As one of Egypt’s brightest hopes for a medal at next year’s Beijing Olympics, swimmer Mohamed El-Zanaty has a strange sense of humor when he talks about his sport.

“Swimming is really boring — really boring,” he says with a shrug. “You’re putting your face in the water and counting.”

Given his Olympic event is the marathon of swimming — a 10-kilometer open-water event that takes two hours to complete — it’s just as well El-Zanaty is so keen on winning. The two minutes after a victory, he says, make all those hours spent pulling his 186 centimeter frame through the water worthwhile.

At 23, El-Zanaty has already earned his place in the record books as the first Egyptian to win a medal at the FINA World Championships when he took bronze in Melbourne, Australia in March for the 25-kilometer open-water event. Now, as athletes around the world face the tough qualifying processes for next year’s Beijing Olympic Games, El-Zanaty is one man that Egyptian sports officials are excited about. Legendary distance swimmer Abd El-Latif Abou Heif — dubbed the “Crocodile of the Nile” and recognized as the Marathon Swimmer of the Century by the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2001 — describes El-Zanaty as someone who can bring back Egypt’s glory days of the 1940s and 50s — and perhaps top even his own remarkable achievements.

In addition to the more familiar medal-winning faces from weightlifting, boxing, wrestling and taekwondo, the world may well see the first Egyptian swimmer standing on the Olympic medal dais in August next year.

When Egypt Today asked Egyptian Olympic Committee Secretary General Khaled Zein El Din about promising new Olympic hopes, El-Zanaty’s was the first name that he mentioned. “I think he has a good chance,” he says.

Boris Dubinin, El-Zanaty’s taciturn coach, merely nods his head and says he is “hopeful.”

Abou Heif believes his young friend and protégé could be the greatest Egyptian swimmer ever.

“Of course El-Zanaty can win a medal,” he says. “He takes his training very seriously. He takes his life very seriously. He’s a good boy. He has the chance to be better than me because he is still young. To be a champion is not easy; you have to sacrifice your time, your happiness. El-Zanaty reminds me of myself when I was young.”

On the day et met El-Zanaty, he was taking his training very seriously indeed in the pool at Cairo Stadium, doing laps back and forth, gliding through the water rhythmically and relentlessly. He made it look effortless.

On every day but Friday, he trains from 6am to 9am, sometimes 10am and again in the afternoon from 4pm to 7pm. That’s six or seven hours a day, six days a week in the pool — more hours than many people work.

Endurance is his strength, rather than the ability to sprint the final stage to the finish line. His tactic, he says, is to wear the competition down by staying in front for most of the race while his opponents exhaust themselves trying to keep up. “I need to be in the lead, increase the pace and make the other swimmers tired.”

El-Zanaty built up his toughness in the open seas by training weekly around Ismailia and Alexandria. If conditions in China next year are tough, he will have an advantage. “Out there, you’re swimming against nature. It’s much harder. But hard conditions for me are better. I like hard conditions — waves, hard currents — because I can survive in them.”

Beijing will be the first Olympics to stage the open-water 10 kilometer swim, so sports fans won’t be too familiar with the competitors standing in El-Zanaty’s way of a medal. Like his hero, Rocky Balboa, El-Zanaty also faces a tough time at the hands of a Russian.

Or, more precisely, two Russians: Vladimir Dyatchin and Evgeny Drattsev, who along with German Thomas Lurz and Bulgarian Petar Stoychev, are the biggest threats.

Dyatchin beat Lurz by less than a hundredth of a second to take the gold in the 10 kilometer event in Melbourne. In the same race, El-Zanaty missed out on a second bronze medal by just half a second to Drattsev. On the other hand, he beat Stoychev by 0.8 seconds to claim his first big international win in the 25 kilometer event at the World Cup in China in 2003.

These excruciatingly tight finishes for such long races are a cause for hope for El-Zanaty, because they show he is right up there with the best.

“You’ll see a very close finish,” he says. “I think I can do it. I’m close. But I can lose it very fast, too.”

After learning to swim at the age of four, El-Zanaty spent his younger years as a short-distance swimmer. He joined his first swim team at age nine. From 11 to 15, he won the Egyptian nationals and began to break national records. Between the ages of 15 and 17 he went through a slump. That was when Abou Heif entered his life.

“He is like my godfather,” El-Zanaty says. “He’s always there for me. He’s the one that discovered me. He took me from the swimming pool and said, ‘You should go for long distance. You can change Egyptian history and bring us back again.’ He said, ‘If you can be a hero in the short distance, you can be a superhero in the long distance’.”

Unlike his mentor, who has a beach and a street named after him in Alexandria and is a household name, El-Zanaty is little known, largely because he lives and competes in the giant shadow of football. In fact, he doesn’t even have a sponsor.

“It’s hard in Egypt because there’s no publicity for swimming. Only football — everywhere, football. If I win a medal at the Olympics, they will build a fourth Pyramid with my name on it. I’m just joking, but it would be great to get some credit. My dream is to put my name in history. That was my dream when I was little.”

El-Zanaty’s relative obscurity is despite the fact that he has already stood on the international dais 35 times, with six golds. He swam the 37-kilometer annual event from Capri to Naples in Italy, and his longest race ever was an 88 kilometer marathon in Argentina, which took nearly 15 hours.

“It was a nightmare,” he says. “I was sore for five days. I was like Rocky after he fought the Russian, Ivan Drago.” Of his celluloid hero, El-Zanaty says Rocky taught him never to give up.

“I mean, he’s not real, but I admire the way he’s thinking and the way he achieves. When he loses, he comes back stronger and harder. If he’s knocked down he comes back. Sometimes I lose; I have to pick up my feet and keep going. You feel bad. It’s hard. Mentally you’re disappointed; you don’t have the spirit to do anything. Why should I train? I train hard and I lose.”

But more and more often he does win and, as expectations are raised, so is the pressure. Once, he was a young swimmer with nothing to lose. Now he has a position and a ranking. In his words: “Something to be afraid of.”

“Everyone is waiting and that keeps the pressure on,” he says. “Even when I’m on vacation, I’m thinking about my next training. My one day off passes really fast. I have a good heart; I have a good spirit but, sometimes, I’m afraid about what’s going to happen. Am I going to be on that podium after the race?”

He certainly seems to have what it takes — if he can just stave off that boredom. et