Different climes, different times

Mention of the 2004 Olympics in Sydney still provokes a grimace from Israel's swimmers.

On the eve of those Games, no fewer than 10 swimmers managed to power their way onto the team, the largest delegation representing Israel.

Once in the pool, however, their heats were not so hot.

The only exceptions were Eitan Orbach, who made a historic finals run, and Michael Halika, who got close. The rest of the swimmers disappointed. The old cliche about quality and quantity never sounded so fresh.

Post-mortems showed that the failings lay not necessarily in the quality department, but in training.

Some of the athletes reached peak performance early, leading to the conclusion that the training camp the team ran ahead of the Games may have been run mistakenly, or perhaps should not have been run at all.

Once in Sydney, the team did not have enough time to acclimate to conditions in the Olympic Village.

Four years later, the Israeli delegation had no such problems. Athens, after all, is just around the corner.

For these Games, however, the team is again traveling far afield, to Beijing, and the delegation's organization has been entirely revamped.

"We decided we wanted the athletes to arrive at least a week before the Olympics in Beijing in order to get accustomed to the conditions," said Gil Lustig, the head of the government's Elite Sport Department.

Despite the committee's recommendations, each Israeli delegation is being given a different amount of time to get organized in Beijing.

As a result, tension has built up between the Israel Olympic Committee and the Israel Swimming Association, after the latter decided to send its athletes to train for the Games in Tokyo.

"After the European Championship, it became clear that we have a strong team, so we agreed with Lustig on a training camp to be held before the Olympics," said Aharon Isras, head of the swimming association.

Lustig says he has no interest in getting embroiled in a conflict between the swimming association and the Olympic committee just before the Games.

Still, he defends the decision to train in Japan.

"It's important they be in a similar climate, and a similar time zone, to Beijing, so they can become acclimated," he said. "It took some time before we got permission to go to Tokyo."

"Now we're trying to fund the camp ourselves," he said.

Telling time zones

Another Israeli athlete training in a similar time zone is pole-vaulter Alex Averbuch, practicing with a Russian team in Siberia.

Averbukh is a first-class athlete - he seems to believe that resetting his body clock and undergoing strict Soviet-style training can give him an edge over the competition. Still further afield is 53-year-old Ethiopian-born marathon runner Haile Satain, who claims that training in the high altitudes of his birthplace improves his performance.

Last week, Satain was jailed for several days in the city of Gondar for unknown reasons, and after being release decided to continue training in the country.

"The influence of high-altitude conditions remains for up to two weeks after returning to normal altitudes, and from a professional perspective he is right. It is also better for him to expose himself as little as possible to the pollution of Beijing," said physiologist Muli Epstein.

"The Olympic Village tends to be distracting. You might go to breakfast and have Kobe Bryant sitting across from you, and that's disorienting. I'm trying to impress that upon Shahar Peer, whom I'm working with," Epstein said.

Along with the other tennis players, Peer will leave for Beijing in a week. Tzipi Obziler, who will compete with her in doubles play, played down the difficulty of acclimating to a different environment.

"We, as tennis players, are used to traveling to tournaments in different places with different climates. Acclimating in the East is not the same as in the U.S. In China, it takes three days to get used to the time of day, but in the U.S. almost a week. So there's enough time."