All the guys out of the pool!” Ray Mitchell intoned, interrupting a typically rigorous early-morning workout at northern California’s hottest youth swim club. Recoiling with trepidation, 16-year-old Natalie Coughlin and the other girls on the Terrapins, the Concord-based team Mitchell cofounded and ran with an iron whistle, congregated on one side of the pool as their coach hovered menacingly above.
The team had just finished its summer break following US Nationals, the longest stretch away from the pool that any of the Terrapins would enjoy for another year. Some of the swimmers had even taken 3 weeks off, an eternity in a sport that beats up its young like few others. If gymnastics and figure skating were the gravest examples of sports whose coaches habitually inflicted physical, mental, and emotional distress on elite-level youth standouts—a comprehensive tragedy documented so masterfully in Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, a landmark book published in 1995—swimming was quite possibly the next worst. It had many of the same pitfalls: an overarching obsession with physique; training philosophies that bordered on the sadistic; talented girls peaking before they were old enough to vote in some cases; and an alarmingly high rate of burnout, injury, and eating disorders.
Coaches like Mitchell, of course, didn’t seem concerned with those types of big-picture issues. They wanted their kids to swim fast, especially the most talented ones—and Coughlin was the kind of once-in-a-life-time swimmer whose success could add to Mitchell’s already significant position in the sport. For more than 3 years, Coughlin had been a reasonably happy member of one of the nation’s most successful clubs. But now, as she struggled with the first serious injury of her career, Coughlin was feeling Mitchell’s wrath.
Because Coughlin’s swimming fortunes were so inextricably intertwined with his own success, it was natural that Mitchell had become particularly hard on her—not that he was soft on anyone. As Coughlin and the other girls sat shivering in the pool that September morning in 1998, they braced themselves for another upbraiding from their impossible-to-please coach.
“You girls are fat,” Mitchell yelled. “Look at you—I can see it in your asses and your thighs when you walk on deck, and it’s unacceptable. You need to watch what you’re eating and get in shape if you want to have a prayer of succeeding.”
Coughlin boiled with rage. It was hard enough to be a teenage girl; being a teenage girl in a swimsuit, with nowhere to hide any pubescent chubbiness, was out-and-out torture. It didn’t help that unlike runners, cyclists, or other athletes who engaged in cardiovascular exercise on an intense basis, female swimmers didn’t seem to shed their weight, perhaps because the cool water kept their bodies from sweating out calories. Also, according to Kathie Wickstrand-Gahen, “studies show that the more efficient you are, the fewer calories you burn. It’s like a whale or a dolphin—if you can figure out a way to glide through the water and cut down on resistance, it requires less energy.”
At the same time, as anyone who has ever hosted a kids’ pool party can attest, few activities provoke such voracious spells of hunger; swimmers love and need to eat. Yet whereas young male swimmers tend to have faster metabolisms that allow them to stay trim, their female counterparts aren’t so fortunate. Already self-conscious about their muscular physiques, female swimmers learn from a young age that they have something to hide. “Swimmers are notorious for eating full meals before dates,” says Cal’s Amy Ng, herself an exceptionally fit athlete. “That way, we can eat light on the date. Guys tend not to like it when you eat more than they do; it freaks them out.”
It’s also true that body fat can be a positive in swimming—it increases buoyancy, allowing a swimmer to ride higher in the water. Over the years, however, most coaches have viewed it primarily as a sign of laziness. “The obsession with female swimmers and their weight used to be out in the open,” says Georgia assistant coach Carol Capitani, who, as Carol Felton, was an all-American swimmer at Cal from 1988 to 1991. “Women used to have to get on scales and weigh in, and (male) coaches would tell them, ‘You’re fat.’ They’d have those hydrostatic scales out there on the deck, and the men would yell ‘moo’ as the women got up there.”
So it’s not as if what was going on at Mitchell’s club was unique or new. In fact, he might have sincerely believed that he was helping his swimmers to stay fit. Like Vince Lombardi and so many successful coaches in so many sports, he was attempting to motivate through fear—and this was yet another form of exerting control over impressionable young minds. When he employed similar tactics with his male swimmers, they were more able to shrug off the message and understand the intention behind it. But young girls in bathing suits and with surging hormones were a different matter.
At swim meets, when his athletes would dine together at restaurants, Mitchell inevitably took note of everyone’s culinary choices. Girls who ordered cheese on a burger or mayonnaise on a sandwich risked being subjected to Mitchell’s taunts. As Coughlin recalls, he’d issue warnings like, “jiggle, jiggle, jiggle,” as the rest of the table fell either silent—or into giggles.
Coughlin was uncomfortable with those comments at the time, and as she grew older and saw that many of her fellow Terrapins struggled with eating disorders, she became increasingly disturbed. At one point during her senior year at Cal, Coughlin told me how hurtful and inappropriate she felt Mitchell had been and that disordered eating was widespread among her former teammates. I assumed she’d been exaggerating, but about a year later I ran it by Leah Monroe, a former Terrapins swimmer who followed Coughlin to Cal but quit the swim team during her sophomore year. Monroe, who described herself as “less disgruntled than any of the other girls” who swam for Mitchell—she spoke highly of him as a coach and motivator—agreed with Coughlin’s assessment. Both she and Coughlin told me specific stories about teammates who’d battled bulimia and anorexia; one had been hospitalized in college after her weight dropped to 70 pounds.
According to Monroe, a relatively petite breaststroke specialist, Mitchell never hassled her about her weight, partly because her proclivity for junk food became an inside joke between them. “The first time I really interacted with Ray was when I was 14, and I was trying to make my Senior Nationals cut for the 200 breast,” Monroe recalled. “About an hour before my race, I had a hot dog and a Drumstick (ice cream cone), and then I went out and made the cut. It became a joke between us: He’d say, ‘Leah’s about to swim, so she’d better go eat some junk food.’ ”
Ultimately, of course, this was no laughing matter. Swimming, partly because of the obvious degree to which young girls’ bodies are exposed, has been shown to have a higher incidence of eating disorders among competitive females than numerous other sports. The official website of USA Swimming posts an article on the subject, condensed from the National Youth Sports Safety Foundation, Inc., fact sheet, which notes, “Athletes participating in all sports are susceptible to eating disorders, but it is found in some sports more often than others. Athletes more at risk of having eating disorders are ballet dancers, gymnasts, cheerleaders, figure skaters, divers, wrestlers, and swimmers.”
While the article asserts that “coaches alone have very little control in helping cure an athlete with an eating disorder,” it also insists that “coaches and parents need to be sensitive to the role they play in focusing undue attention on weight and body image.” According to the article, “Sometimes eating disorders can be triggered by a single comment from someone very important to the athlete. An off-handed remark that refers to an athlete as ‘pudgy’ or ‘thunder thighs’ can become deeply imbedded in the mind of a potential anorexic or bulimic.”
A 2001 article in The Sport Journal, published by the United States Sports Academy, revealed the findings of a study in which 62 female swimmers from seven college teams participated. The study, by West Chester University PhD Justine J. Reel and University of North Carolina at Greensboro PhD Diane L. Gill, found that more than half (51.6 percent) of the swimmers agreed with the statement, “There are weight pressures in swimming.” The most frequently reported weight stressors were the revealing team uniform/swimsuit (45.2 percent), the perception that lower weight helps swim performance (42 percent), teammates noticing weight (16.1 percent); crowd scrutinizing body (12.9 percent), and the feeling that the lightest swimmers have a performance advantage (9.7 percent). Reel and Gill cited prior research, such as a 1993 study by Benson and Taub which reported that “swimmers may be especially vulnerable to disordered eating due to the display of their bodies in a tight and revealing team uniform.” The authors also quoted a 1993 study by Thompson and Sherman which hypothesized that swimmers face unique pressures to lose weight in their sport. A 1990 study by Thornton, the article notes, demonstrated that Olympic female (swimmers) were told to lose weight and body fat to cut times.”
The article by Reel and Gill concluded that “coaches may benefit from an awareness of weight-related pressures for competitive swimmers. It is important to understand that while swimmers may become more comfortable than the general public about wearing swim suits, they may experience the stress associated with wearing very small and competitive suits for competitive purposes. More importantly, swim coaches need to be aware that while many swimmers may have healthy body image, there may be some swimmers that have highly negative feelings toward their body.” Among the 12 coaching strategies offered in an appendix are, “Discourage team members from making weight-related comments to other swimmers,” and, “Watch comments that suggest swimmers shold drop weight to cut times.”
It’s unclear how cognizant Mitchell was that numerous girls under his tutelage were struggling with eating disorders, but he might have been aware that many of the swimmers he sends to collegiate programs felt they had already maxed out their potential. This isn’t unusual for female swimmers; few youth standouts continue to improve during college and beyond. Swimmers train so intensely from such young ages that a major crash is always right around the corner. Once a swimmer falls off the horse—due to injury, burnout, or just plain leveling off—she is rarely able to get back on, or at least not at the same speed as before.
In that regard, Coughlin was a true anomaly. By the time she defied that pattern and revived her career under McKeever, she was convinced that virtually everything about her final year with the Terrapins—from Mitchell’s rigorous training sessions to his controlling personality to his stubbornness in dealing with the injury that nearly drove her from the sport—had been detrimental to her overall development. Mitchell, of course, would see it far differently, claiming that he was as responsible as anyone for Coughlin’s ultimate success. In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News shortly before the 2004 Olympics, Mitchell said, “We feel we developed her from nothing to a national level. It would have been nice to get a little more respect for our contributions to her success. She fixates on that last year. We get the credit for the injury, but not for the rehabilitation.”
Specifically Mitchell, like many youth coaches, believes that repeated high-volume workouts at an early age establish an “aerobic base” that a swimmer can draw upon throughout his or her career. While some, including Coughlin, question the scientific basis of this theory, it inevitably is used to justify the punishing workouts teams like the Terrapins routinely endured. Pummel them early, the thinking goes, and you’ll reap the dividends for years to come.
Of course, when a swimmer becomes slower upon reaching physical maturity, this theory is never cited.
The mere notion that Mitchell had “developed” her as an athlete irked Coughlin. If a coach were capable of creating such a successful athlete, she wondered, why wouldn’t there have been 10 or 15 swimmers just like me on that team? And why do these coaches take so much credit for their successes but never for their failures? When a swimmer fails, it’s always his or her fault.
In Coughlin’s view, “It’s always a symbiotic relationship. Obviously, athletes need their coaches for structure, support, and expertise. But it is ultimately up to the swimmer to make the right choices and put in the hard work. It’s like that saying, ‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.’ ”
Certainly Mitchell, like a majority of his peers, believed in intense, high-volume workouts as the most effective means of improving a swimmer’s performance. Like many youth swim coaches—and, to be fair, like many coaches in all competitive sports—he favored an approach that leaned on strict discipline and aimed to control his athletes’ behavior both in and out of the pool. While some members of the swimming community were opposed to such a coaching style, few could argue that many of the men and women who employed it were often achieving desirable results.
During the years Coughlin trained with Terrapins, Mitchell was in the process of making a name for himself as a coach who successfully pushed talented teenagers into the ranks of the nation’s elite. His bio on the Terrapins’ website proudly notes that Mitchell, who cofounded the club in 1989, was the USA Swimming developmental coach of the year in 1998, 1999, and 2003, and the Pacific coach of the year in 1998. “As the Terrapin Head Coach,” his bio continues, “Ray’s teams have racked up over 30 top-10 team finishes at junior and senior nationals since 1990, including national championships in 1997 and 2000. His swimmers have qualified for USA National Teams, including the Pan Pacific Games, Pan AM Games, World University Games, Short Course World Champs, National Jr. teams, Goodwill Games, World Championships, and USA National “A” and “B” teams.
Coughlin concedes that for the most part, she enjoyed swimming for Mitchell during her first 3 years with his club. She had joined at 13 and, until the end of her junior year of high school, was willing to put up with his autocratic style because of her success in the pool and, more important, the fun she was having with the other swimmers. In fact, Mitchell’s authoritarian approach served as a bonding mechanism, as Coughlin and her friends would close ranks as common sufferers. They privately called their coach “Stalin” and made fun of his mannerisms and platitudes. Meanwhile, when they were able to get away from swimming, they enjoyed being kids. “We’d go surfing practically every Sunday, down at Linda Mar Beach in Pacifica,” Coughlin recalls. “We were terrible, but we loved it.”
Though Coughlin joined her friends in lampooning Mitchell as a pitiless taskmaster, her heart wasn’t really in it until her senior year of high school. Early on, she’d noticed that there always seemed to be a scapegoat in his group, a swimmer he would ride extra hard, as though making an example out of him or her. I’d hate to be that person, Coughlin often thought to herself. As it became clear that her shoulder injury would not easily heal, and Mitchell grew more and more frustrated, it began to dawn on her: Damn. I am the scapegoat.
“In his mind,” Coughlin says, looking back, “he believed that he was challenging you through a ‘tough love’ relationship. But I felt that it was emotionally abusive.”
Coughlin’s introduction to swimming had been far more frivolous, as it is for most kids. When she was 10 months old, Coughlin received her first exposure to her parents’ tiny backyard pool in Vallejo, California, a working-class town 35 miles northeast of San Francisco. Her father, Jim, a Vallejo police sergeant, and mother, Zennie, a paralegal, weren’t frustrated ex-athletes, and neither was especially interested in cultivating a future Olympic champion.
Coughlin took to the water like a baby seal. After Natalie thrived in summertime lessons, her parents decided that signing her up for a swim team would be less expensive. She joined the nearby Benicia Blue Dolphins and began racing in local competitions at the age of 6. Both Coughlin girls were suitably determined—Megan hiked to the top of Oahu’s Diamond Head at age 3—but Natalie’s focus and drive stood out. “Natalie was always goal oriented,” Jim Couglin recalls. “No matter what she did, she had to know everything about it. And when it came to swimming, whatever level she was on, she’d pick out the fastest person around and make a point of saying, ‘That’s the one I’m going to beat.’ ”
Natalie was so intense that in backstroke races, she often powered into the finish and hit her head on the wall. On a questionnaire the nationally ranked swimmer filled out for the Blue Dolphins, at age 9, one of the queries was “What are the reasons you swim on a US team?”
“The reason,” Coughlin wrote, “is because I live in the United States.”
Says Natalie: “I think I always had this incredibly inflated sense of self, even when it wasn’t merited. There’s a video of me doing this dance routine when I was a little kid, and it was awful, but watching it, you can tell I thought I was great.”
Young Natalie wasn’t particularly fond of swim practice but found the meets—and the culture at large—alluring. She’d get so excited about upcoming competitions that she’d insist on wearing her oversize, baggy racing suit around the house the entire day before a meet. Before leaving for the pool the next morning, Zennie would carefully French-braid her daughter’s hair. Natalie would then place a cap on top, put goggles over her eyes, and strut around the house in full battle regalia.
By all measures, Jim and Zennie were exemplary parents in a sport in which perspective often vanishes. The Coughlins spent most weekends at swim meets across northern California, hanging out under pop-up tents, serving sandwiches to their daughters and other team members as endless games of hearts and go fish played out and the girls kept up with their homework. They’d do embroidery and macramé, make necklaces and bracelets out of beads—anything to pass the time between races. As Natalie recalls, “We’d be playing tag, playing cards, goofing around. You’d get so caught up in what you were doing that occasionally you’d miss your event. It was just so great being with your friends and being outside burning off energy, instead of being inside, playing video games or watching TV. I loved being active, and swimming was the only thing I was good at. I did gymnastics, ballet, tap dance; in junior high I played volleyball. I was very uncoordinated, fat, and clumsy, except when I was in the water.”
As much as they enjoyed an environment they considered reasonably wholesome, Jim and Zennie recoiled at the sight of obsessive parents in their midst. “Some kids leave the sport because their parents drive them nuts,” Zennie says. “I guess we were really bad ‘swim parents,’ because we never knew the times, and really, we still don’t.” Jim remembers seeing “parents running around with two or three stopwatches. We never knew anything about times. We just wanted the girls to have fun, do their best, and, if possible, win races. Other parents were always talking about this standard or that standard—and timing everything. There’d be an official clock at the meet, but parents would still be out there with their stopwatches, timing the races, talking about splits.”
One day, when Natalie was older, the Coughlins hosted a party at which the guests watched her compete in a televised international meet. “She’s standing on the starting blocks,” Jim recalls, “and one of the dads pulls out a watch and starts timing her off the TV. That’s when I knew things had officially gotten out of control.”
Long before that, Jim and Zennie, without getting caught up in splits or rankings, had come to understand that swimming was not merely a casual activity for their firstborn. Jim remembers watching Natalie swim at a pool on Vallejo’s Mare Island alongside Marines who were antiterrorist training instructors. “Here was this 10-year-old girl, beating them,” he recalls. “They were like, ‘Who is this kid?’ ”
Around that time, Mitchell noticed Natalie at a local meet and began assessing her potential. He regarded her as a thrasher, a natural talent with choppy form and loads of technical problems, as well as a kid who didn’t understand the first thing about racing. In that sense, she was perfect: He could refine this rough-edged jewel and turn her into a champion. Named after the Grateful Dead song “Terrapin Station,” his club was hardly counterculture: Mitchell, like so many other youth coaches across the United States, wanted to produce the fastest swimmers at the youngest possible age. He was good at it, too—even before Coughlin arrived, the Terrapins had developed a reputation as one of the region’s top producers of standout swimmers.
The Terrapins were based in Concord, an East Bay suburb half an hour from the Coughlins’ home in Benicia (they’d relocated from nearby Vallejo)—or longer, when there was traffic. Nonetheless, in an effort to indulge their daughters’ competitive desires, Jim and Zennie tolerated the twice-daily commute. Then, on August 23, 1996, Jim was driving his daughters across the crowded Benicia Bridge when a chain-reaction accident occurred. His Nissan pickup slammed into the car ahead, the fifth car in a five-car accident, and he and his daughters were violently jolted forward. Jim broke a rib and lost oxygen, while Megan smacked her head against the seat in front of her. “An ambulance came,” Jim recalls, “and the two of us were sitting on the bridge, wrapped up like mummies.” Jim and Megan were taken to the hospital by ambulance; Natalie was left alone on the bridge. A firefighter ended up driving her home in her father’s truck, which, remarkably, was still in working order.
With Natalie about to begin her freshman year at Carondolet High in Concord—the sister school of De La Salle, which had recently set a national record with 151 consecutive football victories—the Coughlins decided enough was enough. By moving to Concord, they could get closer to Zennie’s job in Oakland and send their daughters to more desirable, Catholic schools. If someone had to commute, it would be Jim. “We loved our house in Benicia,” Zennie recalls, “but after the accident, we couldn’t allow her to commute in that traffic every day. It was a very big financial hardship for a while, but we made it work.” (Natalie remembers things differently, noting that Megan had already been attending a private school in Concord at the time of the accident and that her neighbors, who went to De La Salle and swam for Terrapins, also drove her across the bridge at times. “It’s not like the only reason they moved was because of my swimming!” Natalie says, laughing.)
In any event, Natalie repaid her parents with a ferocious dedication to her craft. Told that morning swim practice began at 5:15, she took the edict more literally than her peers, who would arrive in the locker room by that time. Coughlin figured she had to be in the pool by then and was often the first to show at the outdoor facility on Cowell Boulevard, usually by 5 a.m. “The water heater would always break, which was brutal, because in the winter it would be like 30 degrees in the mornings,” she remembers. “There’d be tarps covering the pool, and I’d have to unroll them onto this big wheel. Then I’d run in and get into my suit and run into this little shed about 15 yards from the pool and sit under this heater.” One by one, her teammates would join her until, en masse, they would bolt from the shed and jump into the water, screaming as they leaped, trying to swat the plastic flags high above the lane lines.
Coughlin stood out so much among the younger Terrapins that the summer before starting high school, she was moved up to Mitchell’s “senior group,” where she often outraced older boys in a variety of strokes and distances. At 15, she became the first US swimmer to qualify for all 14 events at US Nationals and the first-ever sophomore to be named national swimmer of the year. Mitchell had a full-fledged wunderkind on his hands, and he knew it. This was an opportunity to vault himself and his program to national prominence, and he was not about to blow it.
So Mitchell, already an overbearing autocrat—“Sometimes he’d put down another coach by saying, ‘He doesn’t have control of his swimmer,’ ” Jim Coughlin recalls—cracked down even harder on Natalie. “I’d say we all got it pretty bad, but it was different for Nat,” Leah Monroe recalls. “She was at a new level Ray had never dealt with before. Ray’s going to put more of himself into his fastest swimmers; he was going to invest as much as he could in her success.”
To say Mitchell was demanding would be like calling the Pacific Ocean big. Jim Coughlin still laughs at the memory of a vacation to Kauai the family took when Natalie was 13—each morning they’d have to find a pool, then go to a hotel with a fax machine so that he could send copies of Natalie’s workout sets and corresponding times to Mitchell. “He didn’t want her to go on vacations, period,” Jim says.
Natalie Coughlin and her fellow Terrapins did get to travel to competitions, where Mitchell and his assistants kept a watchful eye. “Most of us were closer with our swimming friends than with our high school friends,” Monroe says. “We were all very social. Ray would say to us, ‘You need to forget about your social life and your high school friends and not go to parties on weekends.’ At away meets, he would give us curfews; otherwise, we’d hang out and talk all night and do the things teenagers do. He couldn’t keep us from sneaking out of our rooms and hanging out together, but he’d try. He would stand outside the hallway forever and threaten us: ‘If anyone comes out of your room, I’ll send you home.’ ”
To Mitchell, everything came down to focus. He lived, ate, and breathed swimming, and he wanted his charges to do likewise. “Ray would tell stories of swimmers who would lie in bed at night and visualize their races,” Jim Coughlin recalls. “Natalie was like, ‘Uh, okay.’ That just wasn’t her; she was good at compartmentalizing.” Mitchell wasn’t. To him, having diverse interests meant swimming for your high school team in the spring, as well as for his team. Even then, Jim says, “after every race, a Terrapins swimmer would have to leave their (high school) teammates and go up into the stands and check with him. He’d sit up there in the stands receiving them, like the godfather of swimming.” This wasn’t especially unusual—swimmers such as Natalie Coughlin weren’t instructed by their high school coaches on a daily basis—but to observers there was little doubt as to who was in charge.
The kids he coached had another nickname for Mitchell: the Devil. Incur his wrath, and risk public humiliation and physical exhaustion. Monroe says Mitchell once punished a pair of male swimmers, Quinn Fitzgerald and Ben Hanley, who, she recalls, “had missed a set during morning workout or something. The next workout after that, he put them in a different lane from the rest of the team and told them to swim freestyle as hard as they could until he told them to stop. This lasted 3½ hours—it was like 13,000 or 14,000 meters—until finally Ray left and had someone else stop them.” While that might be the most extreme example, Monroe says the concept of extra swimming was an established one. “He’d make you swim a certain time—say, three 200 breaststrokes at 2:25 apiece—and if you didn’t hit the time, you—and sometimes the whole group—would have to keep swimming. One time, he made me swim 20 of those.”
That was hardly Monroe’s worst memory of her time with the Terrapins. When she was 14, shortly after she’d been moved up to the senior group (inheriting Coughlin’s status as its youngest member), she had a particularly slow practice, during which Mitchell abruptly told her to exit the water. She remembers being berated and starting to cry. “We had these motivational posters at the end of each lane, pressed up against the gutters, that we were supposed to read after our sets,” she says. “He made me go from lane to lane, reading each one aloud.” Monroe cried even harder as she moved from poster to poster, all the while interrupting her fellow swimmers, none of whom had any idea what she was doing in their lane.
Some of Mitchell’s disciplinary measures took place in full view of parents, which led to some awkward situations. “One time my dad heard Ray yelling at me after a meet and went over and confronted him,” Monroe says. “He told me later he wished he had thrown Ray into the pool; that’s how mad he was. It was some throwaway meet, and Ray had put me in with a 10-year-old group because I’d been sick, and he didn’t like the way I was swimming. My dad heard him cussing me out and went over and confronted him. It was weird: Ray completely backed down and told him, ‘I didn’t mean for it to sound that way.’ ”
Jim Coughlin had a similar reaction to one of Mitchell’s tirades—but his daughter kept him from going off on the coach. “Natalie’s the one who really put me in my place,” Jim Coughlin recalls. “It was at the Santa Clara meet in ’96 (when Natalie was 13); Natalie and another swimmer did not swim to Ray’s satisfaction, and he pulled them aside and started yelling, ‘You guys aren’t taking this seriously; I can tell by your times.’ I was about ready to rip him right out of his shoes—You get them upset and I’ll get you upset—but Natalie said, ‘Dad, this is my battle. Don’t fight it for me.’ ” For the most part, parents gave Mitchell the leeway to discipline their children because they were so pleased with the results. “Parents knew what was going on, but they were okay with it because of how fast we were swimming,” Monroe says. “I was extremely happy swimming under Ray. He was a tough, authoritarian-style coach, but I was able to respond to that. I know I wouldn’t have swum nearly as fast under a different coach.”
Looking back, however, the Coughlins aren’t so sure they should have subjected their daughters to such an environment. As Natalie blossomed into womanhood, Mitchell became increasingly scrutinizing of her behavior. “He had a hard time realizing that she was growing up,” Zennie Coughlin says. “He never really treated her as an adult.” Adds Jim: “As Natalie she progressed, he wanted to keep control of her. Even as she got older, he treated her like she was 13; he wanted to know where she went in her free time and what time she went to bed.”
Around the time she turned 16, Coughlin began dating Ethan Hall, a tall, quiet Terrapins breaststroker who was 3 years older. Coughlin had developed a crush on Hall years earlier, and the two had become fast friends. For a while, he seemed like the surer bet to make an Olympic team—in 1995 he set a US national age-group (15 and 16) record in the 200-meter breaststroke. But a series of knee injuries kept Hall from achieving greater glory, though he never stopped fighting. Coughlin remembers marveling at Hall’s competitive drive as he attempted to fight through the pain. “He would work so hard,” she recalls, “that he would vomit during a lot of the practices.”
By Coughlin’s sophomore year, Hall had accepted a swimming scholarship to the University of North Carolina, but after his sophomore season he decided to return to the West Coast and made plans to transfer to University of California, Santa Barbara. During Coughlin’s senior season of high school, he was back home in the Bay Area, training with the Terrapins, and he and Coughlin grew closer.
“He was really what got me through that horrible year,” she says. “He was someone I could talk to about what I was going through. He’d been through injuries; he knew about the environment at Terrapins. Plus, he’s such a mellow person. He’s really goofy and funny and incredibly smart. If he wasn’t there, I definitely would’ve moved to another club, in Orinda or Walnut Creek. But because of him I stayed.”
Mitchell, naturally, viewed the relationship as a threat to Coughlin’s focus. Monroe remembers that about the time Coughlin and Hall started dating, Mitchell took a group of Terrapins on a swing through Europe that included several World Cup meets. “We were at a meet in Paris, and after one of my races I went up into the stands and had my ‘personal talk’ with Ray,” Monroe says. “He was angry about the race, and he said, ‘You aren’t swimming well right now because of the mental problems you’re having.’ When I got back over to the team, Natalie asked me how the talk had gone, and when I told her, she started cheering and said, ‘Me, too! That’s exactly what he said to me—that I have mental problems.’ We both thought it was complete b.s.”
Once, during a meet in Washington, Mitchell and an assistant called Coughlin and Hall into a room inside the pool complex and dressed them down. “You two are in your own little bubble,” Mitchell charged, “and it’s making you uncoachable.”
The struggle to control a young swimmer’s private life—especially a young, female swimmer’s—was by no means a unique one. In the eyes of Milt Nelms, the Australia–based stroke consultant who worked extensively with Coughlin during the months before the 2004 Olympics, “A lot of (youth-club) coaches are kind of in a state of arrested adolescence, so they’re basically dealing with their own peer group.” (I would encounter this phenomenon during the 2004 Olympic Trials in Long Beach, California. One night after the competition, I found myself at a crowded restaurant table, discussing Coughlin’s career with a group that included a veteran youth-club coach from Southern California. The coach, with a tone of utmost certainty, declared, “It’s impossible for a young woman to be an elite swimmer and have a romantic relationship at that age—she’s just not capable of balancing the two.” When I noted that Coughlin, who had just qualified for the Olympic team by winning the 100 back, was still together with Hall, the conversation took an irrevocable turn for the worse.)
The boyfriend was one thing. But when Coughlin suffered a serious shoulder injury in March 1999, suddenly imperiling her seemingly preordained path to the 2000 Olympics, it seemed Mitchell really became concerned.
Injuries, in general, are frowned upon in elite swimming circles. Coaches encourage their ailing athletes to “swim through it” whenever possible, and those who can’t either end up quitting the sport or being labeled as malingerers. Monroe remembers a frequently injured Terrapins breaststroker, Maggie Konstantinova, getting berated by Mitchell whenever she couldn’t swim. “Ray would accuse her of being a hypochondriac,” Monroe says. “He’d say, ‘Oh, Maggie, you’re always injured, always sick. There’s something always wrong.’ In her defense, she really did get hurt a lot.”
At first, there was no disputing the severity of Coughlin’s injury. After completing a typically intense butterfly set toward the end of an afternoon workout, Coughlin went home assuming everything was fine. That night she was awakened by a throbbing pain in her left shoulder that brought her to tears. The next morning she tried to suck it up and swim, but as she tried to remove the pool cover, she realized she couldn’t move her arm. She had torn the labrum, a cartilage rim around the shoulder joint, and was told she needed surgery.
Coughlin was hesitant to have the operation, especially after having spoken to some older, high-profile swimmers who’d had similar injuries. They told her she would be facing an extended rehab, her range of motion would suffer, and there was no guarantee it would prove a permanent solution to the problem. The other option was physical therapy, and Coughlin was referred to one of the best therapists in the business: Lisa Giannone of ActiveCare, a San Francisco clinic that had extensive experience with prominent athletes. While playing for the 49ers, future Hall of Fame receiver Jerry Rice had, with Giannone’s help, returned to the football field a mere 3 months after surgery to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament. He was just one of Giannone’s well-known success stories, and Coughlin began a program that emphasized resistance exercises to strengthen her back and other surrounding muscles.
Mitchell, to his credit, accompanied Coughlin to all of her doctor’s appointments. But, she recalls, “the doctor would say one thing—‘You need to rest the shoulder for a month’ or ‘You’re risking future damage’—and Ray would walk out of the room and say I could swim through it. I’d be like, ‘What? You were there.’ ” Mostly, Coughlin tried to swim through the injury—and attend high school classes and make 1½-hour round-trip drives to San Francisco for physical therapy three times a week. Often, in an effort to rest the shoulder, she’d grab a kick-board and do nothing but leg work in the slow lane for the duration of practice. That would later prove to be a blessing, as she further developed the already tremendous dolphin kick that made her an underwater dynamo in the backstroke. But at the time, her failure to overcome the pain—and, when timed, to approach her old form—tormented her impatient coach.
“You worked harder when you were 13!” Mitchell would bark from the deck. He began to view her injury and her relationship with Hall as one and the same—both symptomatic of Coughlin’s lack of focus, a theory he’d broadcast to her and anyone in listening range. As 1999 bled into 2000 and that summer’s Olympic Trials neared, Mitchell became convinced that Hall stood between Coughlin and a spot on the US team. “For Ray it came to a point around the Trials where he felt, ‘Ethan is your boyfriend, but he’s getting in the way,’ ” Monroe says. “He wanted to get her boyfriend out of the way because he felt it was a distraction.”
Finally, Mitchell flat out urged Coughlin to end the relationship. “Just until Trials,” he implored her. “Take a 6-month break so you can focus on making the Olympics, and then if you want to get back together, fine.”
By then, however, Hall was about the only person Coughlin trusted. She was still steamed at her parents in the wake of the protracted battle they’d waged over where she’d attend college the next fall. Jim and Zennie had insisted she sign with Stanford, but Natalie prevailed and accepted a scholarship to swim for McKeever at Cal. Even then, she viewed college swimming merely as a vehicle to get a free ride to the school of her choice. She began to detest the sport she’d once loved. She feared, with legitimate reason, that she had become yet another promising talent who’d reached a premature plateau and, after suffering a setback, could never come near that level again.
Mentally and emotionally, she was a mess. As Trials approached, Coughlin, like most of Mitchell’s swimmers, was being monitored constantly—lactose readings, blood tests, heart rates, and the like. At one point, she recalls, she was tested for cortisol, a hormone released in the body during stressed or agitated states. The range that USA Swimming considered normal was between 8 and 20; Coughlin’s measured 60.
Just a few more months, Coughlin told herself. After that, I will never swim again.
By the time she flew to Indianapolis for the Olympic Trials, she either had let go of the pressure inside or, perhaps, simply couldn’t feel it anymore. She felt indifferent about her prospects for making the Olympic team in the lone event she entered, the 200-meter individual medley. She qualified for the finals and, to her surprise, felt reasonably strong as the race played out. Swimming from an outside line by virtue of her slower time in the preliminaries, Coughlin touched the wall believing she’d snuck onto the team as the second-place finisher. When she looked up and realized she’d finished fourth, she felt a surge of disappointment. Whoa, I did care.
About an hour later, that feeling was gone. She was okay with not having made the Olympic team; given what she’d been through the past 15 months, she could take pride in how close she’d come. In a matter of days, she would move to Berkeley, live in a dorm like any other student, and, for the first time in a long time, swim for someone other than a coach who seemed to resent her for her failure. “When she didn’t make the Olympics, I think Ray took that very badly,” Monroe says. “It was almost as if she’d let him down. I think he had such high expectations, and when it didn’t happen, he was hurt more than anything. I can see how he took a lot of it out on her.”
Looking back, Coughlin deeply resents the way she was treated by Mitchell and understands why she wanted so desperately to replace him with McKeever. “I was ready to get away from my coach, who I believe was emotionally abusive and manipulative—a man who wanted to control every aspect of my life,” she says. “Teri was the most easygoing and honest college coach I encountered, and she seemed to care more about her swimmers as people than other coaches did.”
Certainly, Coughlin treasures her better moments and positive memories of the Terrapins. But once she hurt her shoulder and stopped shining in the pool, she experienced the dark side of competitive swimming on the youth-club level. “Ray has been quoted as saying that I have a tendency to fixate on that last year,” she says, “and that’s absolutely true. That last year was such a betrayal to me—and to all the work, time, and emotional effort that I had put in over 5 years.”