She had snapped at the massage therapist, glared at a US Swimming official, and slept only in fits and starts since arriving in Long Beach for the most meaningful meet of her career. In another week, Teri McKeever would be either a pioneer in her profession or a profoundly disappointed coach, and she was feeling the heat as much as anyone in Southern California as the Trials got under way in early July.
“I’ve been a bitch,” McKeever conceded shortly before Coughlin’s first swim, in the last preliminary heat of the 100-meter backstroke on the second morning of the 8-day meet. “Obviously, I’m nervous. It’s such a tense atmosphere around here. I mean, look at the times—most people are going slower than you’d expect, and that’s because this meet is so emotionally overwhelming.”
Many in the American swimming community argued that the US Trials actually were a tougher and more pressure-filled meet than the Olympics, and they had a point: Because of International Olympic Committee Rules limiting each nation to two entrants per individual race, top competitors from a swimming power such as the United States or Australia had precious little margin for error. Some of the third-place finishers at the US Trials might be good enough to win an Olympic medal, were they allowed to compete—but, of course, the world would never know, because only the top two in a particular event would have the opportunity to swim it in Athens.
One false move—literally—could derail an entire career’s worth of training. Never had that point been underscored more than during the Australian Trials 4 months earlier, when Ian Thorpe, the most decorated and beloved male swimmer in that nation’s history, fell off the starting block seconds before the start of his preliminary heat in the 400 meter freestyle, an event he hadn’t lost in the previous 7 years. Because of the zero-tolerance false-start policy, Thorpe was automatically disqualified, even though he’d merely slipped off his mark, rather than mistimed the gun. Faced with the prospect of having the 400 free world record holder denied a chance to defend his 2000 Olympic title, many Australians immediately began lobbying the second-place finisher at the Trials, Craig Stevens, to surrender his spot—mindful that by rule the next-ranked swimmer in the event who had qualified for the Australian team would get the nod: in this case, Thorpe. Since Stevens had already qualified to swim the 1,500 free (his best event) and the 800 free relay in Athens and was hardly a medal threat in the 400, it seemed the patriotic thing to do. After several weeks of indecision, complete with rampant public lobbying and a reported $60,000 payment from a Sydney television station to tell his story, Stevens did indeed offer to step aside, and Thorpe accepted.
In Coughlin’s case, a false start was not the sole worst-case disqualification scenario. There was also the matter of the 15-meter rule, which required swimmers to emerge from under water by a specific point marked on each lane line after starts and turns. The rule, which originally mandated a 10-meter limit (it was amended 8 years later), had been instituted back in 1988 after US swimmer David Berkoff set a world record in the 100-meter backstroke at the Seoul Olympics using a 35-meter underwater start—one that NBC commentator John Naber nicknamed the Berkoff Blastoff. Though it might not have seemed logical to those unfamiliar with competitive swimming, Berkoff and many other elite competitors could go faster beneath the water than they could swimming above it. Coughlin, because of her skill underwater, was the most blatant representation of this theory: Theoretically, she could have shattered her own world record by spending most or all of the 100 back below the surface, were such a maneuver allowed.
Instead, she was limited to spending no more than 30 of the 100 meters underwater—a rule she typically pushed as close to the allowable threshold as possible. Two months earlier in Santa Clara, Coughlin had come so close to surpassing the 15-meter mark off her start during the 100 back final that whistles filled the evening air—the result of numerous fans voicing their belief that she was cheating. “I wasn’t,” Coughlin said afterward, shrugging. “They don’t even understand the rule. It’s where your head is when it hits the surface that counts, even if your arm is beyond the line. And the only way you can judge it with the proper perspective is to stand at the 15-meter mark.”
At Trials, however, Coughlin was taking no chances. “I think I’m gonna go 11 instead of 12 off the start,” Coughlin told McKeever about an hour before her 100 back prelim race, referring to the number of dolphin kicks underwater. “I’m getting a little close.”
There was a palpable closeness between Coughlin and her coach in Long Beach as 4 years of shared sacrifice waited to be validated. On the morning of Coughlin’s first swim, McKeever, as was her custom before big meets, presented her with a gift card and a present, in this case a “blessing ring” she had purchased immediately after the NCAA meet 4 months earlier. “Should I read it before or after I race?” Coughlin asked.
“Your choice,” McKeever said.
Coughlin opened the card and absorbed its message: “Life is a journey, not a destination.” Life, McKeever continued, wasn’t just one journey, either—it was a series of overlapping journeys. “This begins your Olympic journey,” she wrote. “Thank you for letting me share your journey to this point. I’m sad that I have to start sharing you, but the good thing is that so many people will see what an amazing woman you are.”
It turned out to be an emotional morning for McKeever, beginning with Coughlin’s preliminary swim, a meet-record 1:00.71, easily the fastest among qualifiers. The fastest 16 would compete that night in a pair of semifinal heats, with the top 8 overall finishers advancing to the following evening’s finals. Such a three-round format was largely unnecessary—“What do the semis do, really?” asked Adam Crossen, McKeever’s former Cal understudy—but it mirrored the format that would be used in Athens. “The deal is that the people who run the Olympics want swimming to last a week,” Crossen explained, “and US Swimming wants the experience here to be similar. Basically, they want to give Michael (Phelps, and other swimmers with multiple events) an idea of what it will be like to swim all those events in Athens. I mean, they could pick the same team in 4 days by just swimming prelims and finals, but this is the system we have.” (The counterpoint to this argument, of course, is the notable exception: In the 2000 Trials, for example, Gabrielle Rose snuck into the semis of the 200-meter individual medley with a 16th-place finish. She went on to finish second in the event and placed seventh for the United States in Sydney.)
Haley Cope, with the fifth-fastest prelim time, was right there in the 100 back mix. And in the ultracompetitive 100-meter breaststroke, McKeever’s former star Stacianna Stitts had made the morning’s biggest statement with a scorching preliminary race to lead all qualifiers, even favorite Amanda Beard. Attempting to make her second consecutive Olympic team, Stitts produced a time (1:07.20) that was the third-fastest in the world in 2004, behind only the first- and second-place finishers at the Australian Olympic Trials.
“She’ll just feed off that,” McKeever said after Stitts’s swim. “I really, really hope she makes it. Stace means so much to me. I remember sitting in her living room when I was recruiting her, and her saying, ‘I want to set a world record and win an Olympic gold medal.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I so want to help her do that.’ My dream is that she, Haley, and Natalie will make the team, and we’ll all be there together, and everyone will bury the hatchet.”
For all that was on the line, the prelims still lacked an energy from the stands commensurate with the gravity of the situation. Entire careers were being decided—childhood dreams alternatively dashed and cashed in—yet the scene played out in relatively muted fashion. When swimmers were introduced at the starting blocks, there were sporadic cheers, mostly from family members and close friends, as if the whole thing were one giant junior high school graduation ceremony. Coughlin, of course, was different. “Listen to the crowd when she’s introduced,” Crossen said. “With everyone else, it’s their team and their parents cheering. With her, people go nuts. They love her.”
To swimming loyalists, Coughlin represented the greatest chance for Olympic glory among American women—but it wasn’t just that. After all she had been through, there was both an acknowledgment of her struggle and a sense among the fans in Long Beach that they could collectively will her to overcome her previous disappointments in major meets. With the Olympics only 5 weeks ago, Coughlin was theirs now, and they intended to send her off to Athens with as much support as possible.
McKeever’s friend Susan Teeter, the Princeton coach, passed her on the pool deck and said, “Nice swim this morning.” McKeever thanked her. McKeever, of course, hadn’t set foot in the water. Coughlin’s swims were her swims.
A cell phone rang, and McKeever pulled it out of her pocket and answered it. “Hey,” she said. “Where are you? I’ll come up there when it’s all over. I love you.” She hung up and swallowed hard. “Why does talking to your mom always make you feel like crying?” she asked.
The following evening, as the brilliant Southern California sun began to droop toward the Pacific Ocean, casting a glimmering reflection off the newly gentrified downtown shops and restaurants, the temporary stadium outside the Long Beach Convention Center was abuzz with anticipation. Phelps had been the story of Trials thus far, but this was to be Coughlin’s coronation as America’s Golden Girl in waiting. NBC would be broadcasting live, and 10,000 fans packed the bleachers to see whether she’d deliver.
In the previous night’s 100 back semis, Coughlin had won her heat in a relatively leisurely 1:00.91, 0.2 slower than her effort in the morning. She remained the fastest qualifier, ahead of Cope (1:01.67), the only other swimmer to break 1:02 in either session. Now, as the prohibitive favorite, Coughlin planned to go out and seize the moment. As usual, she would use her underwater prowess to vault to a lead and build it into the turn, and she was, simultaneously, exceptionally confident and horribly nervous as she walked to the starting blocks.
Once in the water, Coughlin relaxed slightly. This was still, at its core, a race against seven other swimmers, and all she had to do was beat at least six of them. She could handle that. The gun sounded, and Coughlin disappeared under the surface and stayed down as the other competitors, one by one, began to pop up and extend their arms backward. Finally, comfortably before the 15-meter line, Coughlin emerged, well ahead of the competition. The crowd roared. She shot through the water like a buoy being pulled by a speedboat, utterly in command of the opening lap. Fans screamed her name, urging her to keep charging. Her turn was perfect, and as she came up from her second underwater session, less than 40 meters stood between her and an official berth on the Olympic team.
Then, for a few seconds, Coughlin began to drift toward the lane line, triggering a haunting flashback to those in the crowd who had witnessed her effort at the 2001 World Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. In that race, Coughlin had enjoyed a similarly dominant second-lap lead, when she veered to the lane line and straddled it for much of the race’s final meters. She had managed to win nonetheless, but her navigational difficulties may have cost her a world record—her time of 1:00.37 was .21 off the standard then owned by China’s Cihong He, a mark that would stand for nearly 8 years before Coughlin finally smashed it in the summer of 2002.
None of the other swimmers in Long Beach seemed to be gaining on Coughlin; only the lane line, it seemed, could keep her off the team. But Coughlin righted herself and backed into the wall for a winning time of 59.85 seconds, the third-fastest effort in history, surpassed only by a pair of her previous performances. Coughlin raised her left arm triumphantly and flashed an All-American smile that resonated all the way to Athens.
It seemed like an entire commercial break passed before the next swimmer finished, and when Coughlin saw who’d scored the other berth on the team, her grin grew even larger. Cope, with a time of 1:01.24, had beaten Hayley McGregory by 0.7 to fulfill her longtime Olympic dream—only Cope was one of the last people in the stadium to realize it.
Cope had smiled broadly during prerace introductions, but inside she was as scared as she’d ever been. In the 2000 Trials, she’d been in the perfect position to make the team in this event but had died in the final stages. This time, the race proceeded fantastically for Cope until the homestretch, when the sprinter’s legs began to get heavy once again. She feared she’d be caught by McGregory, whom she could see approaching in the next lane. During the last 25 yards, Cope thought to herself, over and over, Oh my God. This can’t happen again. This isn’t happening. I’ve worked too hard. No, no, no, no, no, no!
When she touched the wall, Cope, fearing the worst, kept her head down and resisted looking at the scoreboard to see where she’d finished. By the time Cope finally pulled off her goggles and glanced upward, she already knew something good had happened. Coughlin, having moved into Cope’s lane, was practically drowning her old friend with excitement. For all the tension that had plagued their relationship over the past 9 months, since Cope’s abrupt decision to leave Cal and McKeever, this moment was so special that it suddenly made everyone whole.
Standing up and clutching a railing on the opposite end of the pool, McKeever was overcome by emotion. She was teary eyed as Cope, after gathering her gear, came walking by a couple of minutes later. McKeever called her over, and the two shared a sincere hug.
“I couldn’t have done this without you,” Cope said.
“Haley,” McKeever replied, “that’s all I ever wanted to hear.”
Then McKeever and Coughlin had a similarly sweet embrace, and the celebration began in earnest. Following her warm-down session, Coughlin returned to the pool deck for the awards ceremony, first taking a victory lap that once again brought the fans to their feet. As a horrific techno-polka tune blared over the loudspeaker, Coughlin waved and soaked up the cheers. She looked overjoyed and unburdened, as if she had just shed a backpack full of bowling balls she’d been carrying the past 5½ years.
Familiar faces were spread throughout the stadium—her parents, Jim and Zennie; her younger sister, Megan; her grandparents and Aunt Yvonne, Zennie’s sister, along with numerous other relatives; two groups of clamorous college teammates; several friends from high school; her boyfriend, Ethan Hall; her agent, Janey Miller; and, standing proudly on the pool deck, the choked-up McKeever—but even from those outside her inner circle, Coughlin felt the love. Most everyone in the swimming community, it seemed, was mindful of Coughlin’s bumpy journey, and the hearty cheers washed over her like a warm shower.
It was the best day of her life, with the promise of more to come.
For every swimmer who, like Coughlin and Cope, realized a childhood goal, there were scores of others at Trials who were coming to terms with the failure to achieve theirs. The end came with such haunting suddenness that the often muted crowd reaction didn’t do justice to the magnitude of the moment. “You should see the warm-down pool,” said Amanda Hall, a former UCLA swimmer who now worked for the school’s athletic department. “It’s half chlorine, half tears.”
“This meet, if you look under the grandstand, it’s about crying,” said Milt Nelms. “There’s so much emotion being released, you can almost feel it.”
A particularly painful scene played out on the fifth morning of competition, when Georgia swimmer Andrea Georoff froze on the blocks as the gun sounded for the sixth heat of the 100 free. A legitimate threat to sneak into the semifinals as one of the top 16 finishers—and thus, with six 100 free swimmers likely to make the team (because of relays), someone who had at least an outside chance of going to Athens—Georoff stood motionless as seven other swimmers dove into the water. By the time she finally dove in, it was already hopeless. The scoreboard measured each swimmer’s reaction time off the blocks, and Georoff’s was at least 2 seconds slower than everyone else’s. She ended up with a time of 59.18, placing her 49th out of 50 finishers.
Watching that race as she waited to swim in the seventh and final heat, Coughlin was furious. All meet long, she and others had felt, the starts had been inconsistent and tricky. Swimmers would stand on the blocks for uncomfortably long periods, and then the gun would sound abruptly, catching swimmers off guard. Lindsay Benko, a 2000 Olympian expected to make the team again, had nearly been undone in the 100 free because of such a circumstance. No biggie, Coughlin thought. It’s only the OLYMPIC TRIALS! Whereas international meets invariably featured fast starts, with a minimal amount of waiting on the blocks, starters at US meets tended to be more deliberate. This, however, was bad even by US standards. After winning her preliminary heat in 55.23 seconds to lead all qualifiers, Coughlin went to US women’s coach Mark Schubert and complained about the starts, urging him to lobby USA Swimming officials to fix the problem before that night’s session—not that it would do Georoff any good.
One of Georoff’s Georgia teammates, Sam Arsenault, had also competed in Coughlin’s heat, finishing in a somewhat disappointing time of 57.09 to place 26th overall. Arsenault and Coughlin were good friends from their youth swimming days and had hoped to room together for the 2000 Olympics until Coughlin’s injury derailed the plan. “We were at the Pan Pacs (Pan Pacific Games) in Sydney in 1999, and we were sitting on this bridge overlooking the pool,” Arsenault recalled while standing in a hotel lobby in Long Beach. “We held hands and made a pact that we’d be right back there, in that spot, and would room together for the Olympics. Then she hurt her shoulder, and in 2002, I hurt mine and had surgery. We were talking about all of this at the Santa Clara meet 2 months ago, and it was like, ‘Don’t even go there.’ We got really emotional. Last time, I went and she didn’t; this time she’s going and now I have to go out and make it happen again. That’s pressure.”
But Arsenault, it turned out, was facing an even more daunting form of pressure: Doctors had recently discovered a tumor in her body, and she was delaying treatment until after her run at the Olympics.
On a much less vital level, the pressure was also getting to most of Coughlin’s former Cal teammates. After swimming her preliminary heat in the 100 breast on the meet’s second day, shaken sophomore-to-be Annie Babicz told McKeever, “I couldn’t feel my hands.” Realistically, none of McKeever’s other swimmers was a serious threat to make the team, but their performances, for the most part, had been underwhelming. That all changed on the meet’s third day, when Lauren Medina uncorked what might have been the most unlikely preliminary swim of Trials.
Months earlier, after having been approached by the director of Mexico’s Olympic team, Medina had mulled the possibility of swimming for that country in the Games. “You should go to Trials for us,” the coach had told Medina, noting that her ancestry qualified her for that nation’s Olympic team. “I think you’re that good.”
“No, I’m not,” Medina had answered sheepishly. But as the weeks passed, Medina began to consider the prospect more seriously. Though she had never actually been to Mexico and was not close to being fluent in Spanish, she was enticed by the opportunity to swim in Athens and intended to accept the offer. Everyone, including McKeever, was all for it—everyone, that is, except Medina’s proud mother, Sandra.
“No way,” Sandra Medina told her daughter. “If you swim for Mexico, that’s saying that you’re not good enough to swim for the United States. If you do it, I’m not going to support you.”
The problem was that Medina, based on her qualifying times, wasn’t close to good enough to represent the United States as one of the top six finishers at Trials. But bizarre as her methodology may have been, Sandra Medina helped bring out something in her daughter, as did Whitney Hite, who told her just before her prelim swim, “You’ve worked your ass off for this. You get in that water and show ’em you’re the toughest one here.” Then Medina, to the astonishment of virtually everyone in Long Beach, powered to a preliminary time of 2:01.84—1.21 seconds faster than her previous lifetime best. When the dust settled, Medina, the 42nd-seeded swimmer coming in, was in 7th place.
The Cal contingent was abuzz. If she could improve just one more spot, they told themselves, Lauren Medina would go to the Olympics for the United States. “If she can get to the finals,” Hite told them, “there’s no way she’s going to let two people beat her.”
The experience turned out to be too overwhelming for Medina, who spent the hours between her prelim swim and that night’s semifinals bouncing around her hotel room. “I didn’t sleep the entire day,” she said later, “which was a big mistake. I’d had too much coffee, and I went to the bathroom like 30 times. I was so nervous, and I got exhausted thinking about all that was at stake.”
Medina flamed out in her semifinal heat, finishing in last place with a sluggish swim of 2:04.50. But her success in the prelims had changed her outlook regarding her own potential. Prior to Trials, Medina had planned on taking a month off before gearing up for her senior season at Cal. She now agreed to swim at US Nationals, which would take place at Stanford in early August, just before the start of the Olympics. “If you skip Nationals, you’re crazy,” Hite implored. “You could win.”
Milt Nelms smiled as Coughlin pushed off the wall and began the second lap of her 100 free semifinal, already confident she had accomplished her objective. “She’s shutting it out down,” he said, turning to high-five me as we watched from a lower-level corporate suite while the rest of the fans in the packed stadium sweated out the rest of the race. “See how easy it looks.”
Sure enough, Coughlin cruised home in 54.30 seconds, the top time among the eight qualifiers for the finals, ahead of Georgia’s dangerous Kara Lynn Joyce (54.75) and legendary sprinter Jenny Thompson (54.94). “She’s gonna rip tomorrow night,” Nelms predicted. “We could see an American record.”
Minutes earlier, Nelms had been far more stressed-out. Gary Marshall, an Oklahoman who had swum on his Conoco/Phillips 66 team back in Nelms’s earlier life as a prominent coach, was about to compete in a loaded 200 breast final that included former Olympian (and 2000 silver medalist in the 100 breast) Ed Moses and 2001 world champion Brendan Hansen. “Back when I had him, I thought he’d end up being a world record holder,” Nelms said of Marshall, for whom he clearly still had great affection. “He went to college at Virginia and got beaten down. He needed a Teri McKeever in his life; unfortunately, there is no college coach like that on the men’s side.”
As the race proceeded, Marshall, who had since transferred to Stanford, seemed to be in prime position for a second-place finish. No one was going to beat Hansen; he finished in 2:09.04, breaking the world record previously held by Japan’s Kosuke Kitajima, following up an earlier world record effort in the 100 breast. Marshall looked solid until the final lap, when Wyoming’s Scott Usher ran him down and secured the other spot on the Olympic team. Marshall, after finishing third, pulled off his goggles, climbed out of the pool, and walked off alone, pondering what might have been.
The whole scene unnerved Nelms. To him, the sight of Marshall striking that solitary pose revealed everything that was wrong with the sport at this level. “How Gary Marshall navigated his way through a culture to get to this level and almost make the team is just incredible,” Nelms said later. “If the obstacles set up by the culture weren’t there, he’d be a world record holder. As it is, he’s a survivor. And after that race was over, and he came within one spot of making the team, neither of his coaches—his club coach and his college coach, who were right there, poolside—even spoke to him. What kind of message does that send?”
Nelms also resented the way many prominent USA Swimming officials and coaches had left Coughlin hanging during times of disappointment. “The culture has used her to pull their wagon on three occasions,” Nelms said. “In high school she was the second coming of Christ, but then she hurt her shoulder and people forgot about her. Then she came back and did all those wondrous things with Teri, and USA Swimming hitched their wagon to her again. But when she got sick in Barcelona, they dropped her like a hot potato. After it was initially announced that she was sick, they didn’t even update her condition on the Web site.
“That second time through made her grow up. From that point on, I think, her mind-set was ‘This is about me, and I’m going to do it the way that makes sense to me.’ When she made her schedule of events, there was a lot of whining about her not swimming the 200 back. That profoundly offended me. If we don’t have any other elite-level swimmers in the 200 back, that’s not Natalie’s problem. It’s USA Swimming that needs to get it together. We win a medal for every 11 or 12 million people; Australia figures out how to win one for every million and a half. The bottom line is that Natalie will do what Natalie chooses to do, and that’s as it should be.”
Of course, for Coughlin’s strategy to pay off, she had to at least qualify in the 100 free, a race in which hundredths of a second could mean the difference between affirmation and abject disappointment. The top six finishers would likely make the team, in order to provide relay depth, but only the first two would be allowed to swim it individually in Athens. And while the United States might have been sorely lacking when it came to 200 backstrokers, the 100 free final was loaded. The field included Jenny Thompson, who’d won more Olympic medals than any US swimmer; NCAA champion Kara Lynn Joyce and her dangerous University of Georgia teammate Amanda Weir; former Georgia standout Maritza Correia, Hite’s old friend from Georgia, who was bidding to become the first black woman (she was of Puerto Rican descent) to make a US Olympic swimming team; Lindsay Benko, the American record holder in the 200 free; former Stanford swimmer and Olympian Gabrielle Rose, who now trained at Cal with assistant men’s coach Mike Bottom; and Colleen Lanne, one of Salo’s sprinting standouts at Irvine Novaquatics.
Third at the turn behind Joyce and Weir, Coughlin made a charge and appeared to be in position to pull out a tight victory. She had intentionally stayed underwater longer off the turn to avoid running into the pronounced wake caused by the other swimmers. Because the temporary pool was essentially built on stilts and was relatively shallow, the wake was more of a factor than in normal meets, and Coughlin, given her reliance on technique, didn’t want to take any chances.
In the final strokes, Coughlin pulled ahead, but then she made a potentially ruinous error, slightly misjudging the finish. She reached out her arm, expecting to touch the wall, and instead drifted an extra length before finally hitting it. When she looked up at the scoreboard, she had finished a close second to Joyce, 54.42 seconds to 54.38. The time was slower than her semifinal effort of 54.30 (she’d gone 55.23 in the prelims), and she hated finishing behind anyone. But within a few seconds Coughlin forgot all of that and shifted into celebration mode: She had done what she had set out to do at Trials, period, and now had a month to refocus and make a charge at Inge DeBruijn and the two Aussies.
Coughlin, dancing around in her black sweats like a prizefighter, was all smiles as she, Joyce, and the other top-six finishers (Weir, Correia, Thompson, and Lanne) waited to ascend to the medal stand. The six swimmers then took a spirited victory lap around the pool to the strains of Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration.” Coughlin accepted floral bouquets from fans and high-fived others, then threw a T-shirt and swim cap into the stands.
At her postrace press conference, Coughlin was asked how disappointed she was not to have finished first. She looked incredulous. “I really don’t understand the question,” she said. “The objective of this meet is to make the team in your events, and I made the team in two of my favorite events. That’s been my goal. Now the goal shifts to what I do in Athens.”
Later, as she stood outside a temporary trailer, waiting to supply her postrace urine sample, Coughlin remained upbeat. For one thing, she felt her performance was easily explainable—a lack of speed off the start, the misjudged finish, the extra time underwater at the turn, some other technical breakdowns, and a feeling that she was too relaxed on the starting blocks. “I was almost too loose,” she had told McKeever immediately after the race. “It was like I wasn’t anxious enough.”
Another problem was that, in Coughlin’s words, she was “focusing on the wrong things.” For instance, in the final moments on the starting blocks, she was still fiddling with the funky, high-tech swim cap Speedo had provided—the one that had provoked so many giggles at the Santa Clara meet weeks earlier. Coughlin was having so much trouble that Joyce, in the next lane, offered to help her position it correctly just before the gun was about to go off. Coughlin declined the assistance but was so touched by the gesture that she and Joyce forged an instant friendship.
The concept behind the cap was that it reduced underwater drag by eliminating the wrinkle that typically formed at the top of traditional caps. But McKeever noticed that the flotation in the new cap also caused a slight change in Coughlin’s head position during the race, and the coach’s attitude was, At this late hour, why mess with success?
“I think we need to lose that cap,” McKeever said after the race. “She’s sitting there, fiddling around with it, right before the start of the race, instead of getting focused. I’m gonna tell her, ‘You don’t need that. You’re faster than everyone anyway. Just swim.’ ”
As for the second-place finish, McKeever said, “I don’t think because we got second in the Olympic Trials, we need to be in panic mode. It’s like she’s doing what she needs to do but nothing more. She’s operating emotionally at about 80 percent. She’s here, but she’s not really here all the way. It’s something she needs to figure out as she goes along. It’s what’s going to keep her in swimming, ultimately.”
Standing outside the trailer, Coughlin was as loose and carefree as I’d ever seen her. “Honestly, I really don’t care that I didn’t win that race,” she said. “As soon as I made the team, I just wanted the meet to be over with. I mean, I still have to swim the 50, but I really don’t think I have a chance to make it in that event.”
McKeever, who had just walked over, heard the last part and said, “Let’s not concede before we even race.” But either Coughlin was a realist or she was creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, because on the meet’s final night, Coughlin, having qualified for the final in the 50, finished sixth in 25.31, well behind winner Thompson (25.02) and second-place finisher Joyce (25.11). Cope, with a 25.22, finished fourth, while incoming Cal recruit Emily Silver was 15th in 26.22.
At race’s end, Coughlin barely had a shred of disappointment. She had accomplished everything she’d set out to do, which made her one of the few people in Long Beach who could say that. Her friends Keiko Price and Sam Arsenault and so many others had come up well short of realizing their goals—a feeling Coughlin remembered all too well from her previous Trials experience. She was also buoyed by the certainty that she was by no means a finished product. The adjustments she’d been making in the water, along with the principles of Pilates she’d incorporated, had several more weeks to take hold.
“A lot of the greatest athletes, like Michael Jordan or Reggie Jackson, have that extra level they can go to when they absolutely have to,” Nelms reasoned. “It’s always there, but it drains them incredibly to access it, so they save it for the most important moments. So the way I look at that 100 free is that Natalie is like a cat. Cats only use as much energy as they need. She was very aware that there’s a pretty big meet in 4 weeks, and I think she’s going to need every ounce of energy for that.
“As far as the technique, I think it’s a matter of when her nervous system kicks in. I told Teri, ‘It’s like a foreign language. She’s now fluent in it, but she’s not used to speaking it. Once she gets that, watch out.’ ”
In the meantime, there was still one more golden moment for Coughlin to appreciate. At meet’s end, the two US Olympic coaches, Eddie Reese for the men and Mark Schubert for the women, stood on the pool deck and introduced their assistants to the crowd. This was the moment for which McKeever had been waiting—a chance to secure her trip to Athens and to make history. Hopefully, McKeever’s selection could open the floodgates for female coaches in the future.
Certainly, Schubert and McKeever had a good personal relationship. Moreover, it behooved Schubert to keep his most important swimmer happy, and he was particularly inclined to take care of Coughlin right now. By restricting her schedule to a pair of individual events, Coughlin had ensured that she’d be fresh and available for all three relays. “I truly think she wants the team to be successful, and you’ve got to have a lot of respect for that,” Schubert would say later. “It would be real easy for her to be selfish, because she is so incredibly versatile. But she’s made relays a real priority, and I’m delighted about that. I think the smart people understand why she’s chosen to do it this way. Natalie and Teri have made their decisions looking at the whole picture, including the relays. And I think it’s really important that they alone make those kinds of decisions, because they’re the ones who’ll be living it day to day.”
Given all of these considerations, it would have been an absolute shock had Schubert not selected McKeever. But when he made the actual announcement, it was nonetheless an emotional one. McKeever had been tipped off a couple of days earlier by Schubert in a private conversation on the pool deck—she had revealed the news only to Coughlin and to her mother. On the final day of the meet, her selection became official in an unspectacular and awkward manner: While standing near the warm-down pool with virtually everyone else in the elite-swimming universe, McKeever was approached by a young USA Swimming employee and handed a red Team USA T-shirt.
Instantly, McKeever felt sheepish. She had no idea which other coaches had been selected for the men’s and women’s staffs, and she certainly didn’t want to express any emotion in front of a soon-to-be disappointed colleague. As she received her shirt, Jack Bauerle, the esteemed Georgia coach, was walking by; he, it turned out, would not be part of either Schubert’s or Reese’s staff.
The coaches who had received the shirts were instructed to place them over their clothing, and soon afterward they lined up on the deck and, one by one, were introduced to the cheering crowd. As McKeever stood there, soaking up the adulation with her fellow assistants—including Dave Salo on the men’s side, and Stanford coach Richard Quick and Arizona coach Frank Bush on the women’s side—she glanced up at her mother and choked up. Mostly, however, McKeever didn’t allow herself to get too swept up by the moment. This is just the first step, she told herself. We still have 6 weeks of work ahead of us.
Still, as she lay in bed that night, reflecting on the final night of Trials, McKeever had to smile. Coughlin, finally, was an Olympian. So, too, was Cope. Stitts had narrowly missed, fading to fourth in the 100 breast final and eighth in the 200. Medina had provided an unexpected thrill, and Emily Silver, if all went well, would be a serious threat to make the 2008 team.
McKeever, meanwhile, had made history, and she had earned it. And when she stood there on that deck, wearing that T-shirt—The only red shirt I’ll ever keep, the coach thought, laughing—no one in that stadium was cheering louder than Coughlin.