New York Times article on Laszlo Cseh and his rivalry with Phelps and Lochte

Laszlo Cseh Uses Silver as a Steppingstone

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/sports/laszlo-cseh-uses-silver-as-a-steppingstone-swimming.html

By KAREN CROUSE

ATLANTA — The wake-up call on Laszlo Cseh’s phone will not let him snooze. When he is tired from travel, fatigued from training, or drained from his Sisyphean pursuit of Michael Phelps, he cues a video of the 200-meter butterfly final at the 2008 Olympics, which he downloaded upon returning home from Beijing.

“Sometimes when I go to training in the morning and I get tired or I want to sleep more and I feel I need some boost, I watch it,” Cseh said. He added, “I watch it a lot of times.”

Cseh, of Hungary, finished second in the 200 butterfly and in the 200 and 400 individual medleys at the Beijing Games, touched out each time by Phelps. It was a familiar scene. Since 2003, Cseh has won nine individual world championship medals but only one gold, as Phelps and, more recently, Ryan Lochte have foiled his goal of world domination.

Like tennis players who have come of age in the era of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, Cseh has pondered the question of whether it is the worst of timing or the best.

“I think a lot about that,” Cseh said. “Maybe if there is no Phelps, no Lochte, I’m not as good. They make me better and the other swimmers better because of how fast they are swimming.”

Cseh won three events last weekend at the European short-course championships in Poland, then traveled to the United States, motivated by the promise of racing Lochte here on Friday and Saturday at the Duel in the Pool. Cseh was a member of the European contingent, which took on an American squad that was missing Phelps, who skipped the event.

The rivals converged on Georgia Tech Aquatic Center, the site of the 1996 Olympic competition, from different places in their preparation for next summer’s London Olympics. Cseh did not expect to be sharp because he was coming off a week of high-intensity racing. Lochte was dragging because he was in the midst of high-intensity training. He warmed up for his first events Friday with a 6,000-meter workout.

Their showdown in the 400 individual medley on Friday was the swimming equivalent of a first-round knockout, with Cseh falling behind both Lochte and the American Tyler Clary on the butterfly leg on his way to finishing over a body-length behind Lochte (3 minutes 59.52 seconds) and Clary (4:00.35).

At the Beijing Olympics, Cseh swam the freestyle leg of the 400 individual medley two seconds faster than Lochte to pass him in the final 100 meters. After the race, Phelps washed his hands of the grueling event, saying he was through competing in it. Cseh could see the sky clearing, but then a giant cloud rolled in. Lochte medaled in six events at the world championships this July in Shanghai and would appear to be primed for a peak performance in London.

“In Beijing, Phelps said, ‘I quit the 400 I.M.,’ and after he said that, Ryan’s beating everyone in every stroke,” Cseh said. “So it’s going to be really hard. But I think that’s O.K.”

Cseh, 26, is not the first in his family to swim in a superstar’s heavy wake. His father, Laszlo Sr., was a backstroker who competed in the 1968 and 1972 Summer Olympics against Roland Matthes, an East German who did not lose a backstroke race from 1967 to 1974.

“I know about that,” Cseh said, “but I don’t talk about it with my father.”

Matthes’s unbeaten streak was snapped at a duel meet in Northern California by the American John Naber, who also ended Matthes’s two-Olympic reign as the backstroke king at the 1976 Summer Games in Montreal.

Naber’s strategy for dethroning Matthes was to stop chasing him.

“The only way I could imagine beating Roland was to think how fast did I believe he was going to swim and race the clock,” Naber said in a telephone interview. “That way I was just racing an impersonal, dispassionate number and not the Iceman, which is how I considered Roland because he was impenetrable and very resourceful.”

The time Naber set as his goal in the 100 backstroke, he said, was 55.50 seconds. He captured the Olympic gold medal in Montreal with a clocking of 55.49.

In Beijing, Cseh described Phelps as unbeatable and said, “Anytime you think you can get close to Michael Phelps, he jumps to another level.”

Cseh says now that he was not conceding defeat but merely stating the obvious.

“Michael was so great in Beijing,” he said. “I don’t think I lost something there. I feel every race I won the silver.”

When Cseh replays the 200 butterfly final, he sees not only the 0.67-second margin of defeat, but also the gains to be made. He was faster on the third 50 than Phelps, but frittered away too many fractions of a second on the walls. His focus since Beijing, he said, has been on fine-tuning his stroke and his turns.

“I work on improving my underwater kicks,” Cseh said, “and becoming more efficient in my technique so I get less tired.”

Phelps is expected to retire after next year, but Cseh said he had not ruled out swimming through the 2016 Olympics. He has been a fixture on the international scene since he won a silver medal in the 400 I.M. at the 2003 world championships. A year later, Cseh broke his foot during a training camp before the 2004 Olympics and managed a bronze medal in the 400 I.M., behind two Americans: Phelps and Erik Vendt.

The injury seemed unfortunate at the time, but Cseh sees it differently now.

“Maybe if I had the world record in 2003 or 2004 or won the gold medal, I don’t have the feeling that I need to improve myself,” he said. “It has been a long time, but I’m still here. Maybe the training is a little harder, but I feel I’m getting better as I get older.”