Relentless Spirit

by Missy Franklin

  DAD: I always tell people that D.A. and I had some serious separation anxiety during our time in London. You don’t often hear that phrase, about a parent referring to a child, but that’s really how we felt, because there was like this great wall separating our experiences from Missy’s experiences. We were used to being at a small aquatic facility, with maybe two or three thousand spectators at most, and there was always an opportunity to see Missy, before or after. We could make eye contact, or signal her from the stands, let her know we were there for her. It felt at least like we were at the same event, in the same building. But here at the Olympics there were close to twenty thousand people in the Aquatics Centre. Here at the Olympics, she was being pulled every which way, especially after she won her first gold medal. There were interviews and team meetings . . . every conceivable distraction, and some inconceivable ones, too.

  We went to the opening ceremonies, but Missy and the team couldn’t participate because their events started the next day, and that was just how it was the whole time we were there. And she swam so many events, it’s like we never left the pool. When we got home, people asked us about our trip. They wanted to know how we enjoyed London, if we took in any sights, if we saw any other events. I always felt a little sheepish, telling them the truth, which was that we’d traveled five thousand miles just to go back and forth from the hotel to the pool, climbing up all those flights of stairs, sitting and waiting for Missy’s heat in the prelims in the mornings and then hopefully her semifinal swim in the evening and the finals the next night. Every day, it was the same drill. Imagine going to the Super Bowl in the morning, and traveling to the stadium, and going through security, and finding your seats, and then doing it all over again in the evening. And then again the next day, and the day after that. It’s almost unfair to say it was exhausting, given how hard Missy worked to reach this moment, how much effort she was putting in, but it really was draining—spending all those hours and hours, just to watch our little girl do her thing. And with the Super Bowl at least there’s a full sixty minutes of game action. With Missy’s swim, most of these events, there was just a minute or two of action, so if you separate yourself from the situation, and forget for a moment that it’s your kid and that you’re at the Olympics, it hardly seems like a fair trade.

  One good example of how separated we were from Missy was kind of funny, although it’s only funny now in retrospect. At the time, it was infuriating. It’s a story Missy only learned later, but once she heard it she was all over it. You see, her old man was mugged. By a woman. In a wheelchair. Okay, so maybe mugged is too harsh a term. I was pickpocketed, really, but it felt like a mugging. Like a violation. The woman made off with my wallet, which had about $600 in it. Fortunately, my passport was back at our house, so that was one headache I didn’t have to deal with, but I did have to spend hours and hours on the phone with the banks, canceling my credit cards. In the middle of all this great excitement, to have to deal with something like this, it was a real hassle. Normally, Missy would have given me a hard time about something like this. To have my wallet stolen—by a woman in a wheelchair, no less? She would’ve given it to me good. That’s the kind of teasing relationship we had. She would’ve called me a loser or an old man, whatever. And we could have had some fun with it. But she didn’t hear about it until much, much later. And at that point, I was pretty much over it.

  It’s funny how seeing your daughter win four gold medals at the Olympics can make you forget a small nuisance like being in another country and having your wallet stolen on the tube platform.

  DAD: You know, there’s an interesting story about how my sister-in-law, Cathy, took in Missy’s 200-meter backstroke. As D.A. mentioned, her sister was there as the team doctor for the Canadian women’s soccer team, so she was in an unusual position. Auntie C.J. really was Missy’s biggest fan, outside of her proud parents. My brothers and sister made it to meets when they could, but C.J. made it to almost all of them when her schedule allowed. In this case it did and it didn’t.

  She was able to watch Missy’s 100 back, with the soccer team and staff, which was a mixed blessing. She really wanted to be in the natatorium with us, or to be with her partner, Linda, who was back home. She knew the pressure of that race, going up against a fast international field, and she wanted to be there to support the family. But this was the next best thing.

  The soccer venues were outside of London, in a variety of locations. Coventry, Manchester, Newcastle . . . there was really no way for C.J. to get back and forth, while still doing her job. Canada hadn’t won a medal in a Summer Olympics team sport since the men’s basketball team won the bronze in 1928, and Missy’s performance became a kind of rallying point for the team. They all knew her as “Doc’s niece,” and there started to be this feeling around the team that if Doc’s niece could win gold, then a medal was within reach for them, too. It’s like Missy was the team mascot—she’d been “adopted” by the whole team.

  For the run of the games, C.J. was able to catch all of Missy’s swims on television, until Missy’s 200 back. The soccer team kept winning and winning, against all expectations, and it worked out that they were due to play in a quarterfinals match against heavily favored England at seven o’clock in the evening, the same start time as the 200 back finals. C.J. took her job seriously, so during the game she wasn’t about to take her eyes off the field, off her players. And yet at the same time she was desperate to know the results of the 200 back finals. So she worked out a system with one of the FIFA officials, a woman from Scotland named Jo Hutchison, who was also a big Missy fan. They arranged some kind of messaging system so that C.J. could look back at Jo, who was sitting right behind the bench in the stands. One finger for first place, two fingers for second place, and so on. And then there were a whole bunch of follow-up signals, like a thumbs-up for a world record, an okay sign for an Olympic record. So when Jo flashed one finger, C.J. knew Missy’d won the gold, and then when she flashed the thumbs-up, C.J. knew she’d set a world record, and she told us all later that she welled up with tears, thinking of all of us at the pool, thinking of her niece, thinking of what she was missing. But then, her attention was drawn back to the field, because the Canadian women were beating that strong England side and about to move on to the semifinals. It really was an amazing Olympic experience for C.J. as well, because the team went on to win the bronze medal, so it was just one excitement after another, even if she couldn’t be with us at the Aquatics Centre.

  MOM: Missy’s final event was the 4x100 medley relay, and Team USA won the gold in a big way. They broke China’s world record of 3:52.19 with a time of 3:52.05. Missy, Rebecca Soni, Dana Vollmer, and Allison Schmitt were thrilled. What a way to end the meet! Missy always said this was her most exciting event, and she was so happy to be part of such a special relay team. People refer to swimming as an individual sport, but Missy argues the point. Sure, it can be an individual sport, but the team aspect was what Missy had always loved about it. It all depends on how you approach it, and what you want out of it, and what Missy wanted was that sense of camaraderie, and here she got to experience it on the biggest possible stage.

  The next morning, Dick grabbed a taxi and headed over to the Olympic Village to sign Missy out. She was still just seventeen years old, and the responsibility of the USOC, so she couldn’t just come and go like the other athletes, but now that she was free of her swimming responsibilities we all wanted to spend some time together. Originally, the plan had been for us to fly home immediately after the swimming events, but Missy asked if we could stay on. (We were so lucky our rental was extended—imagine having to book a second week of accommodations, right in the middle of the Olympics!) She wanted to walk in the closing ceremonies with her teammates, especially with Kara Lynn Joyce, who was like a big sister to Missy. Kara had moved to Denver eighteen months prior to the games, when she started training with Todd Schmitz and the Colorado Stars, and she and Missy really bonded. Their f
riendship was chronicled by the documentary filmmakers Christo Brock and Grant Barbeito, who would go on to produce a powerful documentary about their relationship, and the dedication required to make it to the Olympics. It was called Touch the Wall, and it really got to the heart of what it means to swim at the international level. Kara had worked so hard to make the team, and she and Missy pushed each other for months in practice, so it was like a special blessing for the two of them to be able to participate in the closing ceremonies together. Of course, we would do anything we could to make this happen for Missy, so I immediately changed our return flights and booked our house for another week.

  Over the course of that next week, our house became like a sorority house. (Poor Dick!) Some of our family members stayed on for a few extra days, but we also housed quite a few swim team members. The way it worked, the USOC housed its swimmers only until their events were completed, so a few of these women had no place to stay, and Dick and I were only too happy to open our doors to them. Trouble was, the house was in a sketchy part of London, and now I felt responsible for everyone’s safety. And now there was a lot of hardware in the house, with this group. All those gold medals, not to mention the silvers and bronzes! I told everyone to send their valuables home, because I couldn’t vouch for the neighborhood. I even called in Larry Buendorf, chief security officer for the USOC, who turned out to be very helpful. He told us we needed to start getting used to a whole new level of fame with Missy. For the rest of the games, he wanted us to give him a schedule, let him know our comings and goings, so he could make sure there was always someone on his team who knew where we were. He told us we needed to be careful about stopping for pictures and autographs. He said if Missy stopped for even one person, it would quickly turn into a crowd. He even advised Missy to “dress down” in public—to wear a hat, or sunglasses, or maybe a hoodie—but then he acknowledged that she was so tall, and so recognizable, this probably wouldn’t work.

  One piece of advice I acted on right away was hiding Missy’s medals. We wrapped them in a pile of blankets and stuffed them into the mouth of a nonworking fireplace. Every time we came back to the house, there was a mad dash to the fireplace, to make sure the medals were all there. We made sure to count them every time.

  Four golds.

  One bronze.

  Not a bad haul for our not-so-little girl.

  My Hundredth-of-a-Second Moment

  SUMMER OLYMPIC GAMES—LONDON, ENGLAND

  A lot can happen in a fraction of a second. A lot can not happen in a fraction of a second, too. And that’s pretty much what happened and what didn’t happen at the 2012 Olympics.

  How’s that for a cryptic opening paragraph? I can be a little overdramatic sometimes. Maybe I should back up and explain.

  By almost every measure, the Games of the XXX Olympiad were a giant success for the US Olympic team, and for me personally. But by one all-important measure—one precise, hard-to-get-my-head-around sliver of time—it featured a personal victory disguised at first as a defeat, a distinction that was almost incalculable. You see, at the Olympics, every triumph, every failure, every hiccup, is magnified. It all means so much more, because it feels like everyone in the whole entire world is watching. Because, well, they are. Also, because you never know when you’ll get another chance to compete on such a glorious stage. For a swimmer, the Olympics is like the Super Bowl, the World Series, the Stanley Cup. It’s the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The ultimate event to cap what’s essentially a four-year season. Oh, sure, we’ve got worlds, nationals, Pan Pacific Championships, but a gold medal at the Olympics is the big, big prize. And yet, for all the bells and whistles, for all the hype, the Olympics are exactly like every other meet on our calendar—a jam-packed week of tightly scheduled events that for the most part play out in the same pool. The difference is that it only comes around for most of us once or twice in our careers, so it’s tough to treat it like any other swim meet.

  And yet at the same time it is like any other swim meet. There might be a different order to the events, from meet to meet, but there’s usually no change from Olympics to Olympics, from one worlds lineup to the next worlds lineup, so at each meet you have to sit down with your coach and figure out a schedule that makes sense. You look at the order of events and see how it fits with your strengths. Maybe you’re a monster freestyle swimmer whose second-best event is butterfly, but because the fly is scheduled right before the free the coaching staff decides to scratch you from butterfly to make sure you’re fresh for your main event. There are all these outside factors at play. In London the semifinal for the 200-meter freestyle was scheduled just fourteen minutes ahead of the 100-meter backstroke final, and this presented a potential problem—or at least a worry. If things went my way and I swam to expectations, best-case scenario on top of best-case scenario, it would be a tight, tricky turnaround, so this was definitely something to think about. Only it wasn’t really something I was thinking about as I headed off to these games. I usually left it to Todd to figure this stuff out for me, while I tried to keep my focus on what I had to do in the pool. Seemed to me I had enough to worry about without worrying if my 200 free bumped up against my 100 back.

  For the most part, I liked to swim on a need-to-know basis. Tell me when I’m up and I’ll be good to go—that was my thing.

  Of course, it’s not enough to just psych yourself up and go for it. There’s a lot to think about, a lot to anticipate, all these outside factors, so Todd sat me down the second day we were in London to walk me through the lineup and get my thoughts. My thing was to focus on my time in the pool. Todd’s thing was to make sure I understood his thinking and he understood mine. At this stage in my career, since I was still just seventeen, he also involved my parents in a lot of these discussions. For this talk, though, it was just the two of us. We went to this little seating area they’d had set up in the Olympic Village and grabbed a couple of cups of coffee. We sat down on a bench. It was late in the afternoon, the sun was shining, there was lots of activity. To my great joy, there was laughter all around. Turns out the Olympic Village is a very happy place to be.

  I didn’t know it just yet, but this would play out to be a significant moment. To me, going in, it was just a cup of coffee with my coach. But to Todd, he had a whole script he meant to follow. He pulled out a piece of paper and across the top I could see he’d written the words seven golds. Actually, he wrote them in big letters: SEVEN GOLDS. He didn’t point the words out to me, or hand me the piece of paper, but he knew I’d see them, and he knew those words would freak me out. He noticed me noticing, of course. That was the whole point. At first I was thrown. Seven gold medals! I’d never even allowed myself to think along those lines—it was an impossible dream. So, obviously, I was thrown. Seven golds! For generations of swimmers, that had been an unreachable standard, set by Mark Spitz at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. For my generation, Michael Phelps would rewrite that standard with eight gold medals at the 2008 games in Beijing. Either way, that wasn’t at all what I wanted, wasn’t at all what I was expecting.

  He said, “What’s the matter, Missy?”

  Like he didn’t already know.

  I couldn’t think how to answer, so I just kind of nodded in the direction of the piece of paper, expecting his eyes to follow mine . . . and they did.

  “Oh,” he said. “That.”

  “Yes,” I said. “That. Seven? Where did that come from?”

  He said, “Does it scare you, that number?”

  I said, “No, it doesn’t scare me. I just don’t get it. That’s not why we’re here. That’s not what we talked about.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not. But I want you to think about that number. I don’t want you to be intimidated by it. I don’t want you to think of it as some unimaginable feat. This is not what I’m expecting of you. This is not what anyone’s expecting of you. This is just a number, but it’s a number you should f
eel good about.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to figure out where he was going with this. Truth was, I felt confident that I would have had a good chance to medal in any one of the seven events I’d qualified to enter—freestyle, backstroke, relays. And, if I was good enough to medal, maybe, just maybe, I was good enough to win, if everything fell my way. But I couldn’t possibly compete in so many events and expect to do well in all of them. My body might break down. The schedule would work against me. Something had to give.

  It was at this point that Todd told me about the turnaround time (or lack thereof!) I’d face with the 200 free and the 100 back. He laid it out for me. He said, “That gives you just fourteen minutes, Missy. To go from a semifinal in an event where you’re just hoping to make it to the finals, to the finals in an event you’re hoping to win. That’s not a lot of time.”

  I could only agree with him. “No,” I said. “It’s not.”

  He said, “Can you swim the two hundred free and still take the gold in the one hundred back?”

  I thought about it. A lot of times, I liked to leave it to Todd to sort through this stuff. But this was the Olympics, after all, so of course I weighed in—even though what came out wasn’t the most emphatic decision. After a couple of beats, trying to get my head around the gravity of what he was suggesting, I was all-in. I said, “Yeah, I really think I can.”

  “You really think you can or you know you can?” Todd said, making sure. Remember, the 100-meter backstroke was key. I felt like I had a better chance of swimming well in the 100-meter backstroke than I did in the 200-meter free, but that didn’t make the 200-meter free any less of a priority. Still, I truly felt I’d have a better chance to medal in the back. The 200-meter freestyle was of course important as well, but I knew it would take a lot for me to even medal.