As Jonathan Chan hit the water, the impact was a jolting reminder of what he'd missed. "You really forget how much the force is until you start diving again." As sport reopens in Singapore, slowly and nervously, rusty skill will show up but so will surprise.
The pool is now in use and the shooting ranges are unlocked. Nothing is going to be the same, but with athletes nothing ever is. Not surfaces, the tactics of rivals, the volume of the crowd or the temperature of the open sea. Usually they just dive in, but this time it's like a hesitant tiptoe. As if they're taking the temperature of this new world.
Athletes will find their way because it's who they are. Obstacle hurdling is their business and suffering is their chosen path. In a way they have an advantage over us because struggle is their daily breath. Their entire lives are studies in disruption and so, in a way, this script is familiar.
They break bones and their form dies, they get benched and transferred, they lose scholarships and funding. They get routinely rattled and then refind their equilibrium. Covid is like nothing they've seen and yet - they should tell themselves - like everything they've ever known.
Just another test.
Sport is an endless interrogation and now it resumes with a simple query: What is the price you're willing to pay? The price to win, to be perfect, to refind your level. Vince Lombardi, the Italian-American coach after whom the Super Bowl trophy is named, loved the word "price", possibly because it brought so many questions with it:
What is winning worth? How much will you suffer? How long can you endure? What is the size of your competitive heart? On this long run back to normality, with so much distraction and uncertainty, at least athletes won't be confused about the price. It's always sweat.
You wonder what psychologists will say to athletes, what parents will preach, all of them perhaps reinforcing old lessons. Like, patience. Remember the six dedicated months it took you to sandpaper a new move? The thousands of kilometres you swam to become a second faster? You did that, you can do this.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said movingly on Sunday, to us all: "Do not fear. Do not lose heart." Instead athletes must adapt, find perspective, keep proportion. If you can't spar yet, at least you're out of the house. If only five people are allowed in the shooting range at one time, relax, you'll get your turn. Gratefulness has to puncture frustration.
LeBron James once said "a second is a long time" and now time must be stretched. Training hours may be fewer but more focused, teams might not be able to touch but must bond. Sport is now a version of improvised theatre.
Muscles might be imbalanced after weeks of working out at home, but that's fixable. Technique mastered in December may be pockmarked with flaws, but it can be smoothened. Coaches, meanwhile, will nudge athletes to remember the art of hanging in there. Hey, Iceland have never won a medal at the Winter Olympics, but they're still trying.
In other eras, the return of sport signalled the cessation of hostilities; in a time of Covid, it indicates the return of some normality. Athletes at play reassure us and yet they must know their place in this new world. It is one with no room for trivial conceit.
Athletes like to live in their own world, but now they must be alive to the wider planet. Distress must be everyone's concern. Funding for sport might be trimmed, sponsors will retreat and plans for medals may have to be temporarily torn up. It's painful and heartbreaking, but as nations suffer and priorities are redrawn, the survival of many always beats the dreams of a few.
Of the many things we need right now, sport offers us one powerful virtue: Hope. The reassuring belief that so much is possible through endeavour and the truth that at our best we have no limits. And if we require courage to lean on, then we should peel back the pages of history. This may seem like an unequalled crisis, but athletes have weathered all manner of calamities.
In 1941, only 14, Eva Szekely - as the Jewish Women's Archive states - was "expelled from the (local swim) team because she was Jewish". Later, during the last part of World War II, "she lived in a crowded two-room 'safe house' in Budapest run by the Swiss".
Roughly 10 years later in Helsinki, the Hungarian stood on the podium, Olympic champion in the 200m breaststroke. She had endured and she had suffered. And she had paid the price for gold.
After all, during that time in the safe house, she ran up and down five flights of stairs.
A hundred times. Every day.
