100 Olympic Athletes To Watch

Swimming
France
Age: 25

In the early 1970s, ABC's multi-discipline "Superstars" program pointedly demonstrated— via half drowning U.S. football stars— that brute strength may help athletes win titles in other sports, but pure power won't get you very far in a swimming pool. Clearly, French swimmer Alain Bernard never watched U.S. network TV. The towering, muscle-bound Bernard heads into the Games favored to win swimming's glamour event, the 100m freestyle. He's also a likely podium candidate in the 50m free. Last March, Bernard shoe-horned his 6-ft. 4-in. (1.96m), 194 lb. (88kg) frame into Speedo's new high-tech body suit and tore his way to a new 100m world record of 47.5 secs. The following day, Bernard used the 15 lbs. ( 7 kg.) of pure muscle he had added over the previous year to set the 50m world mark—a 21.5 second effort that has since been bettered by Australian Eamon Sullivan. Bernard is unapologetic about using brawn to bag titles in a traditional finesse sport, and gives additional reason for detractors to stifle criticism: when he set his world records, Bernard's short-twitching mass wasn't even fully tapered— in Beijing, he'll be ready.