LEBRON JAMES AND GISELE BÜNDCHEN
In case you don't already know, LeBron James is basketball right
now. He's the man up, as they say, and in his case, he goes up and up
and up. King James (or the Chosen One), as they call him, became Rookie
of the Year in 2004, then led his Cleveland Cavaliers to back-to-back
playoff runs in 2006 and 2007, and the team's first-ever finals
appearance in 2007. Last season, he averaged 27 points per game. Do you
remember Michael Jordan? Well, LeBron is Michael Jordan, on a bigger
scale (as in, bigger guy). What he lacks in pure Jordanian
grace—rather than soar, LeBron seems to descend on the
basket—he makes up for with strength and a dazzling sense of
symmetry. Proportion is everything when it comes to King James. If
you've ever sat in the stands as he brings a crowd to a points-induced
frenzy, you know that for LeBron the crossover—that dexterous shift
in direction, from one side of the court to the other—happens
almost imperceptibly. His overall balance is apparent to his trainers,
to his coaches, to sports fans, and, especially, to Rachel Johnson, who
pays attention to his body for a living. "In my mind," says Johnson, his
stylist, "he's not big at all, because even though he's tall and
muscular and gorgeous and all of that, he's very well
proportioned—the top half of his body and the bottom half match. To
me, I'm dressing a man who's five feet eleven."
At 250 pounds, he is a towering six feet eight, but when not in the heat
of competition, he somehow manages not to tower—so says Gisele
Bündchen, the LeBron James of fashion modeling. "He doesn't really
make you feel small, even though he is big," says Gisele, who, although
she'd seen him play, and although her boyfriend, Patriots quarterback
Tom Brady, is a friend of his, had never met LeBron. "I think my leg is
like the size of his shoe," she adds. Aside from a few shared
attitudes—"She's all about business, and she's all about fun,"
LeBron says about Gisele. "That's why she's the best; she has fun while
she's doing it"—they both admit that high school sports made them
who they are. "What sports teaches you is not only respect for your body
but that you have to be aware of your body, that you have to work with
other people," says Gisele, who as a girl was an ardent volleyball
player. "If you feel good, you play better, and if you feel better your
self-worth will increase every day."
During a recent practice, LeBron looks and feels good, and in one of
dozens of shooting drills, all goes well as he sinks ball after ball.
And then—a bad shot, a little off. As the next ball reaches his
hand, he pauses, just for a millisecond, as if hitting the reboot
button. Next shot, and all the ones following—dead on. "It's all
about refocusing yourself," he explains. "For me, it's such a habit, and
I know what I'm doing out on the basketball court, so if I do something
wrong, then I know how to switch the switch and turn it right back on,
to readjust myself. Right there and then. It doesn't take me a day. It
takes me just"—he snaps his fingers—"one play."
MICHAEL PHELPS AND CAROLINE TRENTINI
Michael Phelps, 22, found his own way to swimming, but it seems pretty
clear to a lot of people, especially swimmers, that if he had not found
swimming, swimming would have found him. "I have long arms, a long
torso, and stubby legs," he says. "I have the ideal body for a
swimmer—I have seen my coach say it in the papers." It's his
coach's fault, in part, that he has become this generation's Mark Spitz.
When he was in middle school, swimming and playing lacrosse,
soccer, and baseball, his swim coach told him he had to make a decision.
"My coach said, 'You have a chance to be in the Olympics if you
concentrate on swimming.' "
Why did the coach say that, exactly? Was it Phelps's body type? His
determination? The fact that, as Phelps himself puts it, "I hate
losing—I can't stand to lose"? "I have no idea why," Phelps
says. "But he was right, and four years later I was at the Olympics."
In 2000, Phelps became the youngest American male swimmer at the
Olympics in almost seven decades. Four years later, in Athens, he won
eight medals, six of them gold. He currently holds world records in the
freestyle, butterfly, and that grab bag of different strokes swimmers
call the individual medley. To Caroline Trentini, who recalls first
seeing his photograph in a magazine, he immediately looked like a
swimmer. "I was looking at a picture of him, and his arms went from one
side of the page to the other," she says. Trentini grew up in Brazil,
and although she went to the beach constantly as a child, her mother was
afraid to let her go in the water, making this particular photo shoot,
her first ever underwater, "a challenge."
In breaking world records, Phelps has faced his own challenges,
including a training regimen that takes him to the limits of physical
endurance. "When we have to do an hour of weights before we get into the
pool, and then we have to swim at race pace, I feel just like a giant
brick in the water, just a giant brick," he says. "Sometimes when you do
so many turns, you start to feel your abs hurt, and then after a while
you can feel as if you are carrying a grand piano on your back. But, you
know, it kind of pays off in the end."
APOLO ANTON OHNO AND DOUTZEN KROES
Apolo Anton Ohno's decision to become a world-champion short-track speed
skater was made on a remote stretch of coastline in Washington state, in
a tiny town called Copalis Beach—"a place you go if you're in the
witness-protection plan," says Ohno, 25. He was still a teenager, having
a difficult time and running with a bad crowd, when, as a dose of tough
love, his father left him in a cabin (with provisions) to sort things
out alone. Then, as if out of a scene from a Kurosawa film, Ohno began
running—and running and running—until something snapped. "From
there I just had this burning desire to be the best I can be," he says,
"almost this psychic drive—meaning, I want to win."
What winning means now—on top of the gold medal he took in the 500
meters at the 2006 Olympics at Turin, and another gold more recently at
the 2007 world championships in Milan in the 1,500 meters—is six
days a week of the kind of training that would put an elephant to the
test: pressing 850 pounds with his legs, for instance. Which would seem
like enough for anybody, but then there are plyometrics, for the
fast-twitch muscles, and jumping and lots of speed work on dry land. All
so that he can go really fast while wearing an outfit that is little
more protective than his birthday suit and blades that aren't called
blades for nothing. He readily admits his sport is intense. "I'm pushing
my body every day of my life to do what?" he asks. "To compete for four
weeks every four years." On the other hand, he loves
it—notwithstanding his brief taste of another kind of glory on
Dancing with the Stars, in which he was subjected to only minimal
pain by his partner. "There was no actual physical injury," he says,
"although she did kick me in the head a couple of times."
Doutzen Kroes, whom Ohno is teamed up with here, is the daughter of two
competitive speed skaters; before her career in modeling, she tried the
sport herself, in the Netherlands, where she competed internationally at
the renowned Thialf speed-skating arena in Heerenveen. "Their legs!" she
exclaims when asked about the speed-skating physique. "I still have that
kind of body. I have strong legs." But it's not just her legs she owes
to speed skating. You might say that she owes her very existence to the
sport, in that one day, while crouched at a speed-skating starting line,
the speed-skating man who would one day be her father looked over at the
speed-skating woman who would be her mother and winked.
JARED ROME AND RAQUEL ZIMMERMANN
"You're not as big as I thought you'd be," says Raquel Zimmermann upon
meeting Jared Rome, America's number-one discus thrower. "You're not as
tall as I thought you'd be," says Rome in response. That said, Raquel is
pretty tall (five feet ten), and Rome is pretty big (310 pounds). But
just as height is not everything in fashion modeling, being a
world-champion discus thrower requires skills other than beefy strength,
such as the ability to go into a trance.
Not just a kind of trance—an actual trance. To do this, Rome
starts breathing fast, which increases his heart rate and the amount of
adrenaline running through his body. And then, as if he were about to
pull the string on a spinning toy top, he crouches and, using all his
power, jettisons the four-pound, six-and-one-half-ounce discus nearly
the length of a football field (his personal best is 224.3 feet, or
68.37 meters). When he does this, he typically shouts, as if he's in the
midst of, say, an exorcism. This is not intentional. "It's not like I
think to myself, I'll shout something really loud now. It just happens."
To a non-discus thrower, Rome's prowess might appear to be all about his
arms. In fact, in his quest to be the first human being to throw a
discus 70 meters and a shot put 70 feet (the 70/70 Club, as throwers
call it), he does not expect to use his arms much. "Most people think,
Oh, this guy is just big and strong," he says. And to be sure, his
six-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week workout is full of strength-building
lifts: power clean, snatch, squat, and bench. But it's mostly about his
legs. "I'm pretty much a big version of a sprinter," he says. "The
general public thinks you throw with your arm, but you don't even use
your arm. Granted, I still bench 550 pounds." He also credits what he
calls his "explosiveness," which makes his fast-twitch muscles—the
ones athletes covet these days—twitch even faster. "There are
people who are explosive and people who aren't," he says. "Fortunately,
I was born explosive."
SHAUN WHITE AND DARIA WERBOWY
"I was hanging out in New York the other day, talking to this NFL
player," says Shaun White—as in the Shaun White, the Olympic
gold medal-winning snowboarder. He's five feet eight and doesn't weigh
much compared with an NFL player. In fact, he doesn't weigh much
compared with a lot of people, and if you were to run into him at a
party, you might not guess that he had just won the gold medal in
SuperPipe at the most recent Winter X Games. Then again, with the red
hair, the big smile, he is, in the boarding world, iconic. "And I was
thinking," White goes on, "There's no way I could ever do what you do.
And he's like six feet seven or something. He's amazing. But after that,
I was thinking, You know, there's no way he can do what I do!"
These days, White and Daria Werbowy are both trying something new in the
design world. In Shaun's case, this involves launching a line of casual
streetwear at Target, due out in the fall. Daria, meanwhile, is the
first Lancôme spokesperson to be invited inside the company's
lipstick laboratories, among the lipstick scientists, to design her own
lip colors, the Daria Collection. "The people who make the lipstick are
men," she says, "but I did get them to try it on." The proceeds will go
to Centro Espacial Vik Muniz, an organization in Rio de Janeiro that
provides arts programs for economically disadvantaged young people.
Werbowy is also a snowboarder, and just before meeting White, she's been
heli-skiing in Utah. "You don't have to do what I have to do to have
fun," White tells Werbowy. "I'm just a product of what you're doing when
you get bored."
White himself has never become so bored as to submit to a typical
workout routine. He stays fit by riding a bike on occasion, partly
because he's still terrorized by the physical therapy he had to undergo
a while back after a knee injury. ("It was me and all these old ladies
working out," the skinny 21-year-old says.) And when he is about to
enter the half pipe, perched at the top and ready to go—when he's
about to drop in, as a snowboarder says—he's not really
thinking about what he might do or can do. He's looking for a moment of
grace, a snapshot that's as much about artistic flow as it is dexterity.
"It's funny because everybody asks me what I'm thinking about when I'm
dropping in," he says, "and the thing is, I'm about to do something
really focused. You don't hear anything. You don't think anything. It
just naturally happens."
"Dream Team" has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears
in the April 2008 issue of Vogue.
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