London 2012 Olympics: US swimmers Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte go head to ... - Telegraph.co.uk

Lochte is not to be out done in the macho stakes. Every Sunday he worked with Matt DeLancey, a former weightlifting coach to the military, in a brutal regime designed to improve his raw strength. DeLancey had him flipping 300 kilo monster truck tyres and dragging 250kg boat chains back and forth in front of the coach's garage. "He works hard and he's not afraid to throw up," is DeLancey's pithy assessment.

In a sport increasingly influenced by the technological refinements of sports science, this lo-tech approach seems to have kindled some of the competitive fires in these two. Both will be drawing on those painful hours when they compete for gold this evening.

It has been a hard journey for both Phelps and Lochte. By his own admission, Phelps began to lose focus in the couple of years after his astonishing eight-gold haul in Beijing. For the first time in his life he started to skip training, bunking off to play golf. Unsurprisingly his performances suffered and he started losing to Lochte in the medley races that he had previously dominated.

Phelps is pathologically competitive, so defeat was a great motivator. He recommitted to training with his coach, Bob Bowman, bringing the kind of commitment that had resulted in the Beijing triumph. They returned to their hometown of Baltimore and dug deep and, while Lochte still won the 200m medley at the World Championships in Shanghai last year (Phelps did not race the 400m medley), Phelps has been closing.

That Lochte got ahead was down to his own decision to commit to the sport. He took bronze in the 200m and 400m medley in Beijing and, while he took gold in the 200m backstroke, he knew he needed to make sacrifices if he was to even hope to challenge Phelps.

Lochte, a laid-back Floridian, cut out the fast food and the odd boozy evenings with his students friends, and redoubled his efforts in the pool. The rewards followed thick and fast: he took both 200m and 400m medley gold at the World Championships in Rome in 2009 and then defended both titles in Shanghai last year. To cap it all, in the 200m medley he broke the world record, the first to fall since the super-suits were banned at the beginning of 2010.

The race dynamic will be compelling. Phelps is the stronger butterfly swimmer but Lochte is superior in the backstroke. That takes them into the breaststroke — the weakest stroke for both competitors – before a grandstand freestyle finish, in which there is barely anything to choose between them. Just as in Rocky, though, there can be only one winner.