guy wouldn't want to do that. That was me in college."

For years, all swimmers tackled pretty much the same workload, then spent time working on their specific stroke.

"It's counterintuitive to believe that to be the best sprinter in the world you would need to train and do the most," said Muhammad, the 1998 Stanford grad. "That doesn't make very much sense, even to an outsider. And that's pretty traditional."

Bottom and Hall saw inconsistencies with the era where more was better. Bottom's response was an approach that featured shorter, high-intensity workouts and a detailed emphasis on technique, mixed with non-traditional training methods.

Training features an assortment of dry-land work, including running, yoga, weight-lifting, plyometrics, even boxing.

"If you look at the trunk rotation when a swimmer swims freestyle in the water and you watch a boxer throw hooks, the movement of the trunk is exactly the same," Hall said. "It's that hip rotation that really propels us through the water, gives us more reach and more power."

Instead of long, tedious training sessions, Bottom will have his swimmers do workouts wearing hand paddles and fins on their feet so that they actually swim faster than they would in race conditions.

"We don't swim a pace race -- we swim fast," Bottom explained. "You have to practice fast to see what it feels like when your body is moving through the water faster."

When Bottom met Hall, he found a swimmer discouraged by other coaches who didn't understand Hall's disdain for heavy workout loads.

"He had been beaten up for so long, told he was lazy," Bottom said. "The reality is he was just a thoroughbred sprinter."

Laziness was never the issue, Hall suggested. "It's actually tougher doing Mike's program," he said, adding that Bottom never blinked when Hall was diagnosed with diabetes at 24, a year before the 2000 Games.

Team atmosphere is an equally significant component. During workouts at Cal's Spieker pool, Bottom is not the only teacher. He encourages swimmers to borrow from one another, and with so many influences from varying backgrounds, there is much information to be shared.

"It's a very stimulating environment," said Rose, the only woman and one of the few non-sprinters in the group. "You're always thinking, always trying to find the best way to do things. This is unlike anything I've ever been with."

"Everybody's bringing something from his culture, his way to train, his way to swim," Iles said. "You can't see the differences so much anymore. We're going to be competing against each other, but if you succeed, you're going to be part of this team."

All of it is part of Bottom's almost communal approach to his swim team. In fact, Kizierowski, Rose, Iles, South Africa's Nick Folker and Akira Hayashi, a 29-year-old student-coach from Japan, all currently make Bottom's house their home base.

Bottom's charges gave encouraging performances recently at the Janet Evans Invitational, the final major tuneup meet before the July 7-14 U.S. Olympic Trials in Long Beach.

Cavic, the Cal sophomore who will swim three events for Croatia at the Olympics, knows that what matters are the results in Athens. He has confidence Bottom's formula will work.

"I keep succeeding in what I'm doing," he said.

This story was excerpted from the Alameda Times-Star. Click Here to read the entire story.