Cameron McEvoy says 50m world record just the beginning, Australian Swimming Trials first chance to go faster

Cameron McEvoy has got into the habit of making the incredible look relatively routine.

So much so that his undoubtedly incredible 50m freestyle world record set earlier this year at the China Open was only the beginning of what he feels he can achieve.

"I definitely think I can get faster," McEvoy said upon his return from China.

The statement seems both scarcely believable yet utterly convincing when coming from the 32-year-old defending Olympic champion. And it makes the event at this evening's Australian swimming trials a must-watch.

Especially because the Sydney Olympic venue is something of a "fast" pool.

Need proof? There have been 37 long-course world records set in the Sydney Olympic pool since it opened in 1994.

The men's 50-metre freestyle world record has been broken three times at Homebush, all by a super suit-clad Eamon Sullivan in that early autumn of accelerated development in 2008.

That being said, just one of those 37 marks set in Sydney still stands: Kaylee McKeown's 200m back.

Budapest's Danube Arena and Fukuoka's competition pool have six current world records each.

Can McEvoy return the men's 50m free to the honour roll tonight?

"On paper, there's definitely room to improve," McEvoy said.

"Whether that happens on an execution point of view, I can't be so certain.

"Even on the training side of things, I'm constantly refining it and developing it.

"The underlying skeleton is always the same, but the actual day-to-day representation of what that looks like; there's many different forms that can take.

"So a part of the game is just rolling the dice on a new approach every season and seeing what comes with that too, which is really exciting and gives a lot more purpose than just chasing times and medals as well.

"So there's a lot more to do."

A short history of the shortest race in swimming

Prior to McEvoy's staggering swim in Shenzhen, the 50m free record had remained a somewhat unattainable target.

At 16 years, it was one of the longest-standing world records remaining in swimming, one of the last relics of the super-suit era — a time both set in the distant past and an inaccessible technology-fuelled future.

Prior to the technological arms race that overtook swimsuit manufacture in the late 2000s, the 50m world record had only been beaten four times in the 19 years since Matt Biondi set his mark of 22.14 at the Seoul Olympics in 1988.

American Tom Jager bettered it three times before Russia's Alexander Popov, the very definition of the anti-super suit swimmer, achieved a mark of 21.64 in speedo briefs and without wearing a swim cap in Moscow in 2000.

However, from the outset of the super-suit era, that all changed.

In February 17, 2008, Australian Eamon Sullivan set a new record of 21.56 at Homebush in the Australian Championships.

By the time César Cielo blasted a 20.91 down the pool just 23 months later, the record had been bettered five times by swimmers wearing suits that covered their torsos and extended down to their ankles.

It had taken 19 years for swimmers to take 0.5 seconds off the record before the super suit era. During it, 0.73 seconds had been erased in under two years.

McEvoy leaning into the 'extreme'

Progress can be achieved in a number of different ways.

Technologically, as was certainly the case in the late 2000's; nefariously, as was the case at the farcical Enhanced Games; or through some other form of innovation, perhaps through training specification.

It's training innovation that is precisely what McEvoy has employed to get himself into shape specifically for 50-metre racing.

McEvoy's approach is not necessarily new. British short course specialist Mark Foster was prioritising a less-is-more training regime as long as 30 years ago to great effect: the six-time short course world champion broke the 50m freestyle world record four times and the 50m butterfly five times in a 25-metre pool during his stellar career.

But McEvoy has taken things to the nth degree, exploring how he can tailor his training even more specifically.

"There's a lot of different ways, from a day-to-day perspective, that this training can go," McEvoy explained when asked whether he was surprised that it had taken him so long under his new regime to break the record.

"Because it'd never been done before, I had to be the guinea pig to trial these out.

"The past four seasons, I had done something, I got a result, but then there was other stuff that I hadn't yet exposed myself to that I wanted to just at least see what would happen if I did.

"I spent the first four seasons pivoting and doing, on the surface, rather different stuff just to gather as much information as I could.

"Off the back of the world championships last year, I'd got to a point where I'd learnt enough and I could really put together something that put all of the good qualities from all of those approaches into one singular one, which is what I've done and it's paid off.

"Surprisingly, it's a little bit more leaning into the extreme side of things, even with respect to what I've already been doing."

What does McEvoy mean by that?

"So, before China Open, I hadn't done any rep past 25 metres," McEvoy said.

"I've been in a strength and power block, a lot of my energy had been around protecting that type of stimulus.

"So in the water, it was all 25 metres.

"If you take the dive out, my first stroke set after 10 [metres], really I only go on 15 metres of swimming in one go with 10-plus minutes' rest in between each rep."

That lack of metres is an anathema to most traditional ways of swim coaching, where yardage is king and disciples were sent ploughing up and down the pool on repeat for hours at a time, racking up 70km a week.

McEvoy would barely cover those sorts of distances in an entire year now.

"I'd be lucky to go over one-and-a-half kilometres a week in the water, over anywhere between two to four sessions," McEvoy said.

"The rest of the time is spent in the gym working on mobility, working on general strength and power — which is a stark contrast to my 30 to 70 kilometres a week that I've done traditionally in the past.

"They were for a spread of events, but I've always been a sprinter. It's very, very different."

Does that not affect his sprint endurance? Perhaps. McEvoy admitted that the final 10 metres of his record-breaking 50 was a fair bit harder than the first half of the race.

"There was a stark contrast in how amazing the first 30 metres felt and how much of a fight the last 10 metres was," he noted with a grin.

But when you're already travelling so fast, that speed from the first half of the race carried him through nicely.

Impressively, if McEvoy can continue to hone his approach and refine the most out of his body, there could be an expectation that he will break the record every time he gets in the water.

'The jury's out' on whether McEvoy's approach will work for all

As much success that McEvoy has enjoyed by swimming less, Australian Dolphins head coach Rohan Taylor noted that his low-distance approach would only work with certain caveats.

"I think there does need to be looking into what is enough, but also where are they in their swimming journey," Taylor said.

"Cam's one of the best … he's our Australian record holder in the 100 [freestyle], he is world-class in the 200 free, and so he has that background and he's technically really, really superior.

"I think that adds to what he's doing, and so it's the right time for him.

"The jury's out on whether a young kid can come in and start training from that perspective and get to where he [Cam] is."

Taylor's note of caution is important. What McEvoy is doing is not a short cut, but a fine-tuning of an already elite swimmer. After all, McEvoy is the Australian record holder over 100m freestyle, with his time of 47.04 set all the way back at the 2016 Australian Championships in Adelaide.

"I think there's an amount of aquatic fitness you need to get with your technique to be able to sustain the type of training loads that you need," Taylor continued.

"I'm not a physiologist and a bio-mechanist from that point of view, but from my own coaching experience, there's garbage yardage and then there's specificity.

"So what's the specificity you need to do? With a young athlete, you want to develop their technique so it's sound and it's conditioned and it can hold up.

"But I would encourage exploration. I think we want to explore what we can do if we just keep sticking to the same old things with the same results.

"The old philosophy that my mentor told me is if you're going to play a piano and be a concert pianist, you don't practise the trumpet, you practise the piano as often as you can and be an expert at it. And I think this is a perfect example of that.

"To be honest, that's the kind of stuff that goes into some of our best swimmers in the world when there are events, whether it's a 50 all the way up to 1,500, they're really specific about the work they do and do exactly what they need to do.

"I think what we're seeing here is something special."

McEvoy himself said he understood what he needed to achieve through every single metre of a one-lap dash: "I'd say I am hyper-specific," he said.

"I've spent a lot of time understanding basically every metre of a 50 metres, what goes into it, how the body responds at that point in time and basically trying to transform that into some form of training stimulus.

"Hyper-specificity is really what I've been doing."

His innovative, counter-intuitive training regime has sparked a revision of everything that swimmers and coaches thought they knew.

"'You never change things by fighting the existing reality," wrote the man whose record he took, Brazilian sprinter César Cielo, when congratulating McEvoy on the record.

"'To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

McEvoy has built that model and now he's refined it, is looking to see just how far — and fast — he can take it.