The solitary swimmer emerged from the locker room, dashed across the empty pool deck, and, 15 yards later, launched herself into the chilly water to begin her morning workout. Natalie Coughlin had established this run-and-dive ritual early in her Cal career. Now, a little more than a month after returning home from Athens, she had no reason to mess with success.
This was to be one of her final practices before leaving for Indianapolis, where she’d compete in the FINA World Short Course Championships, a meet she and many of her fellow US Olympians regarded more as a post-Athens appreciation tour than as a compelling competition. Everyone was tired and drained, Coughlin more so than most. Her training had been sporadic as she traveled cities around the US, attempting to make the most of her Olympic notoriety. But because of her short-course prowess, she figured she could fake her way through the meet and do well enough to please the US audience before embarking upon a well-deserved break for the remainder of 2004.
It was a sound plan, given the intensity with which she’d trained over the past 4 years. Except now, as she embarked upon her first practice lap, something was strange. Her left foot began to tingle, and the sensation persisted for several minutes. As she launched off the wall during flipturns, she noticed a throbbing pain. Coughlin stopped, got out of the pool, and, to her amazement, was unable to put any weight on the foot. She had suffered a stress fracture—not exactly the kind of break she had in mind.
Her first reaction was one of shock. It quickly was replaced by mind-numbing relief. Oh my God, she thought to herself. What if I’d done this before the Olympics?
Bizarre as it might have sounded to those unfamiliar with her story, Coughlin, for once, had just experienced a case of good injury luck. “In a way it was perfect timing,” she said. “During my time off, I’d planned to run and do Pilates, but with the broken foot, that wasn’t an option. The only workouts I could’ve done would have been in the pool—and I was definitely staying away from the pool. So I basically decided to be lazy until January.”
Of course, Coughlin’s idea of lazy wasn’t quite as sedentary as that of the average couch potato. Despite her walking boot and cane, Coughlin still managed to go to events like the Women’s Sports Foundation’s awards banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, the bulky footwear serving as an awkward accessory to her white satin Ralph Lauren gown. At home in Emeryville, Coughlin continued to go up and down the four flights of stairs that led from the ground to the top level of her condo, a process intensified by her acquisition of a Border Terrier puppy, which she named She-Ra, a few days after she broke her foot. As Coughlin recalls, “Hobbling down the stairs of my condo eight times a day when she was potty training was quite an adventure.”
She jetted off to New York and other cities on a fairly regular basis, making appearances for Speedo and other sponsors, and enjoyed sleeping late and eating well. She spent time with her boyfriend, Ethan Hall, who had taken a job coaching a pair of youth swim teams, and socialized with family and friends.
Just after New Year’s 2005, Coughlin got back in the pool, slowly working her way into shape, though her training goal was limited: She wanted to swim well enough at US Nationals in March to qualify for the FINA World Championships, which would be held in Montreal in July. Coughlin did what she considered the minimal preparation to accomplish that objective. She got busier away from the pool as well, reenrolling at Cal for the spring semester and completing her bachelor’s degree in psychology. Though Coughlin would skip her graduation ceremony to swim in a meet at Stanford that afternoon, she later hosted family and friends for a party at her parents’ house and reveled in the achievement, having finished up a successful stretch at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities.
As with her academic success, Coughlin needed some time to pass before she could truly appreciate all that she’d accomplished in the pool. If Teri McKeever’s constant directive, Concentrate not just on the outcome but the journey, was still ringing in Coughlin’s ears, she nonetheless required ample distance from the experience before a true appreciation for that journey could be attained.
McKeever, armed with the benefit of far more experience, had a much more immediate sense of what Athens had meant to her, both personally and professionally. She arrived back in Berkeley acting and speaking like a woman who had been instantly transformed—and liberated—by her first taste of Olympic glory.
“It’s a life-changing experience,” she told me in early September as we nibbled on salads at Julie’s, the Bancroft Avenue café at which Mike Walker had talked over her to Jim Coughlin on Natalie’s recruiting visit. “I’m so grateful that I was able to be part of it, and now I hope that the people around me can benefit. By watching Natalie stay true to what she wanted to do and handle everything so gracefully along the way, I learned that I, too, need to stay true to my ambitions. I don’t have to build a program in someone else’s image, and I don’t have to be invincible. I just need to create a situation that I can manage.
“What I want to do now is to find kids who are open to change and open to the possibility of being a world-class athlete, without necessarily subscribing to a preconceived notion of how to get there.”
Though McKeever understood that her team, without Coughlin, faced a major adjustment in 2004–05, she was also convinced that their former teammate’s Olympic triumph would have residual benefits on the Bears. “This is an exciting time for Cal women’s swimming,” the coach said. “I’m glad everyone will get to see Natalie around the pool every day, still working hard and carrying herself like a champion, because it will serve as a constant reminder of what’s out there. The first meeting we had after I got back, I told the team, ‘There’s a piece of all of you in Natalie.’ And there really is—they were part of her journey, of pushing her and supporting her every single day. I hope they realize that.”
Perhaps the most noticeable change in McKeever was how eager she was to talk about things other than the team and its fortunes. Harkening back to the speech US women’s Olympic coach Mark Schubert made at the final team meeting, McKeever found inspiration in his message that extended beyond the competitive realm. Schubert, McKeever recalled, told the swimmers and staff in Athens, “You’ve all been Olympians. That’s an awesome thing. Whether you go home with a medal or not, you got here because you dared to risk everything. You were willing to put everything on the line to be the best, and not everyone can say that.”
Said McKeever, “I know in my life I’ve been afraid to risk things. Certainly in my personal life I have, and even professionally; I go for things I think I can get. Now, I feel like, Wow, you just accomplished something great. If I apply myself and really go for something, I can do anything. I mean, I’m proud of that house I bought this summer. If you had told me I was going to buy a house in the hills with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, I’d have said, ‘No way.’You hate to look at finding a relationship as an accomplishment, but that’s one of my goals as well. And it should be. On that flight home from Athens, I told myself that first and foremost, I’m going to get a life.”
A few weeks later, as Cal’s most successful football season in 46 years was beginning to trigger a wave of sustained euphoria in Strawberry Canyon, McKeever showed up for a game at Memorial Stadium and began making conversation with a man whose season tickets were in the same row as hers. They had met the previous October while watching another game in which Nort Thorton, the Bears’ venerable men’s swim coach, was being honored on the field at halftime. The man had turned to McKeever and asked, “Are you going to be here for 30 years?”
“Hell no,” she responded. She was surprised that anyone in the stands knew who she was and even more stunned that this fellow fan came off as such a nice guy. They talked throughout the rest of the game, and McKeever’s understanding of football seemed to pique his interest further. He sent her an e-mail a few weeks later, but McKeever, who was busy and stressed, read it without responding and quickly forgot about it.
Now, even as they chatted once again, it didn’t dawn on McKeever that this was the same person who’d sent her the e-mail 10 months earlier. Over the next several games, as Cal made a run at its first Rose Bowl since 1959—the 10–1 Bears were kept out after a controversial voting scandal gave the nod to Texas, whose coach, Mack Brown, had lobbied fellow coaches and writers to move his team ahead in the polls—the two forged a connection. In January the man, a San Francisco city employee, sent McKeever a Christmas card. In it, he asked whether she’d consider going to dinner and a play. She called and said yes, and a month later—hey, she was as busy as ever—they had their first date.
The man had a natural way of putting McKeever at ease, and their relationship blossomed over the next several months. By spring she was calling him her boyfriend, and her swimmers noticed that she seemed to be smiling a lot more frequently than she had in the past. Inside, McKeever could scarcely believe the turn her life had taken: All of her dreams were coming true.
Her swimmers, both in and out of the pool, still consumed much of her time and energy. As McKeever and her assistant, Whitney Hite, had expected, the season was an adjustment for the Bears. No longer assured of Coughlin’s three individual victories (and dominant relay leg) in each dual meet, Cal struggled against many of the nation’s elite teams. The Bears did make a major statement at the Georgia Fall Invitational in early December, edging the host Bulldogs, the nation’s top-ranked team and eventual national champion, in the 800 freestyle relay, the event in which the Bears had scored their surprise victory at the 2004 NCAAs. Most outsiders assumed Georgia, with Olympians Amanda Weir and Kara Lynn Joyce on the relay, would overtake the Bears now that Coughlin wasn’t there to lead off, and the Bulldogs were certainly motivated. But star freshman Emily Silver stepped in to swim the second leg—joining returnees Ashley Chandler, Erin Reilly, and Lauren Medina—and Cal won by 0.63.
Coughlin joined the team on its January training trip to Hawaii’s Big Island, where the Bears prepared for the meet of their season. Cal lost its first Pac-10 dual meet resoundingly, falling 144–99 to a talented Arizona team, then defeated Arizona State, USC, and UCLA in succession. The anticipated rematch with Stanford at Spieker Pool proved to be far less exciting than the previous year’s thriller. The Bears had their requisite diving disadvantage—though new coach Ron Kontura had helped infuse Thornton’s men’s program with talent, he failed to have a similar impact on McKeever’s squad—but that was no excuse this time. Stanford’s 172–128 victory, in what would turn out to be Richard Quick’s final season, was thorough and impressive.
An air of disappointment hung over Spieker Pool through much of February. For one thing, Reilly struggled mightily to recapture the brilliance of her freshman season—not an unusual phenomenon for an athlete in any sport, but one that frustrated her coaches to no end. The other major bummer was the collapse of the senior class. While Medina remained an elite-level performer in individual races and relays, she was the only senior to qualify for the NCAA Championships, as Marcelle Miller, cocaptains Emma Palsson and Amy Ng, Lisa Morelli, and Erin Calder all failed to make their cuts. As the NCAAs approached, McKeever drastically lowered her expectations from the previous year. “I just want to finish in the top 10,” she said shortly before departing for West Lafayette, Indiana, in March.
There were encouraging signs, however. Of Cal’s 12 NCAA qualifiers, seven were newcomers to the program—five freshmen and two sophomore transfers. In addition, sophomore Annie Babicz had stepped up considerably, rebounding from a so-so freshman season to become a force in breaststroke and butterfly events. Ranked 11th going into the NCAAs, the Bears delighted their coaches with an eighth-place finish that included a slew of inspiring swims, including Emily Silver’s fourth-place finish in the 100 free and Medina’s fifth-place effort in the 200 free.
That ended the season on a positive note, with the promise of bigger things to come. McKeever’s monster recruiting class for 2005–06 included breaststroker Jessica Hardy, a Dave Salo-coached standout who had narrowly missed qualifying for the 2004 Olympics, and Lauren Rogers, a backstroker and sprint freestyler whose club coach was far less inclined to recommend Cal or McKeever. Rogers, oddly enough, was a star swimmer for the Terrapins of Concord. She was, in fact, Ray Mitchell’s most accomplished athlete since a kid named Natalie Coughlin.
Ray Mitchell had once told McKeever, in the wake of Coughlin’s decision not to swim for him the summer after her freshman year, that he would never again send one of his swimmers to Cal. How had she managed to persuade Rogers to come? “You know, I’m not really sure,” she said. “But I’m definitely not going to question it, because I’m very happy to have her.”
Coughlin whipped through the water, touched the wall, and looked up at the scoreboard, nervously checking the results. A couple of seconds later, she screamed joyously and emphatically pumped her fist—an odd reaction given that she owned five Olympic medals, and this 100 freestyle victory, in 54.76, had merely qualified her for the 2005 Worlds in Montreal.
Except, as only a few people at the pool in Indianapolis last April understood, Coughlin wasn’t celebrating her own success at all. Rather, she had reacted to Emily Silver’s surprising sixth-place finish, meaning the Cal freshman would be joining Coughlin in Canada as part of the 400 freestyle relay.
McKeever had done it again—Silver, for all her raw talent, had seemed worlds away from this type of achievement a few months earlier. The coach knew the swimmer had a chance to make this type of breakthrough at some point, but to have it happen this quickly, a couple of weeks after the close of her freshman season, was truly gratifying. Before Silver realized what she had done, Coughlin was in her lane, offering a hug and congratulations.
“A year ago there was no way Emily would have been able to make a team like this,” Coughlin said later. “I really like her, and we have a great relationship in the pool. I’m willing to give opinions about all kinds of things concerning technique and strategy, and some people like them, and some people don’t. Emily asks me what my thoughts are and I give them to her, and she’s someone who’s very receptive. I was just so happy for her. It’s funny, because when I reacted that way, people thought I was cheering for myself. I mean, that was a good time under the circumstances, but it wasn’t that good.”
If the 2004–05 college season had been a transitional one for McKeever’s Bears, the 5 months that followed served both to validate the coach’s many success stories of the past few years and to illustrate the exceptional promise that the future held. The stars of Cal’s incoming freshman class, Hardy and Rogers, made an enormous splash at the World Championship Trials in Indianapolis, with Hardy qualifying for Worlds by finishing second to former Stanford star Tara Kirk in the 100 breast and Rogers just missing with a third-place effort, .06 behind second-place finisher Jeri Moss. Rogers joined Lauren Medina and Ashley Chandler on the US squad at the World University Games in Izmir, Turkey, a meet in which sophomore transfer Sherry Tsai competed for Hong Kong.
Considering her relative lack of preparation for the Indy meet, Coughlin was pleased with her own performance, which included a victory in the 100 back—albeit in the relatively unimpressive time of 1:01.08—and a third-place effort in the 100 butterfly, an event she later said she had swum only because of a miscommunication with McKeever. “Because of the time off after the foot injury, she wasn’t in the greatest shape,” conceded McKeever, who was picked to serve on coach Jack Bauerle’s staff for Worlds.
As the meet approached, and she and her teammates prepared to head to Baltimore for a weeklong training camp before flying to Montreal, Coughlin noticed something else. Whoa, she thought. Suddenly, I’m old. With Jenny Thompson retired, this time seemingly for good, and stalwarts like Amanda Beard, Lindsay Benko, and a very pregnant Haley Cope nowhere to be found, Coughlin was not only an integral part of the US team but also one of its obvious leaders. “Now Natalie’s articulating things to people like Emily Silver and Mary DeScenza, and that’s a big step for her,” McKeever said in July. “That’s what she can bring to the national team, the same leadership that Jenny Thompson brought for so long. And that’s important, because it’s the type of thing that can keep someone like her in the sport. She’ll need to be emotionally and mentally challenged.”
It also stands to reason that Coughlin’s competitive fires will need to be stoked, a process that might have begun with her mildly disappointing effort at Worlds. Her medal take—a gold, two silvers, two bronzes—was impressive, but she stunningly slipped to a third-place finish in the 100 back, with Zimbabwe’s Kirsty Coventry (1:00.24) and Germany’s Antje Buschulte (1:00.84) overtaking the fading Coughlin (1:00.88) down the stretch. She and France’s Malia Metella (54.74) tied for second in the 100 free behind Australia’s Jodie Henry (54.18). Coughlin won a gold as part of the 800 free relay, a silver with the 400 medley relay, and a bronze as part of the 400 free relay; Silver, who swam in the preliminaries of the latter race, also collected a bronze.
Meanwhile, the 18-year-old Hardy stunned everyone by setting a world record in the 100 breast in the semifinals; her time of 1:06.20 bettered the 1:06.37 standard set by Australia’s Leisel Jones. In the next night’s finals Jones (1:06.25) defeated Hardy (1:06.62), who left Montreal with three silver medals and a scary amount of potential.
A few days later, Coughlin and Hardy competed for the United States against Australia in the “Duel in the Pool” exhibition in Irvine, California, while various current and former Bears prepared for the upcoming US National Championships in the same Southern California pool. There, concluding a monumental summer for McKeever’s swimmers, the Bears won a pair of relays—Emily Silver, Reilly, Chandler, and Medina in the 800 free, and Medina, Reilly, Silver, and sophomore transfer Lauren Andrews in the 400 free—and took second in the 400 medley relay, with Babicz and Reilly joining the Silver sisters. With Coughlin sitting out the meet, Helen Silver stormed to a surprise title in the 100 back. It was an enormous step for her, who would be named a cocaptain of the 2005–06 team, along with Chandler. She considered the 200 back, in which she finished third, her best event, making her effort in the 100 back all the more impressive. Rather than shrinking in the face of her little sister’s ascent, Helen clearly had been energized by Emily’s successes.
Coughlin, meanwhile, was storing up her energy for the challenges ahead—a journey that she hopes will end in Beijing in 2008, where she aims to achieve even greater glories than she did in Athens. “I’m in a really good place right now,” she said in July 2005. “I’m having fun and not worrying about the pressure so much. My main focus is on 2008, and I’m trying really hard not to get too serious too soon.”
While still set on swimming the 100 back and 100 free, Coughlin has designs on branching out, especially in the 200 free. Because that event inevitably seems to overlap with the 100 back in major competitions, Coughlin has precious few chances to swim it outside of the 800 free relay. She is hopeful that USA Swimming might petition FINA and Olympic organizers to separate the 200 free and 100 back, or at least to reverse the order of the 200 free semis and 100 back final at the next Olympics.
“I really, really, really want to do the 200 free,” Coughlin said. “I honestly feel it’s my second-best event, behind the 100 back. It just never works out with the format they use.”
In the fall, Coughlin began training much more intensely than she had at any point since before the 2004 Olympic Trials, sending a clear signal that she has no plans to coast on her Golden Girl glory. “I don’t see her ever just sitting back and living off the past,” says Emma Palsson, Coughlin’s close friend and former Cal teammate. “She is so competitive, deep down inside, although she hides it very, very well. I think she has a whole lot more she wants to accomplish.”
To her credit, Coughlin has a clear understanding of how to pace herself, mindful that she will be enjoying more downtime than ever before. “I don’t have to worry about school,” she says. “I don’t really have the time constraints that I did before the last Olympics, and since I’ve already gotten that gold, I don’t have that hanging over my head.” The result is that Coughlin is more open to experimentation than ever before as she and McKeever continue to incorporate concepts that many of their peers scorn.
“A lot of what Teri has tried to teach us is to always be willing to switch it up, that there is no right way to train and no wrong way to train,” Coughlin says. “The key is never to be closed-minded. Swimming is such a young sport, and there is so much out there that hasn’t been looked at or proven. So we’re going to continue to be open-minded.”
McKeever was even more emphatic: “The challenge now, for Natalie, is to take these nontraditional concepts that we’ve incorporated and push them even further. I’ll still be there to coach her, but in a lot of ways she has to drive the process, to see what works for her and to tap into ideas and techniques that haven’t really been tested. One of the things I most admire about her is that she is willing to venture outside her comfort zone and throw herself out there. Doing that will keep her motivated and energized, and who knows where it might lead.”
Ideally, Coughlin and McKeever hope their past and future successes might lead to change—not so much a desire that everyone would adopt their ideas but that other swimmers and coaches would at least become more open to considering them. This can only happen, of course, if Coughlin continues to share her experiences and speak out about an approach that helped her rise from the teenage swimming scrap heap to the top of her sport.
“There is so much inertia preventing change, and it’s tough to get enough momentum to alter something that entrenched,” stroke guru Milt Nelms says. “What’s needed is leverage, and when all is said and done, Natalie will have it. If she’s willing to use it, that could mark a huge step in the development of the sport.”
In October of 2005 Coughlin decided to tag along with Ethan Hall on a Saturday in which he was leading his rec team, Crow Canyon Country Club, in a dual meet against another local squad. Hall, who also coached a recently formed club team, the Crow Canyon Sharks, in San Ramon, California, hoped his rec swimmers, whose ages ranged from 4 to 17, would have a successful meet. He didn’t need to do much in the way of motivational speeches. Many of the swimmers had decorated their parents’ cars for the occasion, rolling up to the pool with slogans like “Eat My Bubbles” painted onto the sides of the vehicles.
The excitement in the kids’ faces as they began their warm-up laps resonated with Coughlin. It reminded her of the days when she had lived for youth meets, wearing her swim cap in the house for hours before it was time to leave for the pool. Watching Hall’s ebullient swimmers, Coughlin remembered how much she truly loved the sport and why she’d been willing to toil through lap after lap in the hopes of chasing what had begun as a much smaller dream. Long ago, back before that horrible senior year of high school and the nightmarish clash with her club coach, Coughlin had been one of those giddy, fresh-faced kids, and it had taken 4 enlightening years with Cal and McKeever and five Olympic medals to make her feel free once more.
As she watched the youngest swimmers at the meet, in the 6-and-under classification, stand nervously atop the starting blocks before the start of their 25-yard freestyle, Coughlin had another realization: This wasn’t a flashback to her earliest memories of competitive swimming; rather, it was something better. This was a dual meet, complete with team spirit chants and pivotal relays and down-to-the-wire drama, and the kids absolutely loved it. It was quite possible none of them would ever grow up to be Olympians, but that wasn’t the point. They were happy and fit and learning precious lessons about working together and healthy competition, and almost all of them were smiling in the process.
The starting gun sounded, and the tiny swimmers dove into the water and began thrashing toward the opposite wall. Parents and teammates and coaches yelled encouragement, and the lanky Hall practically sprinted across the deck with excitement. At that wonderful moment, with the California sun shining brilliantly and the familiar whiff of chlorine in the air, the Golden Girl had the broadest grin of all.