'Hovercraft' Bernard blazes supersonic trail

By Sophie Greuil

PARIS (Reuters) - Eight years ago, a lanky teenager called Alain Bernard with hardly promising credentials in backstroke and medley swimming walked up to his coach and told him he wanted to become an Olympic champion.

"I didn't believe he could," Denis Auguin, still coaching the French phenomenon, told reporters in Eindhoven, where his pupil has smashed the 100 metres freestyle world record twice in as many days.

"He was all bones and was one the weakest swimmers in my group," Auguin said.

Now as heavily muscled as a comic superhero, Bernard, who was unheard of outside swimming circles a year ago, had warned before the championships he believed Dutchman Pieter van den Hoogenband's 47.84-second mark was within his reach.

That record, set at the 2000 Sydney Games, was precisely what had sparked Bernard's dreams of Olympic glory.

"In the back of my head I know I can swim 47.50," Bernard told Reuters in an interview last month. "I have it in in me and it will come, I just don't know when."

It came in Eindhoven, ironically in Van den Hoogenband's home pool, where Bernard clocked 47.60 in his semi-final, then 47.50 the next day to claim the title.

While Bernard simply said he believed he could swim even faster, France's national technical director Claude Fauquet summed up a general feeling by saluting a "mythical exploit" in French and world sport.