Two Shoulders, Two Generations: What the Curzan–Heilman MVP Actually Measures

Two in the Morning in Rangpur: What I Was Watching, and What Wasn't Being Shown

I have spent twelve years watching swimming footage frame by frame. I pause, measure elbow height, trace the angle of the shoulder. A few nights ago, in my room in Rangpur at two in the morning, the SwimSwam CSL Match 2 feed was running on my laptop, and I kept returning to two moments: Claire Curzan's hand meeting the water on backstroke, and the exact height of Thomas Heilman's elbow at the end of the second 25 metres of butterfly.

Broadcasts leave these moments empty. The commentator watches the split; I watch the shoulder angle. That is my bad habit, and it is also my job.

After the match came the announcement: Curzan and Heilman were named CSL Match 2 MVPs. The award is written in the language of points, times and placings. Not in the language of shoulders. I keep an old line saved on my phone: Every shoulder has a before and after; the tape only shows the after.

What Stage-1 handed me was two names and one award — no event lists, no splits, no count of how many races each swam on which day. Where there is no data, I do not invent numbers. So I am not going to the scoreboard. I am going to the mechanism.

Context: A Match Format, Two Generations of Shoulder

SwimSwam's CSL is a team match format where team points matter more than individual times. I do not have the detailed event list for Match 2, and I will not assemble one by guessing. But the structural logic of a match format is clear: within one or two days a swimmer races several events, and a relay usually closes the session. Four to six races in a single session is the centre of my argument, because a shoulder never tires by looking at a scoreboard. It tires by counting how many times it went overhead.

Claire Curzan is an American sprint backstroker and butterflyer, a swimmer navigating the transition from college to the professional circuit. Thomas Heilman reached the national stage as a teenager; the 200m butterfly is his main room, and his name sits in the age-group record books. Both are fast. Both are at the point where the childhood bonus is ending but the weekly volume has not gone down.

There is an economic layer here that swimming journalism usually skips. A match MVP means visibility — tied to college programme budgets, sponsorships, transfer conversations. When a swimmer wins MVP, the weekly programme does not change; the slate changes, meaning the volume of demand placed on that shoulder. And the more sponsorship grows, the less athletes say about what is actually happening in the joint, because in the market "I'm fine" is the sellable sentence. This has been my long-standing objection: personal branding hides damage, and when damage is hidden, the rehabilitation calendar gets hidden with it.

The Bangladesh comparison has to stop here, because our reality is entirely different. There is no CSL here, no weekly swimming broadcast, no indoor Olympic-standard pool. There is the outdoor 50m complex at Mirpur, the monsoon, and a handful of meets a year on the national calendar.

In November 2026 I was at the 26th National Swimming, Diving and Water Polo Championship with a borrowed DSLR and an unused MS in Kinesiology. Navy freestyler Tanvir Ahmed withdrew from the 100m freestyle final holding his right shoulder. I made a six-minute Facebook video calling it textbook impingement. Dhaka physiotherapist Rezaul Karim commented that the pain pattern read cervical, not shoulder. Four thousand two hundred views, sixty-one comments, one of them right. Since that day every script I write is built the same way: mechanism first, verdict last. Describe the movement that failed before naming any tissue.

The Arithmetic of a Shoulder: Backstroke, Butterfly, and One Match

The shoulder is a ball-and-socket joint with a shallow socket. Stability comes from soft tissue — rotator cuff, labrum, capsule. Overhead work is the stress test, and swimming is an overhead factory. When the arm sits near 90 degrees of abduction and rotates internally, the space under the acromion narrows. That is Neer's position. But impingement is a mechanism, not a diagnosis — and in 2026 that was exactly where I stumbled.

In backstroke the body rotates on its long axis and the arm travels past the ear. At entry the arm is near full elevation with slight external rotation; the catch then begins the internal rotation. The load peak sits between entry and catch, and it arrives once per length — that is backstroke's cruel regularity. If thoracic mobility is poor, the shoulder has to buy extra angle, and the subacromial space pays the bill.

Butterfly is different because both arms work together with no alternation. In recovery both arms swing wide, and the humeral head must stay centred in the glenoid while the scapula rotates upward. Thoracic extension is mandatory. I have long called the 200m butterfly a race against your own shoulders: in the last 50 the stroke rate drops, and when it drops the arm spends longer in the high-drag position — so per-stroke load does not fall, it lasts longer.

Let me do the rough arithmetic, because load without numbers is a feeling. These are estimates from familiar stroke lengths, not laboratory measurements. In a 100m backstroke, at roughly 1.5 to 2 metres per stroke cycle, that is 50 to 60 cycles — about 120 arm recoveries, roughly 60 per shoulder. In a 200m butterfly, with a longer cycle, say 2.2 metres, that is more than 90 cycles, close to 200 recoveries.

Now the weekly volume. The most common shape of Bangladeshi pool work is still 50,000 to 60,000 metres of freestyle a week, with a cycle length around 1.6 metres. Sixty thousand metres gives roughly 37,500 cycles — 75,000 single-arm recoveries, more than 37,500 per shoulder. Starts and underwater dolphin kicks sit outside that count, and that segment holds the shoulder in a tight streamline: full elevation plus internal rotation, sustained for seconds.

Back to the CSL match. If a swimmer races four to six events in one session, adding the recovery counts puts the total easily in the 300 to 400 range. Then comes the relay, usually last, when the muscles that rotate the scapula upward are already tired. In 2026 I wrote a piece called "Salah's Shoulder Is a Swimmer's Shoulder," comparing labrum and capsule mechanics. It did 180,000 reads and taught me something: the language of a footballer's injury and a swimmer's injury are two dialects of one grammar. Put one Salah shoulder impact into a swimmer's week and you begin to see how many mild but repeated impacts a swimmer's shoulder survives.

With Heilman there is an extra layer. In adolescence the proximal humeral physis is open, generally until 17 to 19. The tendon-bone interface is proportionally weaker then, and strength gains never keep pace with load gains. Thoracic kyphosis, hours at a desk or phone, and two hours of butterfly after class — put those together and the teenage shoulder is a bridge still under construction with trucks crossing it daily.

One more thing nobody counts: short-course meets have more turns. Every turn means a glide, a sliver of rest inside the race. The scoreboard looks better. The swimmer looks better. But which glide reduces anterior capsule strain and which transition adds a jolt cannot be read off a time. A stopwatch is a bad shoulder monitor.

The Contrarian Angle: The Rule Writes the Load

Two easy verdicts are off my table: that Curzan or Heilman are fragile, or that the MVP is a gold seal of durability. Both are the same error wearing different faces — verdict without mechanism.

My objection is not to the swimmers. It is to the scoring rule. MVP points are awarded on participation and placing. Participation is counted in events, not in load. So a harmless-looking match format quietly pushes a swimmer toward one specific pattern: repeated elevation with internal rotation under fatigue, and a relay leg on a tired shoulder. Any system that pays per event will produce more events than shoulders can afford.

The second observation is more uncomfortable. We talk about backstroke and butterfly shoulder risk, but in a match format the real decision is made on the coach's whiteboard on Tuesday morning. Injury history, sleep, nutrition, last week's volume — no system holds that in one place. We discuss elite injury management in football, where a squad has 25 players; in swimming a swimmer's own shoulder is the entire squad, and there is no substitute.

In Bangladesh the question flips. It is not which event to drop. It is whether the pool is open, whether the outdoor Mirpur tiles are slippery in monsoon rain, how many sessions can be paired before the inter-services meet. Same shoulder, different ledger.

I should also name my own correction. In 2026 I looked at a shoulder and said impingement; Rezaul Karim saw the cervical pattern. The tape showed a shoulder, but the neck was writing the script. Since then I describe the mechanism before I name the tissue. And while learning to shoot swimming, I once filmed a pond outside Rangpur for months, just for the rhythm of the ripples — I kept filming the pond until the ripple explained the stone. The same holds for shoulders: the race is the ripple, the load is the stone.

Takeaway: Where to Look in the Next Match

At CSL Match 3 I will not be watching the MVP board. I will watch three things. First, Heilman's stroke rate in the final 50 of the 200m butterfly — if the number falls hard, the tired scapula is likely shortening the stroke to compensate. Second, Curzan's entry point relative to her head; when the entry drifts wide it often signals thoracic and scapular fatigue. Third, how many events are loaded into a session and whether a relay is tacked on at the end.

The process is simple: the shoulder is spent first, the points arrive later. In our country the arithmetic is harder still, because with only a handful of meets a year, a swimmer will not give up a single race even when that shoulder spends hundreds of recoveries on each one. The Ghaghot river four hundred metres from my window, where children drown every monsoon — an estimated forty a day across this country — belongs to the same national story as Heilman's shoulder. One end is excess load, the other is zero access, and in between sits a question: will we ever look at the shoulder, or will we spend a lifetime watching the points board?