The Australians had built a seven-year winning streak in this race. Since their last defeat in 1997, they had won three straight world titles, had beaten us in the Sydney Olympics by over five seconds and had broken the world record four times.
We all started walking from the ready room to the deck as a team. As the other guys were set to walk out, I said, “Wait. Come back.” We huddled. Just about everyone on our team had seen Miracle, some in theaters after Nationals, others on their DVD players. “I don’t know if you remember the scene in Miracle before the Soviet game where Brooks tells the team, ‘This is your time.’” I said. “Well, this is our time. I don’t care what happened in the past. This is us. This is now.”
To me, this really is what swimming is about. The team is always better than the sum of individuals. People remember the relays more because they’re just more fun. We never had four boys from the same age bracket to make a great relay at North Baltimore, so I missed this for most of my career.
In Athens, I stood on the blocks and I had nervous energy coming out of my ears. I jumped in to swim against Grant, just as I had done a hundred times during that one trip to the Gold Coast. We practically hit the first wall together; he was ahead by a hundredth of a second. At 100 meters, I moved ahead slightly by half a tenth, and then by three-tenths at 150. My last 50 felt amazing. Just as I had in the 200 the night before, I turned it on at the end, and I could feel myself pull away from Grant. I swam the last lap in 26.78 and hit the wall in 1:46.49, giving us a 1.01-second lead on the field. As Ryan took over and maintained the lead over Klim, Massi Rosolino briefly moved the Italians into second place. The Aussies passed them back with Sprenger in the third leg, but Peter brought us through 600 in 5:21.80, and gave Klete a solid lead of 1.48 seconds ahead of Ian going into the last leg.
Standing on the side and watching your teammates swim is both elation and torture. You jump, you scream, you contort yourself into a pretzel, but you really can’t do anything to make your guys go faster and hold theirs back. Almost as soon as Ian Thorpe jumped in, I wanted to throw a rope around him. Klete had him by over a bodylength, and we were hoping he could keep Ian at bay for as long as possible. Instead, Ian made up the whole deficit in the first 50 meters and pulled even with Klete before the first turn. On the pooldeck, Peter said something I can’t repeat, most of the stadium was thinking: it’s over. It won’t be long now before Ian shoots by him and the U.S. start fighting for second in another 800 free relay. “He’s out too fast,” I told Peter. “He can’t hold it.” By 80 meters, Ian remained in a virtual dead heat with Klete, who was straining to hold him off. At the second wall, Ian still looked as though he could slingshot past Klete at any moment. But as the race kept progressing, Klete kept fighting off Ian’s surges. He flipped first at the third wall, and as Klete headed for home, Ryan, Peter and I were just going nuts on the opposite end of the deck. I glanced at our team in the athlete viewing area and saw Erik on his feet screaming. Nearby, Jon Urbanchek was standing next to Bob and was the first one who really figured it out: “If he didn’t catch him there,” Jon said, “he’s not catching him.”
With two strokes left, Thorpe made a desperate surge. He and Klete lunged for the line and I was clenching my fists waiting for the finish. Even peering right over the wall, with the hands passing right in front of me, I had to look at the scoreboard. Show me a 1 for us. C’mon, show me a 1. We all saw it at the same time and practically left our feet in synch. U.S. 7:07.33; Australia 7:07.46. We did it. The streak was over.
I threw both of my hands into the air and yelled all the way back to Baltimore. I had been pretty outwardly restrained after the individual races, but this one I could share. Klete popped out of the water and joined the three of us for a group hug. It’s the same Klete who rarely got excited about anything. “Yeah, we did it!” he said. “Yeah, we kicked their butts!” In the four years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen Klete show that much emotion. I’ve never seen that side of him. On our way back through the mixed zone, Klim told a reporter, “We owned that race. They stole our race.”
We went to get our medals a half hour later, and I still had goose bumps over my whole body. I didn’t have any hair to lose, because I had shaved down, but whatever was there was standing straight up.
Klete and Peter were done, so they went to do a SportsCenter interview. Ryan and I swam down, went to drug testing and went back to the village to get ready for the heats and semis of the 200 IM the next day. Typically, each night I would give my medals to Bob so he could hold on to them while I headed into drug testing. He would sometimes forget about this medal in his pocket and remember it only when he set off the metal detector (a.k.a. medal detector). This night as we walked in, I remembered to ask, “Bob, do you have something of mine?” It was ironic that the possession of a medal, the one thing that most reveals you as an Olympian, would be the thing that made security stop you and keep you from entering the village.
Back in the room, I told Lenny it was the most exciting moment of my career. I’m so glad I didn’t have to swim any finals the next day, because I was too wound up. I stayed awake until 2:30 trying to sleep, getting up to play a video game, trying to sleep, firing off a dozen fresh text messages and trying to sleep. On nights when I can’t get to bed, I’m usually pretty good at previewing the next day’s race like a short film in my head. Instead, this film was a multi-multi-multi-feature rerun of the most incredible race of my life, the one I had just swum.
I had trouble coming down from the high the next day. My two qualifying IM swims were pretty ordinary and my breaststroke legs were horrible. Ideally I want to kick and pull with my arms one after the other so I’m always moving through the water steadily. Instead I was doing both at the same time. Bob let me know about it after the semis. He came over with a piece of paper and showed me my splits with the breaststroke numbers underlined and circled.
“Michael, your breaststroke was not good.”
“I know.”
“You need to work on the breaststroke.”
“I know, Bob. Don’t get on me now. I realize that.”
Bob was worried about how I’d finish up the week. He was clearly overreacting to my swim, but he also sensed me getting into cruise mode and wanted to put a stop to that. I wasn’t trying to cruise. I think we both looked at my program ahead of time and figured out what I could handle physically, but we underestimated the toll that stress from one race could have on subsequent races. Besides, it’s worse when Bob says nothing, because I know he’s letting the calm build up to the storm, when he can say the things he’s been saving up and really make an impact.
“Listen, Michael,” he said, “you have me for 48 more hours and then you have freedom, so you better just deal with it.” Actually it wasn’t 48, but 72 hours, according to the schedule. I had the 200 IM finals on Thursday, the 100 fly final on Friday and, I hoped, the 4x100 medley final on Saturday, if I could qualify for it by being the fastest American in the 100 fly. Bob may be a brilliant coach, but if he really meant 48 hours, his crystal ball is better than I thought.
Bob could count on the cold shoulder he got from me to be temporary. For really frosty treatment, he could go back to his room, which came to be known as The Igloo. Bob says he likes the room really cold at night when he goes to sleep. That’s a man who is headed to Michigan. Coach Eddie, who was Bob’s roommate on the trip, is a Texas man who is used to warm temperatures and prefers them that way when he’s trying to sleep. Because the settings in their room left few options between iceberg and frying pan, Bob kept the thermometer down. Eddie barely slept at all. “I hope you’re freezing your butt off, Mr. Bowman,” he’d say.
The next morning Bob got on me for coasting through the hundred fly heats. He said he had the same feeling he had about where my mind was as he did before the fly in Barcelona, when Ian beat me. Bob was on a paranoid overdrive. He went back to the village and told Eddie: “I’m so uptight about what he’ll do in the 200 IM tonight.”
For the IM finals, I wanted to do what I did at 2001 Worlds: go out fast and make them catch me in the back hundred. In fact, I saved my best swimming for the back half of the race. I led after every leg, and each time I hit the wall, there was a different swimmer in second place. I had a slim, one-tenth lead over Brazil’s Thiago Pereira after the butterfly and a two-tenths lead over Hungary’s Laszlo Cseh after the backstroke. Since you can get a good look at the field during the breaststroke, I noticed that the field was still a little close for comfort, so I cranked my arms pretty hard, had one of my best breaststroke legs and built the lead to eight-tenths over George Bovell of Trinidad. I pulled away in the freestyle, came home in 1:57.14 and, for the second straight time in an IM race, I got to finish one-two with a teammate. Ryan Lochte took the silver in 1:58.78.
I had a tight turnaround of 38 minutes until the 100 fly semifinal, but first we had the medal presentation for the IM. We got on the stand and I remember that Ryan was so excited about getting his medal, he left the wreath on his head as the anthem started to play. I gave a quick whistle out of the side of my mouth and he took it off. I have to admit while we had our hands over our hearts, I spent the next two minutes thinking about one thing: how fast can I go in the butterfly? Bob had been worried about the short time between races. I only had time for an eight-minute warm-down and we didn’t even bother with a lactate test.
After the presentation, I walked right into the ready room just as the first heat was going off. Ian Crocker and I were both in the second heat. Again I had an Andrei Serdinov moment. This time, I watched him swim a 51.74 to break the Olympic record and I wasn’t happy about it. No sense letting that record last any longer than the world record he held in Barcelona for five minutes, is there?
Ian always goes out fast, but I had no idea what he would be able to do. Since that first night when he was ill, he had slowly been feeling better and swimming faster all week. Ian took it out fastest, hitting the first wall in 24.36. I was fifth at the time, but came back with a really strong second 50 and won the heat in 51.61, two-tenths ahead of Ian.
I was pretty happy with both of my swims. After the race I went up to Bob and said, “That didn’t feel too bad.” Bob showed me the splits and told me, “Nice job. That’s exactly what I wanted to see you do.” He said later that he had a quiet confidence about the final that he hadn’t had since before the final in Barcelona, but at the time, he wanted to make sure I didn’t lose my edge. “I wonder what it will take to win the hundred tomorrow,” he said.
25
DREAMS FULFILLED
I swam in a race on Friday morning, only as a precaution. I was the butterfly leg of our medley relay team that advanced safely into Saturday night’s final. The medley relays are always swum at the end of the meet. The U.S. teams—and most other teams—select the swimmers they use in the final based on results from the earlier races in the competition. The top American in the 100-meter backstroke, for instance, was Aaron Peirsol, who won the gold medal, so that meant Aaron had earned the right to swim the backstroke leg for us in the final. Since Brendan Hansen was our fastest 100 breaststroker, he’d swim the breaststroke leg in the final. Jason Lezak was our fastest freestyler, so he’d be our anchor. Usually, the swimmers who recorded the second-fastest times for us in each stroke would be able to swim in the qualifying heats. Only those four swimmers who swam in the final would be able to stand on the awards podium afterward and receive their medals before hearing the winning team’s national anthem. But the ones who swam in the prelims would still receive medals after the fact for their team’s performance.
Since the relay heats took place before the butterfly final, neither Ian nor I knew who was going to be able to swim in Saturday’s final. The one who didn’t swim in the prelims could conceivably miss out on getting a relay medal if he didn’t win the butterfly.
Eddie had a few ways to handle this. Either Ian or I could have swum the freestyle or butterfly leg of the prelim relay. That way both of us could have been guaranteed to receive whatever color medal the U.S. team ultimately won. Eddie and Ian decided that Ian would sit out the heats, because he was still somewhat fatigued from his illness. Since he had beaten me at the Worlds and the trials, he would probably be a slight favorite in the Olympic final. I swam the fly in the prelims and was fairly confident that whomever we used in the final, we’d be heavy favorites to win the event.
I slept in a bit and skipped the daily team meeting before the fly finals, with the coaches’ permission. The meetings usually only take about 15 minutes. The coaches usually go over the day’s race lineup and show some video highlights from the day before to get us fired up. As I warmed up before the butterfly, Bob noticed my body language and intensity level. “Michael’s going to win tonight,” he thought.
I liked my chances, not so much because of Ian’s illness, but because I really felt prepared. Ever since Malchow kicked my butt a few years ago, I drove myself through extra fly training. Despite our meltdowns, I had complete trust in Bob’s instructions. I put off some social things. I didn’t have a girlfriend leading up to the Olympics. All of that gave me a confidence that, win or lose, I’d be able to say I couldn’t have worked any harder to get a better result. I was pumped.
I dove in and tried to stay within striking range of Ian. At 50 meters, I was in fifth place and Ian’s lead over me, .77 seconds, looked like too much to make up. I was down by about three-quarters of a bodylength. After I hit the wall, I started kicking as hard as I could, and I remember not wanting to look to see where Ian was. I closed quickly, but still trailed both Ian and Serdinov going into the last few strokes. It was clear that the three of us would be the medalists, but we didn’t know who would place where. Bob had stopped watching the pool after the first 50, because he figured I was too far back. As he watched the race unfold on the video scoreboard, he was surprised to see how much ground I was making up, so he decided to look at the pool for the last 15 meters. “Well, second place isn’t too bad,” he told himself.
I reached for the wall and I knew I’d hit it just about perfectly, in other words at the full extension of my stroke rather than in the middle of a stroke. As you get to the finish, it’s sometimes difficult to time it so you touch the wall with your arms fully extended as opposed to touching while you’re in the middle of reaching for the wall. If you do that, you can cheat yourself out of a few hundredths of seconds. Ian didn’t time his reach quite as well.
I took my goggles off first, which I hadn’t done in Barcelona when I celebrated prematurely. Instead of looking at the placement numbers next to our names, I looked at our times, one by one, as if I wanted to digest the news in pieces. First I saw 51.29 for Ian. Then I saw the 51.25 for me. Serdinov was a strong third in 51.36. I couldn’t quite believe it.
As it started to hit me that I’d won the race, I reached from Lane 4 into Lane 3 to console Ian. I did a quick interview with NBC after I jumped out of the pool. Afterward, I went right to the NBC truck, to look at the video with Rowdy and NBC’s play-by-play announcer, Dan Hicks. Even at the last minute, I thought Ian was going to outtouch me. “How did I do that?” I said. “There’s no way.”
I could see how disappointed Ian was after the race. It hit me that because he hadn’t swum in the morning, he was going to leave Athens without a gold medal. This didn’t seem right. As much as I used my losses to Ian to motivate me over the last year, I felt an odd kinship with the guy behind the poster on my wall. He pushed me. If he hadn’t been that good, he couldn’t have pushed me that hard. If I didn’t respect him as much, I might not have trained that
hard in the butterfly. It’s one thing to train your hardest, be at your best and finish second; it’s another to train your hardest and have injury or illness keep you from making your best attempt. I felt that way about Whitney more than anyone, but I also felt some of that about Ian.
I started swimming down after the 100 fly. Even though confidence is good, there is a fine line between having enough confidence to believe you’re going to win and having so much that you take the possibility of losing for granted. I told Bob I knew what he was doing and he shot me a look. It was as if we had been through so many mind games together and I didn’t need one to focus my mind for the next race. Bob shook his head. “You know, Mr. Jimmy would be so proud to see you right now,” he said. “Can you imagine how happy he’d be if he could see this?” Okay, now that got me. I had no defenses for that remark. “He’s with us right now,” I said, “because he’s looking down at us.” Bob and I nodded at each other and I put my goggles on to swim to the other side of the practice pool. When I reached the other side, I had to stop to empty out my goggles.
But actually I was feeling sympathy for Ian. Why did he have to get sick now? Was this really his best? Will he take it tougher than most? Will he be too hard on himself for something he couldn’t control? Will he blame himself for not swimming well in the free relay? Will he be okay with swimming so hard and coming so close to a gold medal?
“Hey, Bob …” Again I had a look on my face.
Beneath the Surface Page 21