And hardly an ideal build-up, with half the squad already in Australia acclimatising to conditions while the rest trained in the English snow.
The 6-foot-4 1/2 Phelps has an ideal build for a swimmer: wide shoulders, big chest, narrow waist and big feet (size 14).
In the track and field events, it is more likely that an athlete has already come close to what Gould called the "right wall" of human performance, simply because the human being who possessed the ideal build and work ethic is more likely actually to have competed in the Olympic Games.
When Federer lost to him in Monte Carlo and Rome I was just mesmerised by the level of confidence he had.' And despite possessing the physique of a middleweight boxer, which is supposed to be the antithesis of the tennis player's ideal build, Nadal does do most of his training on court rather than in the gym.
He practiced sumo as a teenager, but lacked the ideal build for the sport.
He is only 19. Ward has an ideal build for a track man, six feet, one inch tall, 185 pounds of well-distributed weight, good legs, natural co-ordination.
But why should we not form a picture of the ideal life, built out of abundant information, non-hierarchical work and the dissociation of work from wages?
CARUSO sang there, Rachmaninoff played there, Sibelius came there for the premiere of his latest symphonic poem -- there being the visually impressive, acoustically ideal Music Shed, built in 1906 on the Stoeckel estate in Norfolk.
Most people may pour scorn on the notion and call it naive, but I hope that there are still some of us left who can admit to something positive in the public-school ideals that built the British empire.
"We stand with the ideals that built this country: strength of character; resilience of spirit; and refusal to succumb to the demands of the wretched, in order to satisfy the bloodlust of the weak".
But there's something else which makes certain people uncomfortable about brutalism – critic Reyner Banham famously asked at the time if it was an "ethic or aesthetic?", meaning that it is almost impossible to extricate the style of anti-monumental, modernist, uncompromising architecture from the egalitarian, unsentimental social democratic ideals that built it.
