She is staring at me—her bespectacled eyes cutting through my Quicksilver shirt and Billabong cargo shorts like scissors through notebook paper, her scowl a mixture of contempt and disgust. This frumpy, middle-aged woman clad in loose, earth-toned linens and clutching a copy of The Nation seems to regard me as the embodiment of all that is wrong with my gender, my age bracket, and Western civilization as a whole.
They’re all staring, in fact, as, on a warm afternoon in late August 2003, I take a seat at Barney’s, a casual burger joint in North Berkeley in the shadow of Alice Watters’s chichi Chez Panisse. Across the table is a smiling, radiant Natalie Coughlin.
I’d like to believe that our lunch date is attracting attention because, even after her recent misfortune in Barcelona, Coughlin is the best female swimmer in the world, and I am a mildly visible sportswriter who whores it up on the airwaves on a semifrequent basis. But human nature being what it is, I know better. Much better.
What the people at Barney’s see is what I see: a tall, muscular but certainly not substantial college student just turned 21, tanned and golden haired and blessed with gorgeous aqua eyes and perfect teeth and silky skin and an incredibly evolved sense of fashion (not that it hurts when you can bring traffic to a halt in ripped jeans, Pumas, and a sleeveless black top); preternaturally poised and prone to unleashing a wholesome yet slightly dangerous smile at precisely the right moment.
Then, when they’ve finished gaping at her, they notice me: a 38-year-old dude with expensive glasses and day-old stubble, dressed a little too young and casually; tall and curly haired and sporting a touch of gray, not to mention a disturbing abundance of ear hair; very happy to be there and, despite his valiant efforts to the contrary, giving off that creepy professor vibe, talking with his hands and in the process revealing—gasp—a wedding ring.
Any second now, I am sure, the frumpy lady or someone else like her is going to take a ketchup-drenched knife off her plate, sneak up from behind, and stab me through the jugular. Given our location—the PC capital of the universe—she just might get away with it. Your Honor, what we have here is a classic case of justifiable homicide.
It is a sensation I will experience many times over the next year, as I break bread (and pad Thai, and huevos rancheros, and greasy barbecue) with this young woman, who, when I was in her position—entering my senior year at UC Berkeley, contemplating some big decisions—was running around the backyard of her modest home in working-class Vallejo, spared the socialization of preschool because, her parents explained, she was “too smart” for such an endeavor. After a while, I came to accept the discomfort: Wherever we go, whatever we do, we’re gonna get stared at together.
Most times, the gawkers don’t see my reporter’s notebook in my back pocket or the wallet photos of my lovely and age-appropriate wife (herself a frequent recipient of reproachful glares for the crime of being too naturally blond, too fit, and too fashion-conscious for the Frumpy Police’s tastes) and our three kids, the eldest of whom is, in fact, named Natalie. Such details tend to kill your game with the young, hot gold-medalists-to-be, just as the inevitable wink-wink/nod-nods and worse from your jealous friends (you’re having lunch with who?) don’t enhance your popularity on the home front. Because no matter how hard I may try to keep the interaction strictly professional, it nonetheless reeks of awkwardness. Were I a character in a movie whose attributes were somewhat embellished—or, let’s just say, a sportswriter who got paid as much as most of the NFL players he covers—Coughlin could pass as my cliché coed squeeze, a tragically naive second wife in waiting.
It could all be so heavy and self-conscious, except that Coughlin, bless her impossibly mature soul, doesn’t allow it to be. Composed, assertive, and respectfully direct, she keeps our conversations frank and intense without their being charged or multilayered. I’m not sure whether this is an intrinsic gift or a skill derived from years of navigating her way through choppy waters both figurative and literal; all I know is that I’m grateful. It’s not as though being a sportswriter for a national magazine is heavy lifting, but it does present its challenges, not the least of which is a need to bond with and cultivate the trust of intensely driven souls from all over the geographical and social spectrums. Thus I’ve rolled into a rented union hall in North Baltimore on an early spring Saturday night with Green Bay Packers receiver Antonio Freeman and a bunch of his boys, which was a good thing, given that of the 600 folks in attendance, I was the only one who happened to be white—and because of my obvious bond with “Free,” I was as fawned over. I’ve done books with a maniacally competitive, physically obsessive football star (Jerry Rice); a freakishly body-painted, exhilarating exhibitionist party animal and rebounding savant (Dennis Rodman); and an unfailingly sweet evangelical Christian quarterback (Kurt Warner) who believes, as I understand him, that Mother Teresa does not currently reside in heaven, because she died without having been saved, whereas if Charles Manson were to be saved tomorrow, then go on another killing spree, he would nonetheless be guaranteed admission to the pearly gates.
Of the three, by the way, Coughlin is the most like Rice, only with a much greater aptitude for disguising her rough edges.
The point is that in a quest to grow close with subjects such as these in a short period of time, I’m sometimes compelled to accelerate the process by any means necessary, meaning I will scream “Hallelujah!” or quote Pac or Biggie or flirt like a madman, as the situation warrants. For instance, when I had an audience with 16-year-old Russian tennis vixen Anna Kournikova—who I knew was about to split for a 2-hour drive across Southern California on an adventure that wouldn’t end until morning—I managed to overcome the protective presence of both her mother (we ended up delving into my Ukrainian heritage) and her agent (whom Anna would order to “get us a stretch lee-mo”) by shamelessly cashing in on that enduring fantasy, “If I could go back to high school knowing what I know now…” Come to think of it, there were occasions on which I shamelessly flirted with Rodman, too, though I probably didn’t realize it at the time, what with the Jägermeister and the Goldschläger and the kamikazes and all.
With Coughlin, flirting was unnecessary, from the day we first talked business at Barney’s to that emotional moment 11 months later in the cavernous Long Beach Arena when, as she exited a press conference after having qualified for the Olympic team, we saw each other and silently hugged, neither of us caring in the least who stared, because we both understood how elated and relieved and vindicated she felt and, indeed, would continue to feel, from that night forward.
Would she turn pro? What events would she try to swim in the Olympics? Did she want someone tagging along and taking notes in the year leading up to the Games?
These were the questions Coughlin and I pondered during that meeting at Barney’s—we had actually met once before, when I had hammed it up for the team on the deck of Spieker Pool more than a year earlier as one of McKeever’s weekly guest speakers (I’d been recommended by my old college buddy Mohamed Muqtar, now Cal’s director of student services)—and over the next couple of weeks as her senior year began. I quickly came to understand that there were two, and only two, people involved in these decisions: Coughlin and McKeever, who essentially served as her manager, agent, and public relations director.
The first question was the most pressing: Take the cash and renounce her collegiate eligibility, or wait until March, after the NCAA Championships, to sign with Speedo or Nike and whoever else came calling? Before Barcelona, it didn’t seem to be much of a mystery. Coughlin was as good as gone, with McKeever’s blessing. She had done so much for the university and for the program that the coach didn’t even allow her own obvious interests to cloud her judgment. McKeever truly wanted what was best for her greatest swimmer, and the combination of reducing Coughlin’s competitive load and ensuring her financial security while padding her bank account seemed too good to pass up.
Now, though, as she rejoined her Cal teammates at Spieker and began grinding her way back into shape, Coughlin wasn’t so certain. For one thing, the vibe seemed so much better than it had the previous spring, when a team already decimated by mass defections had grown increasingly fractured, with drama over stolen boyfriends and intercepted instant messages to boot. Then there were the feuding stars—Coughlin and breaststroker Staciana Stitts, a 2000 Olympic gold medalist (as a relay swimmer, thanks to a leg in the preliminaries, but still) who had completed her final season of eligibility in 2003. Stitts, who suffers from alopecia, was a popular performer whose bald head was a recognizable symbol of Cal’s resurgence under McKeever.
McKeever and Stitts were close, but Coughlin’s arrival coincided with a dip in Stitts’s performances, and the two ultracompetitive swimmers, who’d been good friends during Coughlin’s freshman year, soon grew estranged. Stitts seemed to resent Coughlin’s presence, sometimes complaining to McKeever that special treatment was being afforded the team’s new star. “Stace, I understand how you could feel that way,” McKeever told her, “but I care about both of you. Does a mother love one child more than the other?”
Alas, any chance at friendship between Stitts and Coughlin was officially extinguished at the NCAA Championships in March 2002. The Bears were preparing for the 200-yard medley relay, with Coughlin swimming the lead-off backstroke leg, and Stitts following with the breaststroke leg. As the whistle blew to signal the backstrokers to enter the water in preparation for the start, Coughlin, as was her custom, waited to be the last one into the pool.
There was just one problem: Texas’s swimmer Kelley Robins remained on the deck as well. McKeever instantly figured out what was happening: Mike Walker, the longtime coaching associate she had gotten rid of shortly before Coughlin’s arrival at Cal, was now the Longhorns’ co–head coach. Walker, who’d been active in the recruiting of Coughlin, clearly knew about her superstition and had instructed his swimmer not to jump in before her.
On deck, a game of chicken was playing out. The wait was getting uncomfortable—technically, both swimmers risked disqualification if they failed to enter promptly. Finally, Coughlin bit her lip and got in first. However, she did not bite her tongue, unleashing a stream of expletives at Robins in the seconds before the race began. Further fueling Coughlin’s anger was the reaction of the other Texas swimmers when she jumped into the pool: They started cheering, as if getting her to jump in first had been some sort of psychological victory.
At that point a meet official approached McKeever and said, “If this happens again, there’s going to be a DQ.” McKeever answered in response to the threat of disqualification, “Fine, but tell them,” pointing at Walker and his fellow coaches. “This wasn’t about two athletes jockeying. This was a personal attack against me and my program.”
McKeever knew what was coming next. “Watch,” she said to the people near her. “Nat’s going to destroy her.” When the starting signal sounded, Coughlin burst underwater with fury and never let up. As she touched the wall at 50 yards, the Bears had an unfathomable 1½-second lead over the next-fastest team. Her split was so swift, it met the NCAA-meet qualifying standard for the 50-yard freestyle.
The Bears ultimately finished second, just .09 behind Stanford, which set an American record in the process, but Stitts was hardly in a triumphant mood. The next morning she and several other teammates, including Coughlin, were replaying the incident in a van headed from their hotel to the pool. “That was great,” Coughlin’s teammates told her. “You took her down.” Stitts, however, voiced a different opinion: “That was selfish. You could’ve gotten us DQed.” Stunned, Coughlin replied, “We weren’t going to get DQed. I wasn’t even the last one in the water.” Stitts rounded on her, screaming, “You’re not a team player!” As Coughlin began to yell back, McKeever, who was driving, intervened and ended the conversation. But the damage was done. The next season, Stitts’s final year of eligibility, was so miserable for Coughlin at times that she began to dread coming to practice.
But in the summer of 2003, Stitts moved to Orange County to train with McKeever’s closest coaching confidant, Dave Salo of Irvine Novaquatics, in an effort to qualify for the 2004 Olympics. With Stitts gone, Coughlin suddenly felt as though a weight had been lifted. She felt something else, too—a tangible sense of optimism that the Bears might be ready to do something they’d often talked about but had always seemed far-fetched: Take the program to the next level.
The key, from Coughlin’s perspective, was Whitney Hite, the new assistant McKeever had hired that May. Though close with Hite’s predecessor, Adam Crossen (who ended up coaching Stitts as one of Salo’s Novaquatics assistants), Coughlin felt that Hite’s presence had injected the team with a spark that had been lacking. Whereas Crossen had been confused by McKeever’s semifrequent exasperation with certain swimmers during periods of intense stress, Hite seemed unfazed. He exuded an attitude of “We’re the coaches; you’re the swimmers, so get to work, damn it.” Judging by the intensity of his sets, it was best not to test that premise.
Before filling the opening, McKeever had asked Hite, as well as the other candidates she considered, to take a behavioral test administered by her close friend and “life coach,” Kathie Wickstrand-Gahen. A former swimmer who became a successful collegiate coach at Northwestern and other schools, Wickstrand-Gahen had convinced McKeever that she needed someone whose personality strengths would complement her own, and Hite hadn’t hesitated to submit to the exam. He figured, I am who I am. If she likes me, great. If not, it’s not the right place for me anyway.
The test in question is known as the DISC, with each letter representing a different element of one’s behavioral style. The D stands for dominance, the I for influence, the S for steadiness, and the C for compliance. McKeever’s scores on the S and C scales were especially high, while her D and I were low. In Wickstrand-Gahen’s estimation, McKeever needed someone with a high I score to augment her coaching style and relieve some of the burden of recruiting. Sure enough, Hite’s I was especially elevated, indicating he is a people person.
Hite was used to winning, having been part of an NCAA championship team while swimming for the University of Texas, then capturing three more team titles while serving as an assistant coach for the University of Georgia’s women’s team from 1999 to 2001. The Bulldogs finished second to Auburn each of the next 2 years, which did not sit well with Hite. Upon arriving at Cal, he instantly set his sights on the top, despite the fact that the team was not fully funded, meaning it had fewer scholarships to disperse than the NCAA-allowed limit.
Yet, a few days after moving to Berkeley, Hite had buyer’s remorse. I think I just made the worst mistake of my life, he thought to himself. Nobody on the team seemed happy about swimming. Athletes were grumbling about their workouts (nothing new), about each other, and about McKeever, and everyone seemed to be going through the motions. Even Coughlin, despite her obvious dedication, appeared to have one foot out the door.
Slowly, that started to change. In the coming months, even Hite was taken aback at how his arrival seemed to coincide with a transformation in the team’s attitude. The most tangible difference to the swimmers was Hite’s effect on McKeever. She seemed calmer, happier, and less prone to voicing frustration with them during practice. She clearly trusted Hite’s leadership skills and technical knowledge, and his firmness and conviction had a soothing effect on her.
The bizarre thing was that philosophically, Hite and McKeever were hardly clones. Hite’s orientation was more traditional. He believed that for the team to improve, mental and physical toughness had to be instilled in the form of long, grueling workouts—in the pool, on dry land, and in the weight room. “In my heart I believe that if you get a swimmer in shape, get her a little bit stronger than she’s been, and then rest her, she’ll swim fast,” Hite explains.
At Georgia, working under the exacting Jack Bauerle, Hite had helped develop stars like sprinter Maritza Correia by pushing them past their preconceived physical limits. Yet he also understood the benefits of technical excellence, something he had picked up while swimming for Texas’s Eddie Reese, whose style was a blend of high-volume training and precision, especially on starts and turns. It was Hite’s ability to impart that kind of attention to detail to swimmers like Correia, who would capture a school-record 11 individual and relay NCAA titles during her collegiate career, that allowed him to work his way up from volunteer assistant to one making $9,000 a year to serving as a full-fledged member of Bauerle’s staff.
Though his new team wasn’t on Georgia’s level, Hite saw similar potential at Cal, particularly in swimmers like Ashley Chandler, a former US national champion coming off a disappointing freshman season; fellow distance swimmer Erin Reilly, a skinny freshman with loads of untapped talent; and Lauren Medina, an ultracompetitive junior freestyler who had already surpassed her unspectacular swimming pedigree.
Early on, “Whitney’s Group” became a dreaded term at Spieker Pool. Swimming for Hite meant you were in for a punishing workout and could expect no sympathy from the architect. Hite, with a gleam in his eye, seemed to revel in his role as torturer. At the same time, the swimmers inherently trusted his plan to uplift the team’s standing. “We’re a top-10 program, and this year we can become a top-5 program,” Hite told me before the season. “But they’re going to have to work for it like they’ve never worked for anything before.”
No one was less eager to experience Hite’s workouts than Coughlin, who avoided his lanes—or, some of her teammates felt, was shielded from them by McKeever—as though they were full of sewer water. Hite’s sustained, high-speed sets triggered bad memories from her teenage years, when Ray Mitchell, Coughlin felt, pushed her to exhaustion (and, ultimately, to serious injury) as a point of pride. She also correctly surmised that her combination of body awareness and ability to shift into the highest gear on cue made her less suited to Hite’s workouts than her teammates were. “I understand what it means to sprint,” she explains, “and when a coach says sprint, I really go for it. A lot of other girls aren’t at that point, so they don’t get nearly as tired.”
Yet Coughlin, paradoxically, became a Hite devotee almost from the start. She loved his intensity, confidence, candor, and passion. “He tells you exactly how he feels,” she says, “and doesn’t sugarcoat it at all. If he doesn’t like something, he’ll let you know.” Most of all, Coughlin sensed that Hite had stirred a sincerity in her teammates that they had lacked before. This year, she felt, when the team mapped out its goals for the season—going undefeated in dual meets, beating Stanford for the first time in 28 years (after three consecutive narrow defeats), finishing in the top five at the NCAA Championships—her teammates actually believed these ambitions were attainable.
To Coughlin, Hite’s presence gave the team the best of both worlds—an innovative, new-age strategist in McKeever and a traditionalist in Hite, each open to exploring the other’s ideas. On a campus known for fostering creativity and outside-the-box thinking, she felt this was a fitting setup: The Bears weren’t being ordered to prepare a certain way or employ a specific approach. Rather, they were being given a multitude of ideas and techniques that could help them succeed, the overriding message being “There are many different ways to be good in this sport. Here are some that might work for you.”
Above all, Hite exuded a toughness that he seemed to pass down to his swimmers. During his first few months on the job, the tall, lanky 30-year-old trained for the Chicago Marathon, fighting through chronic pain in his lower right leg while putting in the necessary distance work. In October, he flew to the Windy City and ran the race in a personal-best time of 3 hours, 22 minutes, grimacing through much of the back end as his leg throbbed. He finally saw a doctor upon his return to Berkeley—and X-rays revealed a stress fracture of the tibia. (As if to top that, Hite would run the ’04 Chicago Marathon in far more pain as, from the 2nd-mile mark, each step he took with his left leg sent a shooting sensation throughout his body. He finally started walking after 14 miles but later resumed running and, after a furious sprint, finished 13 seconds shy of 4 hours, out of principle. This time, X-rays would reveal a significant break in his left fibula, with a nerve coiled around the bone.)
When the Cal swimmers heard about Hite’s Marathon of Masochism, their fear factor intensified. “See,” they joked to one another, “he is crazy.” What they didn’t know was that on the spectrum of fighting through pain, running 26.2 miles on a broken leg wasn’t the gnarliest test he’d endured.
In fact, it wasn’t even close.
“Most people become swimmers because they enjoy the water,” McKeever tells me on a late-August afternoon as she paces the Spieker deck. “It’s quiet and calm and soothing, and they like the way it flows over their body. A lot of times, as swim coaches, we beat that out of them. What I’m trying to do is find a way to tap into that feeling and celebrate it.”
I would soon learn that those three words—feel the water—are central to McKeever’s coaching philosophy. If the typical swimming practice is as monotonous as a statistics lecture, McKeever’s workouts are more like extension-course seminars, with an emphasis on communication and experimentation. McKeever, unlike most other coaches, makes a point of giving her swimmers the rationale behind the drills and sets she chooses, many of which are highly unique. For example, whereas the traditional approach to interval training calls for short breaks between intense sprints, McKeever sometimes asks her swimmers to take five “underwater bobs” before resuming their sets. By inhaling deeply, sinking to the bottom of the pool, and then floating to the surface, the swimmers, McKeever feels, are able to reset their systems and achieve a purer form of rest before continuing the workout.
So much of McKeever’s coaching approach centers on getting her swimmers to become attuned to the mechanics of their bodies. Some, like junior breaststroker Marcelle Miller, didn’t respond to such teachings, instead preferring to grow stronger through hard, sustained sets. Others, like junior freestyler Keiko Amano, seemed immune to such instruction for extended periods before it finally began to kick in. Then there was Coughlin, whose ability to process and implement specific information regarding her physical movements borders on the freakish. In Hite’s words, “She has such great mind and body control, such an amazing ability to connect the dots. She’s always trying something new, always tinkering, and watching her and Teri work together is truly illuminating. Teri will say something about her technique or body positioning, and Natalie will say, ‘Oh, I felt that’ or ‘I’ll try that,’ and then immediately incorporate it into her stroke. It’s like telling (Oakland A’s pitching star) Barry Zito, ‘I want you to move your finger a half millimeter to the left when you throw your curveball from now on, and tell me how it feels,’ and then he’s instantly able to alter his grip and pitch even more effectively.”
However, McKeever was smart enough to understand that what worked for Coughlin might not prove as effective for an athlete less in tune with her own thresholds and without the same propensity for summoning high-intensity performances. As Hite says, “Natalie has a much different mental capacity than anyone else. She can stay sharp and be ‘in the zone’ for a lot longer than the other girls, and so those technique-specific practices are lost on a lot of them. They simply won’t get a good workout.”
To their credit, rather than wage a philosophical tug-of-war, McKeever and Hite opted for a logical division of labor. Despite his background with swimmers such as Correia, Hite focused mostly on distance specialists like Chandler and Reilly, as well as workout warriors like Miller. McKeever, who had a long history of milking the most out of sprinters—and, by extension, of fielding relay teams more potent than the projected sum of their parts—devoted more of her energies to those who swam shorter distances. Given collegiate swimming’s short-course layout, McKeever’s ability to drill home lessons in technique, as well as her focus on starts and turns, gave her sprinters a huge edge in a sport typically decided by hundredths of a second.
For example, on any other top-10 college team, the sight of a 5-foot-2 sprinter would provoke poolside laughter. But Amano, such an afterthought as a recruit that McKeever was stunned to learn she was coming to Cal—she and a group of team members, after all, had actually lost Amano for nearly half an hour during a recruiting trip to San Francisco’s Pier 39—had become a viable contributor to the Golden Bears’ sprint relays. In another 7 months, she would unleash one of the most stirring anchor legs in school history.
Somehow, as they splashed through the water at the start of the fall semester, the Bears were starting to resemble a team. They certainly weren’t one big, happy family, but they’d been infused with a common quest for improvement. That, ultimately, was all Coughlin needed to see. She pictured herself closing out a fulfilling career by helping to launch a new era of excellence—and, she hoped, by rewarding McKeever with one hell of a parting gift. Before I leave this place, Coughlin said to herself, we are going to beat Stanford.
Oddly enough, it was the coach of one of Cal’s other rivals, USC’s Mark Schubert, who helped Coughlin finalize her decision to stay. Schubert was talking about Coughlin’s decision with McKeever on the phone one day when the Cal coach asked, “You’ve been on seven Olympic staffs, and you’ve seen people go through situations like this. How do I help this person?”
Schubert offered to fly up and meet with McKeever and Coughlin to discuss the decision. McKeever was flattered and floored. A few days later, the three of them went to lunch at a Mexican restaurant on University Avenue, and Schubert shared his experiences with backstroker Lenny Krayzelburg, who’d won three gold medals at the 2000 Olympics and faced a similar decision in the years leading up to those games. Schubert said he’d advised Krayzelburg not to make any dramatic changes. “You’ve found something that’s working for you,” the coach had told him. “Is now the best time to change it?” He then explored the various scenarios with Coughlin, wondering, “If you decide to turn pro and go outside your familiar mix, what will that look like?”
Coughlin took it all to heart and, one morning in September, walked into McKeever’s office and said, “I’ve made my decision. I’m staying.” McKeever smiled. They hugged. Perhaps Barcelona, in an odd way, had been a blessing, the coach thought. Instead of feeling too good about ourselves, we’ll dig in and work that much harder.
Coughlin’s illness at the World Championships had affected another important decision: how many events to swim in Athens, and which ones. Before Barcelona, Coughlin had been tempted to push her physical limits and shoot for a record medal haul. Now that she’d been confronted with her body’s fragility, her ambition was somewhat muted. Twice now, at crucial junctures—before the 2000 Olympics and at the ’03 Worlds—her body had failed her. She feared that if she pushed herself too hard, her entire dream could disappear.
In the wake of his impressive effort in Barcelona, Michael Phelps was already talking about attempting to match or exceed Mark Spitz’s record. Phelps, however, had two distinct advantages over Coughlin: He believed he was bulletproof, having never experienced any adversity in his swimming career; and the Olympic swimming schedule made such a bold attempt plausible.
The schedule at the Olympics—and at the US Olympic Trials, which mirrored the Athens itinerary—could not have been less kind to Coughlin. In theory, she was the best US swimmer in five events—the 100 back, 200 back, 100 free, 200 free, and 100 fly. She held the world record in the 100 back and American records in the 100 free and 200 back; in the 100 fly and 200 free, only two Americans had ever swum faster, and she’d be a legitimate medal threat in each. Coughlin also figured to be the centerpiece of the US efforts in all three relays—the 400 free, 800 free, and 400 medley (in which she’d likely swim the backstroke but could also swim free or fly).
Yet the schedule didn’t allow her to showcase that versatility. On the second night of swimming at the Games, for example, the 100-meter backstroke semifinal would be followed by the 100-meter butterfly final, with only a pair of men’s 200-meter freestyle semifinal races in between. “I checked,” McKeever said in late August, “and they’re talking about a gap of like 18 minutes.”
So the 100 fly was out. The 200 free, an event in which Coughlin was growing increasingly comfortable, was intriguing, but the schedule killed her there as well. The 200 free semis on the third night of competition were before the 100 back finals, meaning Coughlin, at the very least, would be winded for her featured event. Before Barcelona, she might have been willing to risk it, but now her attitude was “Take care of the 100 back, and everything else will fall into place.” Had the two races been reversed, with the 100 back final shortly before the 200 free semis, it might have been worth a shot; unfortunately, the schedulers clearly hadn’t had Coughlin’s best interests in mind.
That left the 200 back and the 100 free, two events that (surprise) also conflicted. To swim both would require another vicious turnaround: On the sixth night of the competition, Coughlin would have to swim a rigorous 200 back semi just before the 100 free final, with only the men’s 200-meter individual medley final between them. This time, the gap would be as little as 12 minutes. “Nat’s good,” McKeever said, laughing, “but she’s not that good.”
Most likely, then, Coughlin would attempt to swim all three relays, the 100 back, and either the 200 back or the 100 free. On paper, it didn’t seem like a subject much worth debating. The 200 back was an event considered to be so weak internationally that Coughlin, even if she wasn’t at her best, would be a prohibitive favorite to win the gold.
Yet the 200 back had one distinct disadvantage: Coughlin hated it. “It’s a lousy event to swim, and it’s boring,” she explained one September morning as she rested on the Spieker Pool wall between sets. “It’s just not exciting at all.”
“Well,” McKeever interrupted, “it might be somewhat exciting if you break a 12-year-old world record while winning it at the Olympics.”
The coach let the thought sit, then continued down the deck to go over a set with some of her other swimmers. It was true that the 200 back was the smart play; the 100 free would be a much tougher event, one likely to feature 2000 Olympic gold medalist Inge de Bruijn of the Netherlands, budding Australian stars Jodie Henry and Libby Lenton, and, quite possibly, US legend Jenny Thompson. It was also a race in which someone could come out of nowhere—whether chemically enhanced or clean—and become a surprise contender. It was clear that McKeever preferred that Coughlin not subject herself to a scenario so rife with potential disappointments.
“Yeah,” Coughlin said with her coach out of earshot, “but the 100 free is where the action is.”