MATT COWDREY was born with nothing but thin air below his left elbow. Both legs are in full working order - and they need to be - because he's attempting to do a Michael Phelps by winning eight gold medals during a torturous campaign at the Water Cube.
In a measure of the detail going into his preparation, and the importance of a couple of strong legs to go with his one good arm, the Australian team has made the rather extraordinary decision to give him a pedometer and ban him from taking a single step more than 18,000 a day.
The Australian swimming team's sports scientist, Brendan Burkett, last night revealed Cowdrey and all his aquatic teammates have been placed on a limit of how many steps they can walk in a 24-hour period around the Paralympic village and venues. If Cowdrey reaches his 18,000-step maximum, he is ordered to get a cold drink, a movie and put his feet up for the rest of the day so Beijing's stifling heat doesn't suck the life out of him before he dives into the Paralympic pool from Sunday.
Cowdrey is looming as the superstar of the Games. America's Phelps made history by winning eight swimming gold medals at the Olympics, and Cowdrey has a genuine shot of following suit, speedsuit that is. Earlier this week while everyone was scurrying around looking for athletics superstar Kurt Fearnley's missing wheelchair - it was eventually found under a box in the village - it was feared Cowdrey had appendicitis when he was laid low for a night. But with access to the same Speedo LZR suits that created a storm of controversy and a swag of world records at the Olympics, he trained strongly yesterday, rubbishing any fitness concerns as vehemently as he rejected comparisons to Phelps.
"Michael Phelps was swimming at the Olympics," he said. "My name is Matt Cowdrey and I'm swimming at the Paralympics. I just had a tummy bug. It's all been taken care of, we jumped on it very early, everything is fine. I just need to be fresh every day and I'll do whatever it takes to be fresh. I'm just going to go out and swim as hard as I can in every race I have. It's too hard to put any figure on the medals. I'm relaxed. There's no pressure. Michael Phelps, I don't think it's a comparison you can make. I'll just go out there and be my own person."
Asked about the pedometer, Cowdrey replied: "It's important. You want to maintain what you're doing at home, to keep your legs doing the same amount of work on land so they don't let you down in the water. It's a simple but novel idea."
Burkett was the brains behind the idea. "The whole team is in on it," he said. "They can use up too much energy without even realising it. There's a lot of walking around here that you don't normally do at home.
"You go from your room down to the dining hall, the dining hall to the bus stop, you get to the venue, you go through the venue and security to the pool, and then there's the same routine back out again. The swimmers were given pedometers and measured at home for six weeks so we had a base line to work from.
"When we got here, we found that some of them were doing 40 to 50 per cent more walking than normal. That was going to affect their energy, their muscles were going to tighten up, they would take longer to recover.
"It's critical for their recovery. The Olympians weren't doing it. It's something we've come up with ourselves. None of the other countries have done it. Some of the guys doing 8000 steps at home were up to 15,000 here before they even knew it. Matty is allowed 18,000 steps." Plus a few more on to the podium, once, twice, maybe eight times.