Eric the Eel is Back!

According the the tourism website Ecquitorial Guinea Online, everyone’s favorite Equatoguinean Eric “the Eel” Musambani will be making another appearance at the 2012 London Olympic Games.

This time, however, it will be not as a swimmer, rather as a coach leading a whole new generation of charges.

The COGE (Olympic Committee of Equatorial Guinea) made the announcement after their February 28th meeting in Malabo, where it was also announced that they would compete in athletics, boxing, judo and taekwondo.

The hope is that Musambani’s new crew (who are huge unknowns – I can’t find a single result for the team for the last two years) will fare better than he did, when he swam a 100 freestyle 1:52.72 in Sydney at the 2000 Olympics. That even included a flipturn (and a not terrible one at that), and very nearly earning a disqualification for completely submerging prior to the finish. What makes this impressive is that he had only learned to swim 8-months prior, and was training out of a 20-meter hotel pool.

That is believed to be the slowest time in Olympic history (though records from early games are shotty at best) – even the slowest swimmers in the 1900’s were still swimming in the 1:30 range.

But the expectation is that Musambani would have valuable experience to empart on future generations of Equatoguineans. For starters – he felt the thrill of Olympic victory – his competitors in the first heat were both disqualified for false starts, and as such the Eel was racing alone. Not only that, but he persevered – according to this article from the Sydney Morning Herald, he trained himself all the way down to a 57, which is not-too-shabby of a mark.

Beyond that, he has handled the immense pressure that comes along with the Olympics even for the last-place swimmer. Since that fateful swim that was viewed by millions, Musambani has seen very-little slowdown in the calls for interview requests, and is still one of his country’s most famous sporting figures.

Though they won’t win medals, I’d expect this next group to be at least respectable in their swims. With the increased availability of coaching resources on the web, the availability of high-quality technique instruction is ten-fold what it was in 2000.