She is a full-fledged professional now, and something about the college senior in the faded jeans and gray scoop neck seems different. She looks more mature, more chic, more… brunette?
“I dyed my hair brown,” Coughlin says, laughing, as she reaches for a succulent samosa in the middle of a bustling Indian restaurant shortly after returning from the NCAAs in late March. “I’m so mad, because Marcelle (Miller) and Emma (Palsson) beat me to it and dyed theirs first!”
It seems that at least on a literal level, the Golden Girl is no longer golden. But in parting with her blond persona, Coughlin has also performed a symbolic cleansing of her cluttered psyche. This is one case in which, at least in the pool, she can claim that brunettes have more fun. “It’s hard to explain,” she says, “but I just feel so much lighter now. In practice this morning I was just so crisp and dialed in. I’m really, really excited about getting into my long-course training and making some adjustments in Pilates and with my technique. Honestly, this is the best I’ve felt in a long time.”
In fairness, the samosas may have something to do with it. Having finally found the clandestine lunch haven in West Berkeley for which we’ve been searching for several weeks, Coughlin and I have, as usual, erred on the side of gluttony. This is the second time we have come searching for Vik’s, an order-at-the-counter eatery inconveniently located in the middle of an industrial neighborhood, and only because we were persistent in questioning passersby did we actually find it. “Vik’s? It’s in there,” a pleasant woman finally informed us, gesturing with her thumb.
There? But it’s a warehouse.
“Yeah, in there.”
We walked tentatively toward the massive steel door at the side of the structure and pulled on the oversize handle. It opened, leading into a corridor that, a few yards away, spilled into a cool, high-ceilinged room containing more than 100 diners chowing down on marsala and curry and other delectable dishes.
Less than 96 hours earlier, Coughlin had suffered the defeat that reverberated throughout the swimming world, finishing third in the 200 back in the final individual race of her amateur career. Even allowing for the fact that she’d previously avowed her acting aspirations, her unfazed demeanor was utterly convincing. She seemed about as rattled as Meryl Streep after failing to win an Oscar—like I needed that to validate my eminence.
“Everyone expects me to freak out over this, but honestly, I really don’t care that much,” she said. “For one thing, I just really don’t like that event. The only reason I swam it was because it was the best thing for the team back when I was a freshman, and then, once I won it my first 2 years, people wanted me to keep winning those same three events. I was doing it for them, not me. I could’ve won the 100 free or 200 free and enjoyed myself much more. It wasn’t like I lost the 100 back or something I cared about. Basically, I just went out too fast, and I died going into the seventh lap. When I die, I just lose it in my legs—and I rely on my legs for power more than most people. When it was over, it was almost like a relief. It was my last college race, and now I could stop thinking about the Streak. It basically cast a shadow over my last 2 years of swimming, and now that I actually had to face losing, it wasn’t so bad.”
Her words carried plenty of ramifications, including a bias against the 200 back that could affect her decision whether to swim that or the 100 free—or both—at Olympic Trials. They also spoke to an uncharacteristic strain of tension between her and McKeever. When Coughlin spoke of the “people” who wanted her to swim the 200 back at NCAAs, it was her coach to whom she was referring. So strong was the connection between them, so deep the trust, that both women were able to live with their rare philosophical divides and remain focused on the larger picture. In this case, that meant moving full speed ahead toward Athens.
Besides, it wasn’t as if McKeever had neglected to beat herself up over what had happened in Texas. “In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have introduced the new stuff we’re doing in Pilates so close to NCAAs,” the coach had said 2 days earlier. “It probably tired her out. Because if Natalie says she’d going to do the exercises, she’s not going to half-ass it. I can’t wait until she sees the tape, because her technique, until it broke down, was awesome, the best it’s ever been. We’re trying some new things, and it can get better and better. The more I think about it, the more I realize that in the grand scheme of things it’s not that big a deal. For someone who’s going to swim as long as she is, you’re going to have races where things don’t go the way you like. It happened to Jenny Thompson, to Summer Sanders, and to Tracy Caulkins, and it’ll happen to Michael Phelps. At some point, it happens to everyone.”
It wasn’t difficult for McKeever to spin it forward. “From now on she’ll be swimming only for herself,” the coach said of Coughlin. “There are some negatives that go along with that, but also a lot of positives. At Trials, she won’t have to care how her Cal teammates are swimming. Emotionally, it’ll be about preparing herself to do really well for specific races, and that’s it. Even on an Olympic team, it’s all about you. You might like the other girls—Jenny or Amanda (Beard) or whomever—but it’s not like they’re your college teammates. You want them to do well, but it’s really not that big of a deal if they don’t.”
McKeever’s sights were firmly on the Olympic Trials, with Coughlin scheduled to compete in just three long-course meets, all in California, before heading to Long Beach for the biggest competition of her life. In fact, with the US staging its post-Trials training camp at Stanford and with her magazine interviews and photo shoots (Time, Glamour, the New Yorker, Vogue, Vanity Fair), as well as other media commitments (mostly to NBC) set for LA and the Bay Area, Coughlin would have to leave the Golden State only once before heading across the Atlantic—to attend a 3-day training session at the US Olympic training facility in Colorado Springs.
McKeever, too, would make that trip—not that her Cal coaching responsibilities had ebbed much. Still heavily involved in recruiting with the approach of the spring signing period, McKeever also had her share of housekeeping with which to contend: That morning, for example, she’d screamed at one swimmer whose commitment, she felt, was in question; later, she’d received a phone call from a hysterical Keiko Amano, whose dog had died. It was easy to see why McKeever viewed the push toward Greece as a welcome respite from the daily grind.
The coach’s next challenge was to make sure she and Coughlin were propelling themselves in the same direction. “Sometimes I’m afraid to push her because of the relationship we have,” McKeever conceded. “That’s why I was hesitant to approach her after she lost that race—I know that she trusts me not to make her uncomfortable. Whereas with Whitney, he’ll just confront her with things without feeling restricted. One thing I want to do when I see her tomorrow is convince her that with 105 days to go before Trials, I have a specific plan, and here’s what it is…to show her that it’s going to be okay. I don’t think she’ll doubt herself, but the fact that she’s talking about not wanting to do the 200 back scares me a bit.”
Soon there was comforting news: A third member of the team had been welcomed aboard. Going with her initial gut instinct, Coughlin had chosen Janey Miller as her agent, with the first and most important order of business being the consummation of a lucrative apparel deal. Miller, from Boulder, Colorado, was appealing for several reasons—she was a woman; she came highly recommended from sources such as former swimming star Janet Evans; and she had branched out to run her own shop, making her the closest thing to an antiestablishment candidate. Said Coughlin: “I’m not someone who is impressed by how big and established you are. It’s the same reason I didn’t go to Stanford.”
Similarly, Nike’s top-dog status in the sports world wasn’t helping the shoe giant, though in some ways it was the company’s lack of an established presence in the swim world that made the notion of signing there such a tough sell. It was true that Nike, with only a handful of swimmers in its stable (including Haley Cope), would have gained instant legitimacy with Coughlin. Michael Phelps had signed with Speedo, and Nike was seeking a face for its Athens campaign—not just within the swimming world but for the Games in general. With the BALCO scandal having cast track and field in a negative light, Coughlin was a logical candidate to become that face, should she choose the swoosh. Clearly, from a marketing standpoint, track’s loss stood to become swimming’s gain. In June, a Sports Business Daily survey of sports and advertising executives ranked Coughlin as the third-most-marketable prospective Olympian, behind Phelps and US softball pitcher Jennie Finch.
Yet Nike’s chief competitor for Coughlin’s services had a distinct advantage: proven technology. You can’t spell Speedo without speed, and the company’s Fastskin suit was widely regarded as state of the art in terms of increasing buoyancy and decreasing water resistance. If Coughlin was going to wear suits that were considered slower (or at least less proven in that department) than those worn by most of her peers, Nike would have to convince her of the benefits of taking that risk.
Ultimately, there were other factors that would sway Coughlin toward Speedo. For one thing, the company had a flair for the dramatic gesture: Upon learning that Coughlin had her eye on a new Acura TL, Speedo amended its offer to increase her signing bonus by the exact purchase price of the car.
It was more than a mere matter of money, though. Coughlin felt that Speedo employed a far more communal approach in its dealings with the swimming world. “They’ll be at a big meet, giving out suits that cost $200 to $300 to any swimmer who’s interested,” she said. “It’s like, ‘If we come up with better technology, everyone benefits.’ Nike has a reputation for being more secretive and proprietary. It’s like, ‘That’s ours. Why would we share it with someone else?’ ”
(Some in the swimming community wondered, Why wear the suits at all? Not only did the Fastskins take some of the sex appeal out of the sport, but they also struck some swimming insiders as antithetical to its spirit. Because the suits cut down on what Speedo called friction drag—essentially, water resistance—some argued that they were basically doing the body’s work, as a pair of fins might. According to Speedo, friction drag was responsible for up to 29 percent of a swimmer’s total drag underwater. The original Fastskin, worn by most swimmers at the Sydney Olympics in 2000, had been modeled after the skin of a shark. The Fastskin II was an upgraded model that included different fabrics in various parts of the suit, came in stroke-specific versions, and increased buoyancy by contracting the body, creating another physical advantage for a swimmer—the bigger, the better. Thus, bodysuits were something of an equalizer, providing far less of an edge for a relatively lithe swimmer like Coughlin than it did for her fleshier rivals. “If Natalie is, say, 4 seconds better than anyone with no Fastskins involved, she’s probably only a second and a half better with everyone wearing them,” Whitney Hite speculated. “By being water-resistant, I think they take away from the essence of swimming, which is finding a way to move quickly through the water.”)
For now, with the Nike-Speedo decision still unresolved, Coughlin was wearing a cute Puma jacket as she finished a postpractice breakfast at the Kensington Inn in early April. “I’m thinking about blowing off class,” she said in a tone that indicated she’d already decided not to attend. “It’s the only one I’ve got left, but I’m just not in the mood.”
That’s what being on the verge of signing a seven-figure sponsorship deal can do for a college kid. In reality, though, Coughlin already had cash stashed away, thanks to NCAA and USA Swimming rules that allowed her to pocket medal money for her finishes at certain elite national and international competitions. Such an arrangement might have come as a surprise to, say, Leon Powe, the star freshman forward on Cal’s basketball team, who many believed had NBA potential. Powe, an Oakland native, had lived on the streets during part of his destitute childhood and needed every cent of his full athletic scholarship to survive. Yet even while he helped to bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars for the athletic department Powe, to remain eligible, could take nothing above that scholarship limit. He couldn’t even share in the proceeds from the jerseys bearing his name being sold at the student store. In that sense, Coughlin knew, she was comparatively fortunate.
On the other hand, how many swimmers actually made money, period?
Yet as she awaited the spoils of her many, many hours of labor, Coughlin certainly wasn’t tensing up or behaving in an overly conservative manner. “We played Ultimate (Frisbee) the other day in the middle of the track, and Teri told us whichever team won would get a special surprise,” Coughlin said. “So I said, ‘Okay, we’re winning.’ I had Lauren (Medina) and Erin Calder on my team—they can’t catch to save their lives. I was like, Catch the disc! It was windy, so I was telling people to keep it low. And I was making diving catches like crazy.” Sure enough, Coughlin’s team won, though she received a “special surprise” beyond that which had been offered by McKeever, which was getting out of practice early. “I got this awful rash from the pesticide on the grass,” she said. “I was scratching so hard you could see the blood vessels under my skin.”
Then there was Coughlin’s recent trip to Orchard Supply Hardware to purchase patio furniture for her condo. When she got home, she remembered two things: There was no elevator up to her condo, with four flights of stairs leading up to the master bedroom; and she had not thought to enlist any friends. “So I put on athletic clothes and did it all myself,” she said. “I hauled a 60-pound wine barrel up to the fourth floor—I’d pick it up, sprint up a flight of stairs, and then stop to rest.”
Coughlin’s time in the pool since she’d returned from NCAAs had been far more fruitful. “I’ve had more good workouts this past week than I did the entire college season,” Coughlin said. “People have told me, ‘You look so much happier’—that’s because I am happier. It’s just felt so much lighter lately. Plus, Teri’s workouts have really been tailored to me, which is nice.”
Five days later, Coughlin was officially part of the Speedo family. She and McKeever had flown to Phoenix, where the newly signed swimmer posed in fashionable one- and two-piece swimsuits with Jenny Thompson for a series of promotional photos. As part of the Speedo deal, Coughlin negotiated a clause that gave 5 percent of all the bonus money she earned—including incentives for Olympic medals and world records—to Cal’s women’s swimming program. “That,” McKeever told the swimmers at the team’s annual banquet in late April, “tells you how much she cares about this university and this team.”
“I’m so happy to have signed with Speedo,” Coughlin said. “It just feels right.”
She had but one remaining major decision hanging over her head, and it stood to affect the fortunes of swimmers across the globe.
For 8 months now, Coughlin and McKeever had been involved in a psychic tug-of-war over what she would swim in Athens. Scheduling conflicts had all but ruled out the 100 fly and 200 free, meaning that besides the 100 back and the three relays, Coughlin could swim only one more individual event. It would be either the 200 back or the 100 free, two events in which Coughlin held the American record. It was very clear which one McKeever thought she should choose.
Often, their push-and-pull played out in subtle fashion. McKeever would remind Coughlin how dominant she was in the 200 back and how capable she was of setting a world record in the event. Coughlin, meanwhile, would grouse about how much she hated that race and draw attention to her potential as a freestyler. That Coughlin had suffered her first significant defeat as a collegiate swimmer in the 200 back at NCAAs hadn’t helped the coach’s cause, especially after the seemingly shot senior rebounded 50 minutes later to set an American (short-course) record in the 100 free on the leadoff leg of the 400 free relay. Following the 200 back, Coughlin had done an interview with ESPN for its tape-delayed telecast, and she couldn’t resist smiling into the camera and saying, “Maybe this is a sign.”
“As soon as the Olympic schedule came out, we started talking about the 200 back versus the 100 free,” McKeever had said a few days later. “In the 100 free, there’s less margin for error, and if anyone is going to come out of nowhere and medal, it will probably be in that race. She and Inge (de Bruijn) are the only women who have gone under 54, but this 15-year-old Italian girl no one’s ever heard of just swam 54.4, and a girl from Finland emerged at Worlds and won it with a fast time. Plus, Jenny Thompson will try to swim it.
“Ultimately, it comes down to Natalie being comfortable with what she’s doing. I still think she should swim the 200 back, but if she ultimately decides the 100 free is her comfort zone, then so be it.”
Nine days later, McKeever was still pressing her case. “What I’d like is for her to give me 3 weeks to work with her on the 200 back, to get her feeling comfortable with the event again,” the coach said. “I think the world record is there for the taking. Of course, it doesn’t matter if I think that; she’s the one who has to convince herself of that, ultimately. If, as Trials approach, she’s still feeling like the 100 free is where she’s most comfortable, she’ll probably just end up swimming it.”
Yet as McKeever spoke, some startling developments were taking place Down Under at the Australian Olympic Trials. Nineteen-year-old Libby Lenton had clocked a 53.66 in the semifinals of the 100 free, breaking the 4-year-old world record set by de Bruijn, the 2000 Olympic champion from the Netherlands. And another young Aussie, Jodie Henry, had gone 53.77 in her semifinal heat, matching de Bruijn’s prior record. Suddenly, instead of being one of only two women to have gone under 54 seconds in the 100 free, Coughlin was one of four.
“Yeah, but I know I can go faster, too,” Coughlin said. “When I set my American record, I had a horrible finish, and my dive off the start is way better now than it was then.”
Still, in an interview with the Oakland Tribune in late April, Coughlin, when asked what events she planned to swim in Athens, answered, “Basically it’s the 100 back and 200 back, unless something changes.”
On May 1, 2004, on an inhumanely hot day in LA, something did change. Competing in the USC/Speedo Grand Challenge, the first of three walk-up meets to Trials, Coughlin swam her first long-course 200 back since the previous summer and plodded to a prelim time of 2:19.24, nearly 11 seconds slower than the American record she’d set in the summer of 2002. The Speedo meet had an unorthodox format in which only the top four finishers made the final, and Coughlin ranked fifth, behind former Olympic gold medalist Beth Botsford; Auburn star Margaret Hoelzer (one of the two swimmers who’d beaten Coughlin at NCAAs); another former Olympic gold medalist, Misty Hyman; and Haley Cope. Coughlin improved to 2:17.53 in winning the consolation final, but even before she completed her last lap, she had soured on the 200 back even more. Why is it always such a struggle to swim this event? she wondered. Sure, it was early, with more than 2 months left before Trials. But she’d had no trouble winning the 100 free in 54.87. This, she concluded, was another sign.
Another of Coughlin’s swims in LA had been revealing: her victory in the 200 free. McKeever was in constant communication with Mark Schubert, the USC coach in charge of the US women’s team, regarding Coughlin’s potential for winning a spot on the 800 free relay without having to swim the 200 free at Trials. Though Schubert couldn’t officially guarantee anything, he indicated that were Coughlin to record the fastest 200 free time of any US swimmer headed into Trials, he’d almost certainly be satisfied that she’d be a very viable option. Otherwise, she might have to swim the event at least once at Trials—a problem, since its preliminaries and semifinals would be on the same day as the 100 back final. Obviously, the better option was plan A, and Coughlin was anxious to see how she’d swim the 200 free in the Speedo meet. Her time of 2:00.24 was impressive, but something else was even more encouraging. Coughlin had recorded a “negative split”—meaning the second half of her 200 (59.87 seconds) was faster than her first (1:00.37). This is a rarity for most swimmers, who typically become winded toward the end of the 200 free; Coughlin, however, often employed a strategy designed to allow for a finishing kick. Her negative split in LA was seen as a sign that she had plenty of room for improvement, once she reacquainted herself with the race’s rhythms.
Just for fun, Coughlin swam a pair of other races in LA: the 400 free, in which she finished fourth with a career-best time of 4:15.35, erasing a PR she’d recorded when she was 14; and the 50 free, in which she scratched after qualifying fifth with a time of 26.60, just behind fourth-place Cope.
With Trials a little more than 2 months away, both Coughlin and McKeever were concerned about the potential discomfort of having Cope in such close quarters. Not only had the relationship been strained since Cope’s decision to leave Cal the previous October, but she also had a knack for saying the most maddening things at the least optimal times. McKeever’s memory of Coughlin’s landmark, American-record-settting 100 free swim in Yokohama, Japan, in 2002, in which she became only the second woman to go under 54 seconds, includes Cope’s untimely scream of “Oh my God—she’s gonna die!” after seeing Coughlin’s 50-meter split of 25.98.
The weekend before the Speedo meet, McKeever, Coughlin, and Cope had traveled to Colorado Springs to be part of a US national team camp. The trip had been notable for two reasons: Coughlin’s workouts at high altitude, McKeever said, were “exceptional”; and it was the first time McKeever and Cope had seen each other since their breakup. On the flight back to the Bay Area, McKeever asked Coughlin, “How do you want to handle it if Haley tries to come sit with us at these meets or at Trials?” The two agreed that they’d prefer that Cope stay away. “If she does try to approach us,” McKeever later explained, “I’m going to have to tell her, ‘Haley, this is what you gave up when you left. You can’t sit with us anymore.’ ”
Of course, 2 weeks before that, Cope had reentered the Cal universe in style. At a birthday party for former teammates Ashley Chandler and Danielle Becks, she arrived wearing a Cleopatra outfit complete with chain-link bra and spent much of her time drinking beer out of a Viking horn.
The skinny 14-year-old girl emerged from the pool and bounded across the deck, waving and smiling and soaking up cheers. Katie Hoff, a heretofore little-known swimmer from Baltimore, had just stunned the crowd at the Santa Clara Invitational in late May, annihilating the competition in the 400-meter individual medley. Her time of 4:39.82 was the world’s second best of the year to that point and was less than 2 seconds shy of Summer Sanders’s American record. In less than 5 minutes’ time, Hoff had thus announced herself as a bona fide Olympic hopeful. Her future appeared to be unlimited.
Up in the stands, many of the other swimmers competing in the meet were dubious. “Let’s see what happens when she gets hips,” one said. “Yeah,” added another, “wait till she gets her period.”
Had Coughlin heard the comments, she would have empathized with Hoff. Back in the day, she, too, had been a 14-year-old phenom, obliviously blowing away more established swimmers and seemingly getting more dangerous by the day. That she was here at all now—let alone here as a wiser, more accomplished competitor—was somewhat of a miracle. In a sport notorious for eating its young, Coughlin had survived and thrived.
In that sense, Coughlin felt instinctively protective of a sudden star like Hoff, whose career could be slowed or destroyed by so many potential pitfalls. Some swimmers burned out or branched out into other interests. They got beat up physically, mentally, and emotionally, or they simply grew tired of being slower than they used to be. Eating disorders, depression, drug abuse—Coughlin could name dozens of once-prominent swimmers who’d succumbed to those and other perils.
Any adult swimmer—even one who loved the bare essence of the sport as much as Coughlin—who claimed to have never thought about quitting was lying. So brutal was the training regimen that the “Q” word was on everyone’s mind at some point. “It’s funny how I quit swimming at least once every practice,” one of Coughlin’s teammates told me a couple of weeks before the Santa Clara meet. “I get all mad that we’re doing something really hard and I’m like, I don’t have to do this; I can quit anytime I want. In fact, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m quitting. But then by the time we warm down, I’ve forgotten about it. I think everybody does that, which is kind of disturbing and certainly weird.”
Sometimes it was over in a flash. Seven months earlier, Coughlin and her teammates had been pining for the services of high school senior Diana MacManus, reasoning that the former national champion in the 100 and 200 back would be the plum of their recruiting class. MacManus had chosen Texas over Cal, but now, 6 weeks before Trials, she was nowhere to be seen. She had stopped swimming, at least for the moment, and would not even show up in Long Beach. Four years earlier, as a 14-year-old, she had been the Katie Hoff of her era, finishing fourth in the 100 back at Trials. And now—poof, she was gone.
Whether or not MacManus had been a victim of excessive yardage wasn’t certain. But in general Coughlin believed that most of her peers were susceptible to burnout, as she had been as a teenager. “There’s too much overtraining,” she said, “and some programs are just downright abusive. As some people begin to understand that and change the way they train, you’ll see less people walking away. And I think that’s why a lot of people are swimming longer and longer. Jenny (Thompson)’s training half of what she used to, and she’s still fast. My attitude is, focus on yourself. I look at someone like (former Cal sprinting star) Anthony Ervin—people called him a slacker. But what I saw was that when he swam, he was focused, and it obviously worked for him.”
“Swimming is such a wholesome activity, and it breeds so many driven, successful people,” McKeever had noted in March. “But instead of selling that, USA Swimming touts Michael Phelps for not having missed a workout for 3 straight years—and that we’re all up at 5 in the morning. It’s like they make the sport intentionally boring and wear it as a badge of honor.”
Stroke consultant Milt Nelms had convinced McKeever that training approaches would be radically different—if not in their lifetimes, then in Coughlin’s. “If not missing a practice for 3 years is what it takes to be a prospective Olympic champion,” Nelms told her, “then we shouldn’t be doing it.”
Coughlin was so convinced that technique-driven, lower-volume workouts were the most effective that as the Games approached, she deviated further and further from the traditional training model. She delved deeper into Pilates, each week making the 1½-hour round-trip drive to Mountain View, a Silicon Valley town just south of Stanford, to see Tom McCook, a former bodybuilder with a soothing voice, whom Nelms described as a “physiological genius.” Before one morning session in early June at McCook’s Center of Balance studio, Coughlin lauded the instructor as being someone who “thinks outside the box, which more people need to do.” McKeever, who was also present, added, “I think, for a lot of us, this is the missing piece—to be able to concentrate, to listen to an instructor’s cues, and then to apply that to what goes on in the water.”
McCook had previously worked with a number of standout swimmers, including Jenny Thompson, Gabrielle Rose, and Misty Hyman, and had traveled to Sydney for the 2000 Games as part of Richard Quick’s entourage. He was impressed by his latest client’s ability to assimilate his teachings. “She’s digested it all,” McCook said. “Plus, she’s a great mover. It’s good to work with someone who gets it. My goal is to make her the authority, which should be the ideal. Your workout has to be related to improved functioning, and not just conditioning. It’s really changing your view of what ‘strength’ really means. It’s more about your body’s intelligence and how to access it.”
During their 90-minute session, Coughlin did a series of rigorous stretching and strength-building exercises, some on machines with amusing nicknames: Elvis, a rocking device designed to stretch one’s pelvis; the Pegasus, a new contraption designed in Florence, Italy, that especially works the pectoral muscles; and the Reformer, in which the legs go into ankle straps on opposite sides of a sliding base—“my favorite,”
Coughlin said sarcastically of the latter machine. “The first time I did this, I had a profound fear that I was gonna fall and my legs would split.”
“Yes,” McCook said, “she thought she’d become a Siamese twin.”
At various points throughout the workout, McCook and McKeever were able to reference Coughlin’s performance in the water in relation to the stretches. After Coughlin placed a foam ball between her knees while lying flat on her back and doing breathing exercises, McCook said, “Now curl over and see if you get the sense that you’re lengthening the muscles in your lower back…that you’re elongating.”
“I think that’s what Milt was talking about with your backstroke start,” McKeever chimed in.
“Right,” Coughlin said. “I was tucking my tail too much.”
Said McCook: “When you crunch your butt, you put a lot of tension in your sacrum. That’s why you have to stay long. When the back is elongated, it lets go of a lot of tension, and that makes you a lot more functional. When your back is tight, it’s really hard to hold your position when kicking—and then you’ll overuse your quads.”
Staying loose at Pilates was one thing; doing so everywhere else was another. Coughlin’s pre-Olympics preparation was becoming more specific as she zeroed in on her schedule. By early May she had completely stopped swimming the butterfly, a development that made Coughlin’s friend Jenny Thompson, the United States’ other top threat in the 100 fly, utterly aghast. “What I love most about swimming is the competition,” Thompson explained while standing above the warm-up pool of the Janet Evans Invitational, the final major event before Trials. “I kind of revel in it. When she told me she wasn’t swimming the 100 fly, I was like, Come on.”
As Coughlin zeroed in on the biggest competition of her life and her media commitments intensified, McKeever did her best to keep things light. The coach was in a hopeful mood, having spent much of the spring house hunting amid the resplendent hills north of Berkeley. Unlike her modest apartment west of campus, McKeever felt, one of these houses would be a real home. Professionally, McKeever also had reason for optimism. Finally fed up with the Bears’ diving futility, McKeever had met with Cal men’s coach Nort Thornton and discussed the possibility of replacing longtime diving coach Phil Tonne. They then met with executive associate athletic director Teresa Kuehn and agreed to open up the job to any interested applicant. Tonne, at least in theory, would be free to reapply; however, McKeever believed several attractive candidates would emerge.
The atmosphere on the pool deck reflected McKeever’s upbeat mood. One sweltering afternoon in late April, she had the swimmers doing a drill in which, one by one, they ran across the deck, dove into the pool without breaking stride, and then did various other novelty strokes, such as a two-handed backstroke, while shifting to the next lane at every other wall. As the drill played out, about a dozen members of Cal’s women’s water polo team, who were getting ready to begin practice, stood watching with bemused grins. The drill was designed to make the swimmers aware of body control and positioning; judging by some of their ungraceful gaits and awkward dives, this was not a bad thing. Coughlin, by contrast, could not have looked smoother as she pranced along the deck and vaulted herself into the water without making a splash.
A few days earlier, volunteer assistant/team manager Jen Strasburger had ended practice with a relay featuring two teams of seven swimmers apiece swimming a pair of broken-up 25-yard legs, all while wearing one of four devices: an AquaJogger, a pair of inner tubes that conjoined one’s ankles, a water parachute, and a mono fin. The race was a reasonably competitive one, and the swimmers were laughing practically the entire time.
Coughlin, of course, tended to be far more serious during practice, as she was on a June afternoon while swimming freestyle laps with a snorkel and resistance boots. After finishing a protracted set, she took off her mask and, a second later, did a double take. Famed sprinter Gary Hall Jr., an Olympic gold medalist in 1996 and 2000, was walking by in a skimpy Speedo. There was nothing unusual about that—Hall was one of the many standout sprinters training under the renowned Mike Bottom, a former swimming great who was now an assistant to Nort Thornton. What caused Coughlin first to stare openmouthed, then burst out laughing, was the sight of the tall, mop-haired Hall sporting a faux handlebar mustache the eccentric sprinter had apparently applied with a Sharpie marker.
At the Santa Clara meet, Coughlin had enjoyed a burlesque moment of her own when she was fiddling with the bubble-shaped outer cap that Speedo had provided in an effort to test its latest technical innovation. Already self-conscious about what she called her “enormous head,” Coughlin sheepishly attempted to find the proper fit for the cap while sitting in the stands before the 100 free final, and in doing so she bore an uncanny resemblance to the character the Great Gazoo from the old Flintstones cartoons. “When she wears that cap,” her father, Jim, said, “she looks like she’s about to get shot out of a cannon.” Some of her teammates joked that she had walked off the set of the movie Spaceballs. Laughing, Coughlin removed the black cap and then once again placed it over her silver Cal swim cap, and the resulting shift of air caused a funny noise. “It farted,” Whitney Hite said, and everyone cracked up.
Then Coughlin left to get ready for the 100 free, walking to the blocks a few minutes later with the other finalists, each trailed by a young girl carrying the swimmer’s belongings in a plastic bin while Verve’s “Bittersweet Symphony” blared over the loudspeakers. Still, the mood was entirely casual as the race began—only because it was an Olympic year were those outside the swimming community even paying attention to meets such as these, with Michael Phelps’s participation and Katie Hoff’s emergence as the primary story lines. Coughlin won comfortably in 54.77 seconds, and her teammates in attendance seemed genuinely thrilled for her.
“Natalie’s really enjoying being a professional,” Marcelle Miller noted. “I think the team dynamic was hard for her this year. We expected certain things out of her, but I’m not sure we did enough to support her and the things she was going through. I can’t even imagine the pressure she’s under. It’s definitely gotten more intense this year than in the past, and as we get closer to the Olympics—oh, man. I wouldn’t want to be her, I’ll tell you that.”
Two nights later, while watching the 200 free consolation C final, Miller smiled as she caught a glimpse of Cal’s future. “I love watching Erin (Reilly) swim,” the breaststroker said. “At some point she’s going to realize how good she is and put it all together, and it’s going to be scary.” In another lane, meanwhile, Lauren Medina was making a late push that would see her edge several higher-seeded swimmers at the finish to win in 2:03.60. The Cal contingent was visibly moved. “Medina just refuses to lose,” Miller said, to which Hite replied: “Lauren just needs someone to run down. If she could get to the final heat of Trials, she would beat two people in that heat—the girl on her left and the girl on her right—even if she had to go 1:57 to do it.” In that fantasy scenario, Medina, by finishing sixth, could represent the United States in the Olympics, as the top six finishers in the 100 and 200 typically made the team as a means of providing depth for the relays.
However, it turned out there was a more plausible scenario that could land Medina in Athens. At Cal’s meet against USC in January, the director of Mexico’s national swim team had seen her swim and had subsequently contacted her with an offer: Given her grandparents’ ancestry (three of four were born south of the border) Medina would be eligible to represent Mexico in the Games and would almost certainly qualify to do so based on her times. She was still mulling it over. “I’ve never been to Mexico,” Medina said sheepishly, “and my Spanish sucks. But yeah, I’m definitely thinking about it.”
Meanwhile, a far more celebrated choice loomed: the Decision. What would Coughlin swim, and how would it impact the rest of the elite US and world swimmers? “There are definitely people that walk around going, ‘Oh my God, what’s Natalie going to do?’ ” said Maritza Correia, the former Georgia sprint star who was attempting to become the first black American woman swimmer to make an Olympic team, between races in Santa Clara. “I’m pretty good about just focusing on myself, but there are definitely others who get caught up in it.” Rowdy Gaines, the former Olympic champion turned swimming commentator, understood Coughlin’s dilemma when it came to choosing between the 100 free and 200 back. “Maybe she should swim the 200 back at Trials and then decide,” he said, “but if you hate an event, it’s really tough to swim it. In 1984 I had the world record in the 200 free, and I finished seventh at Trials. I just really hated swimming that event, and it played with me mentally—and when it came time to swim it at Trials, I choked. The thing with Natalie is, if she swims the 200 back in Athens, she’ll either get first or 36th, because it’s such a mental thing with her.”
Given the mental machinations and Coughlin’s physical breakdowns before the 2000 Trials and at the ’03 Worlds, Gaines believed she could best serve her country by scaling down her ambitions. “The United States needs Natalie to be at her best, badly,” he said. “Otherwise, we could lose all three relays. The more events, the worse it is for the relay, because she’s the key to all of them.”
McKeever, for one, hadn’t given up on the possibility of Coughlin’s swimming both events, at least at Trials: “She may swim all three in Long Beach and then choose,” McKeever said. “They’re now telling me that there are 37 minutes between the first 200 back semis and the 100 free final—that’s doable. You’d like to have that order reversed, but in her case it’s better to get the 200 back over with, because she’ll be motivated for the 100 free regardless.”
In Santa Clara, Coughlin competed only in the 200 back prelims, clocking 2:12.29—just off the meet record, yet far from where she’d like to have been at that point. And yet, with no other American even close to having emerged as a medal candidate, would USA Swimming officials pressure Coughlin, at least via McKeever, to go that way? “I don’t think anyone will pressure her to swim anything, to their credit,” McKeever said as Coughlin, toward the end of her warm-down swim, had her ear pricked by the officials present in Santa Clara to test her blood for lactic acid. “If they’ve been watching her and what kind of athlete she is, they know she’s not going to let anyone tell her what to do. I’m certainly not going to start telling her what to do now.”
McKeever continued: “After her 200 back prelim swim at USC (in April), I told her, ‘Nat, I think the 200 back is an incredibly weak event internationally—but I don’t have to swim it. I want you to be comfortable with whatever you swim. If you want to swim the 100 free, that’s what you’ll swim, end of story. Either way, we might as well keep our options open right now. If nothing else, training for the 200 back will help your 100 back.’ ”
Three weeks later, at the Janet Evans Invitational, McKeever and Coughlin huddled in the stands of the temporary pool outside the Long Beach Convention Center—the same place Trials would be held in less than a month’s time—and discussed race strategy for the upcoming 200 back prelim. The 100 free, as it seemed was always the case, would also be contested that morning, and as McKeever reminded Coughlin to “stay upright, and tuck your chin a little bit,” she sensed that the swimmer wasn’t all there. Finally, Coughlin blurted out, ‘Can I not swim the 200 back tonight?”
McKeever froze. Not swimming the 200 back in the finals of the last meet before Trials meant Coughlin wouldn’t be swimming it, period. Was it really over? Coughlin looked at McKeever as though the coach were a foreign visitor who understood no English. “This is going to be my last 200 back,” Coughlin said. “After this, I just want to focus on the 100 free.”
“What are you saying—that you’ve made your decision? This is it?”
“Yeah, this is it.” Coughlin said. “I thought you already knew that. This is my last 200 back. Ever.”
Ever? McKeever thought to herself. I didn’t sign off on that!
But the coach let it go. “I’ve got to pick my battles,” she said later.
“How many did you retire today?” Dave Salo asked McKeever only semi-sarcastically as they left the deck of the warm-down pool later that morning. He and his assistant Adam Crossen, who had joined Salo after leaving Cal, had stopped to schmooze with McKeever and Whitney Hite, a somewhat awkward convergence of related parties in an insular universe. “We retired one,” Salo continued, “and we prolonged a couple of careers, too.”
All four coaches agreed that the mood in Long Beach was tense. “Everyone’s wigging out here because it’s too close to Trials, and it’s too late to change,” Salo said. “They now realize they should’ve listened before: He wasn’t kidding when he said it’s only 700 days to Trials. I actually got mad at them one day recently and put up on the chalkboard, ‘Only 1,400 days until the next Trials.’ You better believe that pissed some of them off.”
Everyone laughed and continued the lighthearted conversation as begoggled swimmers and concerned coaches scurried past. Before the madness of Trials and the locked-down intensity of Athens, this was the last actual swim meet that would take place for a while. The break between morning prelims and the evening’s finals served as an extended social hour.
“Well,” Salo said, finally breaking up the conversation, “I’ve gotta go find my Katie Hoff.”
McKeever went over to find Coughlin, whose mood was bright in the wake of her decision to swim the 100 free. It was all systems go heading into Trials: Coughlin’s winning time of 1:58.31 in the 200 free had all but assured her a spot on the 800 free relay in Athens. The coach’s job between now and Trials would be to keep Coughlin as loose as possible while resisting the compelling urge to become a stress case herself. When McKeever reached the swimmer, Coughlin had a grin on her face the size of a gold medal. She was on her way to the official’s table to withdraw from the 200 back final—the last time, she hoped, she’d ever be entered in that race she so hated—and when she signed her name to complete the task, it was as if an ecstatic current surged through her entire body.
“Should we frame it?” I asked.
“Yeah!” she practically screamed. That night, after winning the 100 free in 54.47, Coughlin found her buddy Jenny Thompson, who had flown in but was not competing, on the deck of the warm-up pool. They compared hats—Coughlin’s beige Kangol lid, Thompson’s pink zip-up cap—and gossiped and giggled, all the while mindful they were headed for a spirited 100 free showdown in Long Beach.
At this point, the specter of having to beat Thompson—or Inge de Bruijn, or Libby Lenton, or Jodie Henry—didn’t faze Coughlin in the least. “The 200 back is a weak event internationally,” she said, beaming, “but I don’t care. I know Inge is there in the 100 free, and those two Australian girls went under (or tied) her world record—well, I can set world records, too. It’s a tougher path, but I embrace it. And if I win that gold medal, it’ll really mean something.”
In the meantime, the selling of Coughlin as a Golden Girl was proceeding in earnest. During one marathon 10-hour session at Spieker Pool in late May, Coughlin completed a nonstop run of interviews and photo shoots. Shivering in the water as a Time magazine photographer coaxed her into various poses, Coughlin, her hand clutching the gutter bordering the pool, was stung by a bee.
Far more enjoyable was the movie-trailer skit she filmed for NBC as a means of hyping the network’s Olympics coverage. The scenes Coughlin shot in Southern California, which were later juxtaposed with those featuring other Olympians to form the trailer, gave her a taste of the acting experience, an avenue she hoped to explore when her swimming career was done. She had unsuccessfully lobbied the producers to allow her to drive the 2005 Corvette—one of only five in existence at the time—that was featured in the mini-film. A stunt double did the honors instead. “They dropped a log on it like 20 times,” Coughlin said, “but they didn’t trust me to drive it 10 feet.”
To be sure, Coughlin was getting far less attention than Michael Phelps, who would grace the cover of Time in a skimpy Speedo and was being cast as the surefire star of the Games. Coughlin wasn’t jealous in the least. “I’m glad I’m not getting all that attention,” she said. “We’re different people. He thrives on it. If I got that much attention that much of the time, I’d go crazy.”
As June wound down and Trials neared, Coughlin’s mental state seemed as solid as possible. She had even responded favorably to an out-of-nowhere suggestion by McKeever: Why not swim the 50-meter freestyle at meet’s end? At first, Coughlin balked: The 50 was, at best, her sixth-most-accomplished event. “My time in the 50 is the same as my first 50 in a 100,” she had told me a few weeks earlier. “I tend not to swim it because, it’s like, what’s the point?” But McKeever pointed out that in swimming the 100 back and 100 free, Coughlin would finish her responsibilities at Trials with 2 days remaining in the 8-day meet. The prelims and semifinals for the 50 would be held on the 7th day, with the final the following night, mirroring the schedule for Athens. Though Coughlin hadn’t trained for the event, and wasn’t convinced she could even make the finals, she figured, why the hell not?
McKeever liked the idea for two reasons: First, it would keep Coughlin’s head in the meet, rather than allowing her to let up and become distracted in the wake of making the Olympic team. “She was going to have to be there anyway because of media commitments,” McKeever would later reason, “so this way, she couldn’t completely check out.” Also, McKeever believed that swimming the 50 would help Coughlin’s preparation for the 100 free, particularly in terms of her start and potential explosiveness down the stretch.
This wasn’t particularly good news for Haley Cope, whose best events were the 100 back and the 50 free. Now, suddenly, her old friend Coughlin was in position to deny Cope her Olympic dream—twice.
When Keiko Price called to give her the news—“Natalie’s swimming the 50 at Trials!”—Cope was stunned. “Why?” she demanded.
“Why not?” Price answered.
On the other end, there was complete silence.