Milt Nelms vividly recalls the first time he got an up-close-and-personal look at Natalie Coughlin, and it is not a pleasant memory. On a warm afternoon in the summer of 2000, Nelms stopped by Spieker Pool during one of Teri McKeever’s practices to check out the prize of Cal’s incoming freshman class, and when he caught his first glimpse of Coughlin in a one-piece swimsuit, he instantly knew something was amiss. A former sculptor who became a swimming coach before morphing into his largely unofficial role as mysterious stroke guru, Nelms was struck by the asymmetrical appearance of the almost-18-year-old swimmer. As they stood there on deck, having a casual conversation about Coughlin’s academic intentions, Nelms remembers, “I just got a spooky feeling.”
Nowadays, when most people see Coughlin for the first time, they’re overwhelmed by either her physical beauty or the mellifluous fluidity of her stroke—or both. Nelms had a far less pleasant reaction. The word he uses to describe his first impressions of Coughlin, in and out of the water, is grotesque.
“You know when you close one eye, you can see the edge of your nose and make a line with it?” Nelms asks rhetorically. “I closed one eye and looked at her, and half of her face was literally angular—the muscles in her trap, shoulder, and face were prominent. The other side looked like a normal girl’s face would look. Her neck was off center by at least half an inch. It was almost like a comic book caricature. I asked her, ‘Would you mind turning around?’ And when she did, she was just this misshapen thing, with her spine curved around a shoulder blade, and one shoulder literally 2 inches lower than the other. Her pelvis was way out of whack—it looked like you were watching John Wayne in midstride. It was like someone had taken pictures of half of two people and pasted them side by side.”
Nelms, who at the time was based in Oregon, had seen Coughlin swim as a youth standout and was vaguely aware of her shoulder injury. Earlier in the summer he had been at Berkeley, working with Haley Cope at McKeever’s behest, employing principles of anatomy and physiology while analyzing her technique, and now he was back to meet with Nort Thornton, Cal’s longtime men’s coach. McKeever, with whom Nelms was only casually acquainted, had asked him to speak to her team about swimming technique and to spend some time with Coughlin—a rather bold move, considering the stakes involved. McKeever had just jettisoned Mike Walker while landing the most decorated recruit of her career.
Certainly, Coughlin’s form left something to be desired. Cal assistant Adam Crossen, who had been hired by McKeever to replace Walker, says his first thought upon seeing Coughlin swim in Berkeley was Eccch.
Now, as he took the time to study Coughlin’s musculature, Nelms drew attention to the severity of the problem. He looked at McKeever, and the two of them exchanged Do you see what I see? looks.
“Natalie, do you breathe on both sides when you swim freestyle in practice?” Nelms asked softly.
She shook her head no; only one. Nelms and McKeever exchanged another look. Coughlin was hardly the only swimmer not to engage in alternate breathing, but it would go a long way toward explaining the asymmetry—in Nelms’s words, “It’d be like walking and having a lift in one shoe, and moving very aggressively, over and over again. Over time, you get this imbalance. Then, when you factor in the shoulder injury, what’ll happen to someone who’s growing is that the difference in strength will relocate the skeleton and create bone-mass changes. Her entire skeleton had changed.”
Nelms asked Coughlin to get in the water and swim a few laps of freestyle. Again, he was overwhelmed by the imbalance of her body, almost to the point of nausea. “It was like splicing two different freestylers together,” he recalls. “On one side she was really linear, aggressive, and forceful, and on the other side she was like a skateboard, just gliding into the next stroke. It was really arrhythmic, almost like watching a coyote run after it had chewed its leg off in a trap. On one side, she was practically dislocating her shoulder, hyperextending her arm as she reached forward, yanking her elbow up in the air and shoving the water back. I couldn’t believe someone so small and feminine-looking was that aggressive in the water.”
When Coughlin finished, she got out of the pool and related the history of her shoulder injury to Nelms. A bald, engaging, soft-spoken man, Nelms listened intently and replied, “I’d suggest that you breathe bilaterally 100 percent of the time and try to round your stroke off, instead of reaching way out and pushing way back in the water with your arms. In other words, try to get your body to do what it feels like it should do, rather than what people have told you to do.”
When Nelms finished talking, Coughlin just stood there and stared. He didn’t know whether she was skeptical, confused, or angry—or whether she was merely digesting his words and assessing their value. She just stood there, expressionless, looking back at a man to whom she’d been introduced minutes earlier and who had suggested she drastically change her stroke. And then, to Nelms’s utter astonishment, Coughlin jumped back into the water, pushed off the wall, and proceeded to do exactly what he had just advised.
“She got in the water,” Nelms recalls, “and it was, like, fixed. I mean, think about it: She took a verbal message from someone she had just met, translated it into a physical language, and got in the water and assimilated it completely and instantaneously. It was eerie. I looked at Teri and said, ‘I don’t believe that I just saw somebody do that.’ Teri said, ‘I don’t either.’ ”
It wasn’t as if that initial adjustment suddenly cured Coughlin’s shoulder after nearly a year and a half of agony. There was still plenty of fine-tuning to be done, and Coughlin’s times suffered as she began rounding off her strokes, shortening her entry point, and relying upon a more circular, cyclical motion, rather than one comprised of right angles. “All in all, it probably took 2 to 3 years to deprogram her prior habits, and really, it’s an ongoing process,” McKeever says. Yet that first meeting had established several abiding attributes among the parties involved: Nelms’s acute ability to diagnose inefficient and unnatural physical processes, McKeever’s intuitive understanding of such concepts, and Coughlin’s sense of bodily awareness and willingness to tinker with her form.
The fir tree tantalized him, like a hot fudge sundae being delivered across the table from a dieting diner, and the tired teenager found it too inviting to ignore. Exhausted after his third rigorous workout of the day, 15-year-old swimmer Milt Nelms was walking back to his home in suburban Portland on a summer afternoon in the mid-1960s when he saw a shady tree and decided to take a break. He took a seat on the grass underneath the massive fir, rested his head against it, and, 3½ hours later, woke up with a start. “When I finally got home,” Nelms recalls, “I got my ass kicked for being late. The next day, when I walked to practice and saw the tree, I started crying.”
It would be overly simplistic to claim that a tree was responsible for the end of Nelms’s career as a competitive swimmer, but that ill-timed nap carried its share of symbolism. For most of his childhood, Nelms remembers, he “loved playing grab-ass with all the other guys on the swim team,” typically swimming no more than 4,500 yards a day. Then, one weekend, his coach went to a clinic in Santa Clara conducted by the legendary George Haines—the man whose youth club had spawned the career of a kid named Mark Spitz. Haines advocated a far more rigorous approach to training: multiple workouts totaling 14,000 to 15,000 meters a day. Like a lot of other American youth swimming instructors, Nelms’s coach bought it.
“The day after he got back, the shit hit the fan,” Nelms says. “That was the last happy day of swimming.”
Later, after scraping his leg while getting out of the pool, Nelms ended up with bone rot, further souring him on the sport. He turned down a chance to swim at the University of Oregon and, like so many other curious young people in the second half of the 1960s, drifted down to northern California. He worked in a warehouse south of San Francisco, loading trucks, and rode his motorcycle into the city, where he studied art under a man named Thomas Leighton. “I had always been very visual,” he says, “and I started doing sculpture when I was pretty young.” He also took a job coaching at a swim club and later landed a similar position at a club in eastern Oregon before deciding to leave the business. Eventually he gravitated back to the Park Rose Swim Club, near Portland—the very club for which he’d swum as a youth.
Nelms had been brought back to the sport after attending the wedding of one of his ex-swimmers. “There were 800 people there, including a whole lot of kids I’d coached who were now in their mid-twenties,” he recalls. “A bunch of them got some booze in them and started telling me how important I’d been to them, and it really touched me. After that I figured, ‘If I’m gonna do this again, I’m gonna do it right.’ So I started at the bottom.”
Nelms started coaching in lesson-type groups at Park Rose three nights a week while working a full-time job. After a year he moved to a club in nearby Vancouver, Washington—another cramped operation—quit his job, and began coaching full-time.
At Vancouver, Nelms remembers, conditions were hardly optimal: “We had 2 hours of pool time a day in 85° water. We had six lanes at 25 yards with an L-shaped dive.” Still, after 4 years, Nelms produced a pair of world-ranked swimmers and three junior national record holders. Seeking a new challenge, he took a job at a club in rural Springfield, Oregon, figuring, “I’ll just work the same magic.” He didn’t. “It was like coaching in Appalachia,” he says. “After a couple of years, the aquatics director called me in and said, ‘You’ve got to stop the parents of the swimmers from doing drugs in the parking lot.’ I began to realize that maybe I’d had a little bit of luck before.”
Nelms also began to refine his theories about swimming, most of which had very little in common with what his peers were teaching. To Nelms, moving in the water is a complicated activity—one influenced by lack of gravity, the need to propel oneself horizontally, and the effect of water resistance on a rapidly accelerating swimmer—yet an endeavor that can be mastered with blissful simplicity by those who feel comfortable doing so. To Nelms, that the dolphin and the shark and other water creatures move beautifully and efficiently through the water is not a mere by-product of the environment but an adaptive wonder whose principles should be emulated by competitive swimmers.
In other words, a swimmer should lean on his or her gift for feeling the water, and we should all revert to our inner animal whenever possible.
In Nelms’s eyes, physiological lessons are best illustrated through animal analogies. He talks about cats and cheetahs and chimpanzees so regularly that those less receptive to his teachings find it comical. “He’s telling them to move through the water like a monkey,” one coach groused during the 2004 Olympic Trials. “Yeah, we’re primates, but I’m sorry—I don’t see any monkeys swimming.”
As a kid, Nelms spent his summers with relatives on a ranch in eastern Oregon. “There were two things going on at the ranch,” he says. “First, there were animals everywhere, and I always watched them move. Second, every day you’ve got to deal with work and with physics. If something doesn’t work, you’ve got to figure out a way to make it work, and so I really got into the mind-set of understanding those processes. I also remember, even at 14, watching people go by in the water and thinking, ‘Why does he look so smooth? And why does he look so strained?’ ”
In 1989, Nelms was introduced to Bill Boomer, who spent 30 years as the University of Rochester’s swim coach before retiring to study and lecture on technique. Boomer, says Nelms, “was the first guy to talk about efficiency as a way to improve velocity.” The two bonded instantly, and Nelms immersed himself in Boomer’s teachings. As Boomer’s profile increased, thanks largely to his appearances at coaching conferences, Stanford coach Richard Quick—a man always searching for the next big thing—became a devotee. As the women’s coach of the 2000 Olympic team, Quick insisted that Boomer accompany him to Sydney, ultimately paying for the trip out of his own pocket.
Nelms, too, would eventually team up with Quick, but not until he had officially given up on coaching. In 1996, Nelms was hired by the Phillips Petroleum Company to coach its prestigious Phillips 66 Swim Club. The job promised state-of-the-art facilities and every resource imaginable. However, the location—Bartlesville, Oklahoma—was far from ideal. “There were 35,000 people and 85 churches,” Nelms says. “It was definitely a cultural adjustment for a secular and skeptical retreat from Eastern Oregon.”
During his 4-year stint there, Nelms’s swimmers did well—but as he developed his theoretical teachings, he also came to terms with his limitations. “I know what people are thinking,” he says. “If I’m so goddamned smart, why don’t I have 30 world-class kids in the pool every single day? And the answer is, because I suck at coaching. Or, to be fair, the economics and sleep-deprivation of the lifestyle.”
So Nelms stopped. Instead, he decided, he’d impart his out-of-the-box philosophies to any real coach who was receptive. The scary thing was, there were so few of them. In Nelms’s words, “I need to have some sense that the coach I’m working with is forward thinking. I don’t want to help somebody put an ornament on some crap that they do that isn’t what I believe in. I’ve seen some stuff that’s really disturbing. I turn people down all the time.”
In 2001, Quick persuaded Nelms to be a “volunteer assistant,” but he spent most of his time crisscrossing the world, doing conferences and instructional videos and the like. In May 2002, Nelms spoke at the Australian Swim Coaches and Teachers Convention on the Gold Coast and was introduced to Shane Gould, that nation’s most famous swimming champion—or, at the very least, until Ian Thorpe starred at the Sydney Olympics. At the ’72 Games in Munich, Gould was the Australian Mark Spitz, a 15-year-old sensation who won three gold medals, along with a silver and a bronze, in individual events. (Whereas Spitz picked up three of his record seven gold medals in relays, Gould, with a far less powerful crop of teammates, had no such luxury.) Throughout 1972, Gould, amazingly, held world records in all five freestyle events, with distances ranging from 100 to 1,500 meters.
Then, shortly after Munich, Gould walked away, burnt-out physically and emotionally. “She still loved swimming,” Nelms says, “but not the public life associated with fame.” She married a Christian fundamentalist who disdained competitive sport, and she basically stayed out of the water for 2 decades. After divorcing in 1997, Gould became reacquainted with her former world and grew convinced that the grueling way she’d been trained was unhealthy and improper.
Gould and Nelms connected on that level—and many others. Soon they were live-in lovers in Australia, with Nelms regularly traveling back to the States and other continents as duty called. Gould, at 47, would ultimately compete in the 2004 Australian Olympic Trials—mostly as a symbolic gesture, for the event she chose, the 50-meter butterfly, was not an actual Olympic race—while Nelms would help bring about the revival of one of the few swimmers as phenomenally talented and driven as his famous girlfriend had once been.
On a warm afternoon at Spieker Pool, Coughlin, now a Cal senior, is swimming a couple of laps for Nelms and McKeever—a scene strikingly similar to the one that took place upon her arrival at Berkeley years ago. This time, all of her teammates have long since finished practice, and Nelms, having arrived from Australia just an hour or so earlier, a backpack over his shoulder and a Diet Coke in his right hand (to deal with the jet lag), is only mildly disturbed by what he sees. He is talking to McKeever about the technical adjustments in Coughlin’s underwater backstroke start, using words like atlas and axis as McKeever nods knowingly.
Coughlin stops, removes her goggles, and looks up at Nelms. “The mass behind your buoyancy makes you go too deep,” Nelms says quietly. “Try keeping it the same, but as you’re going in the water, make a spoon out of your back.” Coughlin nods. “Shane was talking about this with some kids she was teaching the other day,” Nelms continues. “She says, ‘Pretend you’re a cat hiding in the garden. Now pretend you see a bird.’ See how you raise your neck like this”—he elevates his head suddenly, as if preparing to pounce. “That enlivens your nervous system. It feels good to raise your head like that. It’s a primal act, but we rarely do that anymore as humans—maybe if I see a cute girl on campus or in a bar.”
McKeever smiles, as does Coughlin. Nelms moves on to an adjustment he’d like Coughlin to make with her hands—holding her thumbs outward to “activate your center.” He suggests she try the start again while conjuring an imaginary ball resting between her knees. “It should feel like there’s a triangle inside your thighs that’s pulling up.”
Immediately, Coughlin begins nodding. “We’ve done this before in Pilates,” she says.
Next, Coughlin moves on to freestyle, showcasing a newly adjusted stroke, and when she finishes and looks up at Nelms, he is smiling approvingly. “You were carrying speed,” he tells her, “rather than trying to make it.”
“It didn’t feel like I was trying as hard,” Coughlin agrees, “but it felt faster.”
Nelms lets the thought hang for a while before adding, “I don’t think you’re very good at making things happen, Natalie. You’re better at letting things happen than making things happen.”
Therein lies the central premise of Nelms’s philosophy: With someone who can feel the water as viscerally as Coughlin can, less is more. The best thing a coach can do is to help get her in touch with her inner dolphin—and then get the hell out of the way.
“What she needs is a lack of instructions,” Nelms says. “When I first saw her that day in Berkeley, she was imposing the instructions of others on a process that is natural to her. I told her, ‘Use your body like you think you should use it. Try to get your body to do what it feels like it should do, rather than what people have told you to do.’ Swimming, to her, is a pleasurable physical experience, and she gets it in her gut.”
This is how, despite her relatively petite frame, Coughlin can succeed in events that have typically been dominated by amazons. Coughlin, who isn’t a hair taller than 5 foot 8, might weigh as much as 140 pounds during a peak training period, but from looking at her, you’d probably peg her for about 125. Certainly, she is ripped, although during breaks from swimming her muscles begin to atrophy at an alarming rate. She has relatively thin wrists and long fingers, and because of her shoulder injury, McKeever has always shied away from having her bench-press or do pushups.
To put it in more colloquial terms, Coughlin, in a fight, could probably kick a lot of people’s asses, if only because of her relentlessness and determination. But if you wanted one of your swimmers to try to throw a bicycle across the pool, she would not be your first choice.
“Natalie’s not a very powerful person,” Nelms says. “US Swimming has administered all the strength tests, and she’s off the charts—the bottom of the charts. According to them, she can’t swim very fast. Look at it this way: She can’t impose herself on the water; she has to relate to the water. What happens to most people in the water is that a big part of them is still relating to being on land, so a part of their movement includes land-based reactions. But Natalie uses her body in the water the same way that people walk on land. She begins most of her movements from balance, not from being off balance. Her movements are more curvilinear. Everything that lives in the water lives in curve circles, or curvilinear patterns; linear movements are land based. People that have a very good relationship with the water, like Natalie, can generally figure that out. She’s just negotiating the environment.
“When Teri first saw Natalie swim as a freshman, with all those linear angles, she intuitively knew those movements are wrong. As a swimmer, her body can remember that.”
This is just one of the ways in which the McKeever/Coughlin partnership—and, for that matter, the McKeever/Coughlin/Nelms theoretical triumvirate—is perfectly cast. “When Natalie swims, you can see a relationship with the water,” McKeever says. “It’s a calming thing for her. She’s at her most comfortable in the water, and I understand that, because I was that way. I wasn’t extroverted. I wasn’t especially pretty. But in the water, I felt right.”
The end result is that to the naked eye, Coughlin looks as lovely in the water as a mermaid, even while expending energy and enduring pain at a rate that would make most people scream in agony. Longtime Georgia coach Jack Bauerle has said that Coughlin swims “like she’s in the womb,” while Stanford’s Richard Quick simply calls Coughlin “the most talented swimmer I’ve ever seen.”
Though understandably biased, Coughlin’s close friends and former Cal teammates Marcelle Miller and Lisa Morelli offer no argument. Morelli marvels at how Coughlin appears to be “dancing through the water”—indeed, this is an athlete who can, during one of McKeever’s funky drills, take off from 10 yards across the deck, break into a dead sprint, launch herself forcefully into the air, and, as she lands horizontally, make only a tiny splash while projecting herself forward into a silky smooth freestyle sprint.
“I’ve seen her do things that are just incredible,” Miller says. “People may not realize it, but I think she’s more talented than even Michael Phelps. Her feel for the water and her movement set her apart. If you watch her swim, it’s flawless. It looks like she’s not trying at all. Underwater, her body is so incredibly flexible, and she moves so gracefully, like no other human does.”
It’s not merely a convenient confluence of comfort and grit, either. Coughlin possesses some physical advantages, beginning with those uncannily flexible limbs. Before races, she does a series of warm-up exercises that include reaching both arms behind her back until her outstretched palms touch; she also does shoulder windmills that evoke images of twin blender blades. Further, she has an otherworldly lung capacity that, when she was 9 and suffering from pneumonia, caused X-ray technicians to believe there had been a mistake—that they were looking at someone else’s photos. Put the ability to hold her breath for long periods while exercising furiously together with a powerful underwater kick, and you have the equivalent of a Ferrari Testarossa on the starting blocks.
“Her lung capacity is just freakish,” Coughlin’s friend and exteammate Haley Cope says. “I’m really good underwater, but Natalie just blows me away. In the backstroke, there are times when I can go off a start and beat Natalie the first 15 meters, but it doesn’t take as much out of her as it does out of me.”
Yet Coughlin, for all her intuition, intensity, and efficiency, still can’t separate herself from the very best swimmers in the world with those qualities alone. To do that, she has to beat them with attention to detail—knowing what makes herself go, for how long, and what precise movements best help her achieve that flow. Even then, there are times when her preferred technique defies the experts. “Underwater, she’s a model for what we’d teach other kids,” says Irvine Novaquatics coach Dave Salo. “But she’s not a model of what we’d teach kids in the backstroke. We’ve all looked at her backstroke and said, ‘If she could get her turnover rate up a little more, she’d shatter records.” By “turnover rate,” Salo means the speed with which Coughlin completes a stroke cycle: The higher the turnover rate, the greater the number of strokes in a given lap. In the 100-meter backstroke, Salo says, she fluctuates between 1.4 and 1.5 seconds per stroke cycle; most other elite backstrokers are around 1.2.
Nelms, of course, would tell Coughlin to ignore such information and focus on the speed-per-stroke cycle that feels most natural to her. His gifts go beyond understanding and diagnosing; his true talent may be an innate ability to relate to the athletes he counsels. Whereas Coughlin was confused by Bill Boomer’s assessments and struggled to comprehend his explanations—they sounded vague and convoluted to her—Nelms, from the first time they met, spoke her language. “He’s so artistic,” she says. “His eye is so incredible. You can tell he used to be a sculptor. He draws perfect body diagrams in about 2 seconds; you look at one and say, ‘Wow, that’s a work of art.’ He picks up the most subtle things that can make a huge difference. Some of it sounds crazy, but it really does work.”
In a 2004 article in Time magazine’s Asian edition, Tracey Menzies, who coaches the great Australian freestyler Ian Thorpe, said of Nelms, “You’ve heard of horse whisperers? Milt is like a swimming whisperer. He observes and manipulates, and the results come quickly.”
With Coughlin, as Nelms discovered the afternoon they first met, results tend to come at warp speed. He likens the process of working with her to “playing with a Barbie doll. Watching her make an adjustment is like watching time-lapse photography. What a good athlete will process in 6 hours, she’ll process instantly. Give her the cause, the effect, and the relevant information, and she fixes things. Nowadays, it’s like the three of us will go to a pool, spend little bits of time tinkering, and then Teri and I go home and write down stuff like mad. There are lots and lots of female athletes that are far beyond Natalie physically, but she is so intelligent. And when it comes to physical intelligence—an understanding of what her body does and how to make it behave in a desired way—she’s a flat-out genius.”
Yet when others start crediting Nelms for his impact on Coughlin’s career, he gets uncomfortable. “Over a 3- or 4-year period, I may have had some influence, but it was only informational,” he says. “We’re talking about someone I saw maybe 10 days out of 4 years. Really, it comes down to what she and Teri did during all those other days. When I made those first suggestions, the two of them latched on to the concepts right away. It all just made total sense to Teri, too. There was a 30-minute encounter, and then I didn’t see Natalie for a year. I gave them really good information that made sense to the two of them, and that’s all it took.”
There were tenuous moments, to be sure. At first Coughlin grew extremely frustrated with the changes, as she was failing to make interval times she’d reached when she was 14. To strengthen her back and other muscles, she’d used resistance exercises prescribed by San Francisco physical therapist Lisa Giannone; at McKeever’s behest, Coughlin applied the same principles to a rigorous weight-training regimen that took a while to produce tangible results.
If McKeever’s physical justifications made sense—harnessing the energy of the previous stroke by working with the water, rather than fighting it by aggressively driving the arms forward and thrusting them backward—it was her keen ability to tap into Coughlin’s emotional state that made an even bigger impact. “She did things that US swimming coaches just don’t do,” Nelms says of McKeever. “If she saw that Natalie was exhausted or not into it, she’d tell her, ‘Get out of here. I don’t want to see you for a few days. And don’t go near the water, unless it’s the ocean.’
“Natalie’s a kid who’d been dragged through the knothole backward by her sport, and it was no accident that she came to Cal. I mean, she can go anywhere in the country coming out of high school, and she chooses that program and that coach, with all Teri was dealing with at that moment. Whether or not she understood it as such at the time, Natalie knew it was her best chance—it was the best person at the best place. She beat every odd to get to this point. She’s a cat that somehow got through all those years of being worked like a dog. Thirty or 40 years from now we’re going to look back and say, ‘What we were doing then was so damn primitive, and how that kid navigated her way through the madness was just a miracle.’ Anyone else would’ve been chewed up by the sport, and the only coach who could have saved her was Teri McKeever.”
McKeever acknowledges that when Coughlin began to thrive during what became a record-setting freshman season, she had to expand her base of knowledge to meet the challenge. “When Natalie arrived, Teri was scared to hell,” says Salo, a longtime friend of McKeever’s. “All of a sudden, she had this amazing athlete coming to Cal, and it made her step up to the level she’s capable of. That’s what makes a good coach. She’d always had the confidence to turn a swimmer no one had heard of into an overachiever. Now she had to reclaim her confidence and, with an athlete of that caliber, take that skill to the next level.”
By the summer of 2001, the rest of the world was forced to take note of Coughlin’s remarkable revival. Sure, many traditionalists ascribed her success to the residual benefits of Ray Mitchell’s training regimen, but the people closest to the situation knew that McKeever had also played a major role. At the 2001 FINA World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, Coughlin proved she was not merely a short-course supernova, winning the 100-meter backstroke in 1:00.37 seconds despite her having spent much of the second lap rubbing up against the lane line. Later, in leading off the victorious 400 medley relay, Coughlin had a 100 back time of 1:00.18, only .02 off the 7-year-old long-course world record set by China’s Cihong He in what many experts suspected was a drug-tainted effort.
What Nelms remembers about that meet is not so much Coughlin’s remarkable swim but the way she seemed to stalk him for several days without actually approaching. He’d be locked in a conversation, and out of the corner of his eye, he’d notice Coughlin several feet away, looking directly at him but making no attempt to inject herself into the proceedings. This kid’s weird, Nelms thought to himself. It had been a year since their first and only meeting, and he wondered whether she even remembered who he was.
Finally, when Nelms was walking through the Ready Room, in which swimmers congregate before their races, Coughlin walked up to him and reintroduced herself. “I just wanted to let you know we had a couple of mornings this year that were really cold, and my shoulder started to hurt,” she told him. “But I did exactly what you said, and it stopped. It doesn’t hurt anymore, and I just wanted to thank you.”
Nelms smiled, and as they continued their conversation, he couldn’t resist the impulse to close one eye and examine Coughlin’s drastically altered physique. One year later, there was nothing grotesque about it.