Stroke of genius: Swimmer looks to Olympics and then medical school
Ben Wildman-Tobriner (BS 2007 Biomechanical Eng.) is one of the best swimmers in Stanford history and has earned three gold medals in two events at the last two World Championships (the 50m sprint and 400m freestyle relay). He almost undoubtedly is the only alumnus of the school to have an endorsement contract with the swimsuit maker Speedo. This summer he is training hard for the Olympic trials. As talented as he is, he is fighting to come back from a terrible injury in December. He is optimistic, however, that he’ll make it to Beijing. Even if he doesn’t make it, he has quite a future ahead, with acceptances from top medical schools. We spoke with him in late April [editor's note: he made it to Beijing].
How's your summer looking?
It’s looking good. It’s a little complicated, partially because in December I tore my pectoral tendon, in my shoulder, which was not a good thing to do. Not that it’s ever a good thing to do, but I was less than thrilled to sustain the first serious injury of my career in the Olympic year. I had surgery to repair it a couple of days later. The past four months have been filled with hours and hours of rehab, and it’s come a really long way in not that long of a time. Four months ago, I couldn’t move my arm, and yesterday in practice I sprinted all out, for the first time. So with about 10 weeks to go until Olympics.
trials, I am optimistic at this point. But certainly it wasn’t the way I had planned to approach the Olympic trials and, hopefully, the Olympic Games. I had a custom wetsuit maker in Santa Cruz make me a one-armed wetsuit-sling-straightjacket, if you will - as complicated as that could be – that would keep my arm pinned against my body while still allowing me to hop in the water and start kicking. So really as soon as the wound healed from the surgery, I was back in the water, swimming with one arm, and kicking. And I would get on a stationary bike with my sling on to try to stay in shape. And then I started taking some baby strokes when I was allowed to do that. And, little by little, here we are where I am fully training again with the team. Things are looking pretty good. The surgeons and physical therapists are still closely monitoring how the shoulder is responding to increasing loads. So, yesterday was really the first time I sort of went after it, if you will. Trying to see how it would respond to sort of the maximum amount of force I could put on it.
As you use terms like “force” and “load,” I am reminded that you studied biomechanical engineering here.
Just yesterday, I read a paper entitled, “Sprinters Need Faster Starts – How Vector Physics Can Improve a Swimmer’s Start.” Our coach just forwarded it to us. I want to get in touch with the author because that’s really how I approach the sport as a whole, with sort of an engineer’s mindset. That was one of the first times I’ve ever read a paper on swimming that really sort of spoke to me in those terms. You know, he was talking about your horizontal velocity vector on the start needs to be as big as possible, whereas you try to minimize your vertical velocity vector. So, sure, velocity vectors are engineering concepts, and they are not often used to describe swimming.
However the Olympic trials go, you can already say you’ve won three gold medals at the World Championships. Do you plan to compete in 2009 or will you be in medical school?
Yeah, that’s going to be a tough choice. And that won’t get decided until after the Olympic trials, when I see what happens. But, yeah, this year I have been applying to medical schools, and I have been admitted to a few at this point (Yale, Columbia, and Mount Sinai) so I’ve got some good options. I’ll have to tell them whether I am going to be coming in the fall of ’08 or in the fall of ’09, because the Olympics themselves are, of course, in August, and that’s usually when schools start. And despite my ambition, it might be foolish to skip the first month of medical school and then try to go.
What made you choose swimming? Anyone who swims is clearly athletic enough to do a lot of things.
I did do a lot of things when I was growing up. I played tons of sports. You name it, I probably tried it at least once. I learned to swim because my mom wanted me to be water safe. It was that simple. She didn’t want to have to worry about me, whether it be at the beach or at the pool, or anywhere else where there are bodies of water. And so, I learned to swim in Marin at the Ann Curtis Swim Club. And Ann Curtis was an Olympian swimmer in 1948 for the United States. I guess I really owe my start in competitive swimming to my older sister Becky. She decided to join a summer league swim team, and I followed suit. I had my first race when I was 6, and I never really stopped. From the age of 6 until 12, I played a bunch of sports. I really liked baseball. But I was always pretty good at swimming, so by the time I was 12 or 13 I had decided to sort of pursue it a bit more seriously, which involved stopping playing other sports, which was a tough decision for a 12 or 13 year old, but I saw my teammates and competitors, and I realized what had to be done to continue to improve in what I consider as a pretty difficult sport. When I was 13, I joined what’s called a club team in San Francisco, and they swim year-round, so you go to more swim meets than just a summer league team. My high school swim team had three boys on it, so it was a pretty small team. There’s not a lot you can do for relays when you have three people. We did some relays where I swam twice. But those didn’t count, actually. But I had some pretty good success in high school, to the point where I was thinking about swimming in college. Stanford offered, in my opinion, really the almost sole opportunity of a superior academic institution in combination with an excellent swim team. There are certainly other good academic schools, but they really don’t have great a swim teams. And there’s certainly the flip side. The athletics department and the school like to talk about that duality between student and athlete, and I think that really did come to fruition with my experience here.
Are there highlights of your Stanford swimming career that you remember particularly fondly?
Well, there’s a lot. The Stanford/Cal dual meets are always really fun. And while those aren’t the focus of the competition season, whenever you put Cal and Stanford together, it always results in some good competition. All four years that I was at Stanford, it rained during the dual meet. I have really fond memories of it just pouring rain, everybody’s freezing, but excited to be racing. And I think probably my favorite is going to Cal and beating them in their pool. Just ‘cause it’s always fun to do. In the final dual meet of my career at Stanford, we raced at Cal and beat them, which was a great way to finish my four years.
On the academic side, what did you enjoy here?
Well, I really enjoyed the more “hands-on” classes that I was able to take. My high school was actually a technical arts high school that had a woodshop and a machine shop, and so, when ME203 came around, I was really enthusiastic to take that class. There’s a similar one, ME112, where you’re building actual objects that hopefully work. And just seeing what you are studying put into action is usually quite gratifying.
What inspired you to want to go to med school? Were there interesting classes here specific to that?
I’ve always really enjoyed science in all its different forms and I’ve just always thought of medicine as a really noble profession that could also potentially save me from working at a desk every day of my life. I am not entirely convinced that I am going to become a practicing doctor. People change careers, we decide what we want to do when we grow up at various times in our lives. But for the time being, I think that at least going to medical school and exploring that world would be pretty interesting. At Stanford, I got to take two classes in medical device design. That sort of brings it all together. The first one was a seminar my sophomore year called Medical Device Innovation. And then the second one I believe was ME294, and that’s called Medical Device Design. In that class, which I took my senior year, we were paired with a surgeon from Stanford Hospital where we designed a medical device using the shop and were actually building a prototype, and testing it on some cow liver and some actual flesh. Getting to go into the hospital and see what he does and to see how our device might be able to improve his life, as a surgeon, was a pretty immersive experience. It was awesome.
What was your experience being an engineering student athlete? It is probably not the least demanding major.
All engineers love to gripe about the fact that they are all three-unit classes, and you work as hard as a five-unit class. So certainly combining pre-med with an engineering degree, without question, my experience as a student athlete was a difficult one. And in this sort of interim year now, where I have graduated and I am training, but not in school, it’s given me a lot of perspective and respect for how the heck I did it for four years. It gives me a lot of respect for all of the other student athletes at Stanford, too. Really no matter the major, if you want to try to do well on the student side of student-athlete, it’s going to take a certain degree of sacrifice. But especially if you choose engineering as a pursuit, there is no question, it wasn’t a cruise major. I just tried to keep it all in perspective and know that I was working toward goals, both in and out of the pool. That paid off with some of the nice choices I have for medical school. And even if I decide to not go to medical school, an engineering degree from Stanford is going to keep a lot of doors open for many years to come.
