Beijing Olympic Games

SWIMMER Nick D'Arcy's Olympic dream has been revived after the Australian Olympic Committee said he will be eligible to swim for Australia at the 2012 Games.

NICK D'Arcy has cleared one hurdle by avoiding a jail term for assault, but he has others to negotiate before he can stand on the blocks at the Rome world championships in July.

NICK D'Arcy has been thrown one lifeline by a judge. Now he needs another from Swimming Australia.

KEVIN Rudd's semi-secret meeting on Saturday with Li Changchun, the Chinese politburo member in charge of propaganda, media and ideology, is one of the most bizarre episodes of his prime ministership. It is almost certainly more stupid than sinister, but it does raise legitimate questions about Chinese influence in Australia. Li is ranked No.5 in China's nine-member ruling politburo standing committee. Rudd welcomed Li and the accompanying Chinese media to the Lodge in Canberra but didn't tell the Australian people about it.

THE lawyer who led the Australian Olympic Committee's campaign to dismiss Nick D'Arcy from the Beijing Games team last year believes in redemption.

• Olympic champion shows fine form in qualifying
• Patten misses out after 13th-place finish

Rebecca Adlington looked in excellent form as she cruised into the final of the 800 metres freestyle at the British Gas Swimming Championships in Sheffield.

The double Olympic champion was comfortably the fastest qualifier for tomorrow's final despite swimming well within herself to finish in eight minutes 33.92 seconds, well outside her own world record. The 20-year-old is all but certain to book her place in the team for the World Championships in Rome this summer.

Keri-Anne Payne, silver medallist in the 10km open water event in Beijing, was second fastest ahead of Jazmin Carlin, who was third in the 400m freestyle on Monday in which Jo Jackson broke the world record.

However, Cassie Patten, who reached last year's Olympic final, failed to make it through, finishing 13th.

Hannah Miley and Ellen Gandy returned from their record-breaking exploits last night to qualify for the semi-finals of the 200m butterfly.

Gandy, who broke Jemma Lowe's British record in the 100m butterfly, was fastest ahead of Miley, the new European 200m individual medley record holder.

Former Commonwealth champion James Goddard left it late before coming back on the final length to win his heat of the 200m backstroke. However, the Stockport Metro swimmer was only third fastest behind former European junior champion Marco Loughran and his successor Chris Walker-Hebborn.

Wednesday evening's session features Jackson and double Commonwealth champion Caitlin McClatchey in the 200m freestyle final, although Adlington has withdrawn from the race to concentrate on the 800m. Andrew Hunter heads a competitive field in the men's equivalent, Kris Gilchrist leads the field for the 100m breaststroke and Olympic finalist James Goddard is favourite for the 200m individual medley. Kate Haywood is favourite for the 100m breaststroke.

Double Olympic gold does not mean an end to the punishing regime needed to scale sporting heights

Rebecca Adlington stood dripping by Sheffield's Ponds Forge pool on Monday, having torn up the 400m freestyle world record but still lost, to her team-mate Jo Jackson, by 0.23sec, and the only moment she almost cracked was when asked if all the delirium after Beijing had eaten away at her hunger to win.

"It's never been a question of motivation," she insisted, visibly welling up, just for an instant. "I've always been motivated. It has been a question of how I would deal with the level of expectation; that is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Hopefully that race showed I've dealt with it quite well."

Bill Furniss, Adlington's coach at the Nottingham Nova Centurion club, for whom Jackson also swims, declared himself "stunned" by Adlington's "awesome" performance, particularly because her resumption of training, after the double Olympic gold, was delayed by the enormous media appetite for her. Furniss confesses to slight irritation by the focus of much of the coverage, which emphasised Adlington as an everyday Mansfield teenager with a thing for Jimmy Choo shoes, and he believes the scale of her sporting achievement, and the prodigious work which underpinned it, got lost.

"The public expects great performances but they haven't a clue how demanding and punishing the sport is," Furniss asserted. "In Australia and America they have more understanding of the challenges and technicalities. Here we associate all sport with football. Footballers can train two or three times a week; they have to be fit enough to run around for 90 minutes, and they can stop and start.

"Swimming is an endurance sport, it is about how fast a person can swim, to the hundredth of a second. You are flat out, full on, for the duration of the race. The only way to prepare is to do the race, many times, at velocity. It is a brutal physio­logical sport."

The training for swimmers is similar in structure to athletics, based on the "period­isation" of a year, building preparation in phases, designed so the competitor will peak on one crucial day.

This year, the world championships final of the 800m freestyle, Adlington's best event, is on 1 August in Rome, so Furniss has worked backwards from that day to schedule the year of training. Beyond that, he has worked out a four-year plan for Adlington to be in peak shape at the London Olympic finals in 2012. "The first phase builds a base of strength and endurance," Furniss said. "It's long, steady, aerobic work. Typically she will swim sets of 4,000m, 10 repetitions of 400m in five minutes each including rest [Jackson's world record on Monday was 4min 00.66sec]. Becky's maximum heart rate is 198, and on these endurance sessions she will be 40 below her maximum.

"When she has that endurance base, we stretch and extend it, then break the sessions down into shorter distances, for speed and power work, developing racing fitness. A set might involve 30 repetitions of 100m, in 90 seconds each including rest, with her heart rate at 180, close to her maximum. That's a classic heart-rate: muscles screaming, pain, agony, she's going through pain barriers after the first one. She will do five sets like that a week. It's brutal, punishing."

Adlington, Jackson and the other international swimmers have been training to these extremes since they were 12, up at 5am every day to carve up the lengths in public pools.

Furniss, 54, a sports science graduate and level five swimming coach who has been responsible for Adlington since she was 12, laments the limited public appreciation of the sacrifice involved and sophisticated nature of modern performance. He explained that the endurance sets are to create "lactate tolerance," training the swimmer's body to bear lactic acid, which produces the burning sensation in muscles. The shorter, faster sessions are "lactate producing," in which the muscles burn, the swimmers rest, then go again.

"No matter how fit you are, you will produce lactate," he said. "If you can keep going, you are working towards maximum fitness and can sprint-finish. In effect, the training is educating the body to tolerate pain. It is extremely challenging work, which is emotionally draining too. It is day in, day out grind."

The final period of preparation before a competition involves easing off the intensity of training, to "taper" down, so that a swimmer's body, already finely tuned, is fresh for the precise day of a final. Structuring the training with sufficient rest is "a very difficult balance" and Furniss added: "If you get it wrong, you can have the athlete swimming perfectly a week after the competition. And some athletes only get one chance. Some break world records but never win an Olympic medal."

Furniss's schedule had allowed for Adlington to have a break after her 400m and 800m triumphs in Beijing, but her explosion into celebrity, the interviews and photoshoots, ate up more time than they ever imagined and she started late. Speaking poolside on Monday, Adlington acknowledged that she has not put in the necessary miles for the 800m freestyle, in which the British championships final is tomorrow. "The distance work for the 800m is so hard," she said, "and with all the media attention, I haven't been able to do the training."

Her management team agreed a media black-out starting in January so Adlington could return to serious training, and Furniss said they used the limited time before these British championships, which serve as the qualifying trials for the world championships, to concentrate on speed rather than endurance work. Her preparation was further interrupted by a stomach bug last month, which explains both Adlington's and Furniss's delight at her record-breaking 4:00.89 on Monday.

"She hasn't had the time to put the work in for the 800m, but she showed on Monday she will do a good job," Furniss said. "She is at around 90% fitness now so I can see how much more we can do before the world championships start in July.

"She is a nice bubbly girl, but she is driven. I have been a coach for 30 years and have never coached anyone with the determination she has – never. She is a perfectionist. She is talented, but she has an ability, day in, day out, to push herself to the limit. I believe the rule that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be good at anything, and the old adage is true, that success is down 10% to natural talent and 90% to hard work."

This is the foundation of work that the rest of us, spectators at the moments of victory and defeat, do not see.

david.conn@guardian.co.uk

THE fate of Australia's bid to host the world's most-watched sporting event, football's World Cup, will be decided in the next 24 hours.

AUSTRALIA'S participation in next year's Commonwealth Games - and the entire event itself - could be scrapped as close as a month out from the scheduled October 3 opening ceremony if security demands are not met.

AUSTRALIA'S participation in next year's Commonwealth Games in India - even the event - could be scrapped as late as a month before the October 3 opening.