Chambliss tries to piece out what makes excellent swimmers excellent and says a lot of interesting things.

1. You can't quantify the differences that lead to excellence, because the excellent are doing what few do to get the results that few get.

   Different levels of the sport are qualitatively distinct. Olympic champions don’t just do much more of the same things that summer-league country club swimmers do. They don’t just swim more hours, or move their arms faster, or attend more workouts.

   Instead, they do things differently. Their strokes are different, their attitudes are different, their groups of friends are different, their parents treat the sport differently, the swimmers prepare differently for their races, and they enter different kinds of meets and events.

2. Talent is necessary but not sufficient. More so it's misleading as a concept. Excellence means acting on a lot of advantages all at once, some innate that we'd call talent (like good coordination), some we'd call luck (like living where a lot of people swim), and others that don't fit well in either category (like finding swimming pleasurable).
3. "Excellence is mundane." The excellent learn lots of small things, gather lots of small advantages, find lots of small reasons to stay motivated, and do so consistently. Excellence is lots of mundane things practiced until they're nature and can act all at once.

   Superlative performance is really a confluence of dozens of small skills or activities, each one learned or stumbled upon, which have been carefully drilled into habit and then are fitted together in a synthesized whole. There is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any one of those actions; only the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, and all together, produce excellence.

   While many of them were working towards the Olympic Games, they divided the work along the way into achievable steps, no one of which was too big. They found their challenges in small things: working on a better start this week, polishing up their backstroke technique next week, focusing on better sleep habits, planning how to pace their swim. Many top swimmers are accustomed to winning races in practice, day after day. Steve Lundquist, who won two gold medals in Los Angeles, sees his success as resulting from an early decision that he wanted to win every swim, every day, in every practice. That was the immediate goal he faced at workouts; just try to win every swim, every lap, in every stroke, no matter what.

   Usually we see great athletes only after they have become great—after the years of learning the new methods, gaining the habits of competitiveness and consistency, after becoming comfortable in their world. They have long since perfected the myriad of techniques that together constitute excellence. Ignorant of all of the specific steps that have led to the performance and to the confidence, we think that somehow excellence sprang full grown from this person, and we say he or she “has talent”or “is gifted.”