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King of the Pool
| Date: |
20 March 2005 12:00 |
| Producer: |
Victoria Cullinan
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Ryk Neethling (Olympic Gold medallist): We swam the perfect race. Every guy did exactly what he was supposed to do... took the bull by the horns and never let go.
Ryk Neethling anchored the South African freestyle relay team at the Olympics last year.
Commentator: 'South Africa, gold in the relay.'
Derek Watts (Carte Blanche presenter): 'It was really one of the big surprises at the Athens Olympics. The little known and hardly rated team of South Africans taking on the top guns in the men's 100metres freestyle relay, snatching victory from the Australians and Americans and winning gold in record time.
Ryk: 'When I touched that wall in Athens I had been working towards that dream for so long and it was a lot of hard work; emotions, disappointment, frustration all came out, and when I punched the air it was all I had left. I was just going crazy.'
To get the gold medal and world record took Ryk twenty years of hard training and sacrifice, with little recognition or financial reward.
Derek: 'And the whole team looked mildly excited.'
Ryk: 'That wasn't a planned thing. It was just what we all thought. We had been going through a lot of hard times and the support before the Olympics was pretty good, but for years leading up it was bad. We would go to meet[s] where there were no swimsuits. We would have one T-shirt for a seven-day meet or we would have to re-use our tracksuits for a couple of years in a row. I told the guys we need to use this; we need to turn this around instead of feeling sorry for ourselves. Let's bank it in the back there and let's get angry and tough. When we won, it was just the anger and toughness coming out and said, 'There you go....'
Derek: 'Surely life has changed after gold in Athens?'
Ryk: 'Yes, life completely changed for better.'
Finally, at the age of 27, Ryk is now the flavour of the year. His athletic physique graces the covers of glossy magazines, sponsors are queuing up at his door and he was even voted Cosmo magazine's sexiest man of the year.
Derek: 'And is Amanda Beard still a big part of your life, or is there a vacancy?'
Ryk: 'She's still a very good friend and I talk to her very often, but there is kind of a vacancy. I don't know what kind of girl would want to be with me because when I'm training I just eat, sleep and swim pretty much.'
Derek [to Ryk's mother]: 'Do you have to protect Ryk from thousands of young girls trying to get his number and address?'
San-Marie Neethling (Ryk's mother): 'Yes, even old ladies. Like 70 years, 80 years... ... they['re] like calling day and night.'
Even so, Ryk's parents San-Marie and Ryk senior are delighted to have their son back. After nearly a decade of living in America, Ryk has returned to South Africa.
Derek: 'Ryk got his first inkling that swimming would be a huge part of his life at an early age. He was six when he nearly drowned in a neighbors pool, and was marched off to lessons.'
Almost right from the start he was a top performer, winning golds and breaking national records.
San-Marie: 'I remember when he was at his first prize-giving in primary school he got prizes for swimming and academics. But he was upset because one of his friends had got a prize for neatness, and he didn't know about this prize otherwise he would have been neater. So he always wanted to win.'
And he always had his sights set on that Olympic gold. It was while he was a 15-year -old schoolboy at Gray College in his hometown Bloemfontein that Ryk was first selected to swim for South Africa in 1993.
Derek: 'Those were the days of the Speedo?'
Ryk: 'Yeah.'
Derek: 'Now these days you have skins and you shave and everything?'
Derek: 'Yeah. I believe if you swim unshaved or shaved in 100 metre freestyle that can make a second's difference, and that's huge in freestyle.'
In 1996 Ryk went to his first Olympics in Atlanta. He managed to come fifth in the fifteen hundred metre finals.
Derek: 'It was just after the Atlanta Olympics that Ryk and his family decided that he should go for the big league. At the age of 17 he left from Bloemfontein to attend the University of Arizona where he spent the next decade.
Ryk: 'Going to America offered me a chance for me to start over. I was always shy and I told myself that I can completely start over and kind of leave this alter ego Ryk Neethling. In America you really have to be like that, otherwise you'll get left behind.'
But it was tough for the 18-year-old boy on a scholarship. Ryk could barely speak English, didn't know anyone and had very little money. But whenever he wanted to quit, he would remember his younger sister Elsja who was recovering from cancer back home.
Ryk: 'I just thought of my sister who would go to school with the shaved head, with a big scar on her head and she would go without a hat or wig or anything. She would just walk on and say, 'This is me, I'm going to fight this thing.' So there was no way I was going to phone my parents and say I'm coming home, it's too hard here. Because I didn't want my sister to get the upper hand.'
Derek: 'Most people don't realise just how well you did in America. You lifted that university right to the top.
Ryk: 'The first year, my freshman year, we went to the national championships. There were about 350 universities that have swim teams that compete and we got 16th and that wasn't good enough for me.
So he was made captain and within three years his university had climbed to third place out of 350 Universities. Ryk won the Swimmer of the Year award nine times and he was voted Athlete of the Century. Once he had his psychology degree he got a job, but trained after hours six hours a day, six days a week, year in and year out.
Derek: 'Surely swimming is one of the toughest sports when it comes to training... up and down that pool.'
Ryk: 'The up and down part is fun for me. I look forward to going to a pool and training hard and hurting and being tired.'
Derek: 'So you're a part time masochist?'
Ryk: 'Full time.'
Derek: 'In 1998 Ryk was one of the five best distance swimmers in the world. When he won the silver for the 1500 at the Commonwealth Games, beating his Australian rival Kieron Perkins, the Australian media labeled him 'public enemy number one'. Ryk was dead certain for a gold at the Sydney Olympics.'
But it didn't happen. Even though he swam his best time, he still only finished fifth.
Ryk: 'I was very disappointed for a long time and there were a lot of different factors that played into it. My performance - and also, some of the guys I raced against were tested and they tested way off the scale for human growth hormone and EBO but nothing was done to them, so that kind of influenced me.'
He was written off by the local media. For a few months after Sydney, Ryk went into a depression and he very nearly gave up swimming.
Ryk: 'I was disappointed and being called a choker, but I kept those clippings and - on days when it was hard to get up - the stuff they wrote about me motivated me.'
Derek: 'So it became a motivation?'
Ryk: 'Definitely.'
He decided to change from distance swimming to sprinting.
Ryk: 'The 100 metre dash guys are a bit more flash. You're in the weight room pumping iron and just swimming half of what you were swimming before.'
Derek: 'It sounds like a bargain all round because it's less training and more glamour.'
Ryk: 'Yeah, I know. That's why most kids want to do it.
The change has certainly paid off. Since taking the Olympic gold, Ryk has broken the world record in the men's individual medley, not once, but three times.
Ryk: 'It was so unexpected. It was just like that! Touch the wall and then, oh a new world record. And then in New York I improved it by half a second.'
Ryk took the FINA World Cup series title and a fifty thousand dollar cheque by winning an outstanding 21 gold medals. It may have taken two decades, but there is no doubt that Ryk has established himself as one of the best swimmers ever to have competed for South Africa.'
Derek: 'Recently and through the last few years there has been tremendous rivalry between you and Rowan Schoeman.'
Ryk: 'Yeah, it's a kind of interesting relationship because we're both competitive, super competitive people. I think it is for the best, because he's pushing me to new levels and I'm pushing him.'
Derek: 'It's actually good for both of you.'
Ryk: 'It's very good. It's really lifted the two of us above the rest of the world.'
His next big goal? To get a medal at the Commonwealth Games in two years' time and then of course the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008.
Derek: 'But surely there must be times where you're saying, 'not another signature and not another picture'?'
Ryk: 'The signatures I really don't mind. The pictures with fans I don't mind at all. Every picture I take now people say how proud they are of me and I'll never get tired of that, ever.'
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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