Lagoon Petero’s training ground
By Rebecca Williams, of the Herald-Sun, Melbourne

IT’S hard to imagine world swim aces Michael Phelps or Grant Hackett having to deal with the hazards of trigger fish, coral heads and ocean currents in training.
But it’s all part of the daily routine for Cook Islands swimmer Petero Okotai.  
With no pool at his home in Rarotonga, Okotai has been preparing to swim at the world championships in a tropical lagoon.
“The lagoon is relatively calm most days,” Okotai said yesterday. “We don’t have sharks or anything like that, the only thing you have to worry about is trigger fish.
“But they only nip your ankles, so you swim away from them as fast as you can. If you don’t have goggles, you might run into a coral head.”
DENGUE
If those hazards were not enough, Okotai has also overcome a potentially dangerous bout of dengue fever in the build-up to the championships after returning from his studies in New Zealand.
“I went back home and after about a week I caught dengue fever,” he said. “That struck me down and I lost about 10kg over that two weeks. I was in hospital for a couple of days on the drip.”
Okotai is part of a three-member Cook Islands team. He has one teammate in the pool and another in the open water events.
The 25-year-old will swim the 50m breaststroke and the 50m freestyle, but has no concept at all of what his personal best times might be.
“Between coral heads, I didn’t really measure them,” he joked. “We will be setting national records, that’s a certainty. I have not had my times recorded in a pool since I was 11.”
Okotai said he was in awe training alongside the best swimmers in the world.
“You do wonder what we might be capable of if we had the same opportunities as the Australians or the Americans or the Europeans,” he said.
“I think I whacked into Michael Phelps a couple of minutes ago. It’s nerve-racking. This is an experience and we have to make the most of it.”

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