leg for the Aussies, memorably performing a mocking air-guitar concert on the deck.
âI doff my swimming cap to the great Ian Thorpe,â Gary said later. âHe had a better finish than I did.â
I took it all in.
Lost in the commotion, at least for most people, was that third leg.
The American who swam that third leg: Jason Lezak.
⢠ ⢠ â¢
The United States won thirty-three swimming medals in Sydney. Of the forty-eight swimmers on our team, forty-one came home with at least one medal. I was one of the seven who didnât.
In Austin the next spring, I got my world record. I defeatedMalchow and went 1:54.92 in the 200 fly. I had become the youngest male ever to hold a world record. I was fifteen years and nine months old. Thorpe had been the youngest before that, sixteen years and ten months.
Not accomplishing my goal in Sydney had driven me for all the months in between. I had always known how badly it hurt to lose, how much I hated it. Now I had concrete proof of how losing could motivate me to reach my goals at the highest levels of swimming.
The win in Austin earned me a trip to the 2001 world championships, in Fukuoka, Japan. I won the 200 flyâmy first world titleâand lowered the world record again, to 1:54.58.
That summer, I started to get asked more and more about the 2004 Olympics. If I could make the team, I said, Iâd like the chance to medal in more than just one event. I was looking at the two flys, the 100 and 200, and the two medleys, the 200 and 400. This wasnât bragging. This was a reflection of how I had always trained, with an emphasis on versatility.
That summer, too, I signed an endorsement contract with Speedo. The deal was for four years, through 2005. I was barely sixteen, the youngest American male swimmer to turn professional.
It was about that time as well that, as I kept saying to Bob, why are all these people all of a sudden asking me about Mark Spitz?
Mark made himself legendary in Munich in 1972. But his excellence and potential had been apparent for years. In 1967, when he was seventeen, he won five gold medals at the Pan American Games in Mexico City. He then predicted he would win six golds at the 1968 Summer Games, again in Mexico City. He did win two golds, in the relays. But no more. In his last individual event, the 200 fly, he finished last.
Mark went to college at Indiana. In those days, there was no such thing as turning professional. There were no professionals at the Olympics then, and there had not been ever since the Gameswere revived in 1896, in Athens. In the ancient Games, way back when, at Olympia, winners got only an olive wreath; when the modern Olympics got started, it was with that ideal in mind. The rules of eligibility originally were driven by the notions of European aristocracy, in particular the idea that it would be cheap and undignified to play for pay. Thatâs why Jim Thorpe was stripped of the medals he won in the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Olympics in 1912 in Stockholm; the year after the Games, he acknowledged he had earned $25 per week playing minor-league baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910. By the strictest definition of the rules, he had been a professional athlete and therefore ineligible to compete at the Olympics.
The president of the IOC from 1952 through those Munich Olympics in 1972, Avery Brundage, an American, made the amateur code his official passion. It made no difference to Brundage that athletes in, say, the Soviet Union could get a commission in the army. If Spitz wanted to swim in Munich, to avenge his performance in 1968, he had to do so as an amateur. He could go to college, accept a scholarship, but that was it.
This story was all part of the lore of swimming.
And, as well, what happened in 1972.
First Mark won the 200 fly, beating, among others, Gary Hall, Sr. He anchored the winning 400 free relay. He won the 200 free, after which, waving to fans
âI doff my swimming cap to the great Ian Thorpe,â Gary said later. âHe had a better finish than I did.â
I took it all in.
Lost in the commotion, at least for most people, was that third leg.
The American who swam that third leg: Jason Lezak.
⢠ ⢠ â¢
The United States won thirty-three swimming medals in Sydney. Of the forty-eight swimmers on our team, forty-one came home with at least one medal. I was one of the seven who didnât.
In Austin the next spring, I got my world record. I defeatedMalchow and went 1:54.92 in the 200 fly. I had become the youngest male ever to hold a world record. I was fifteen years and nine months old. Thorpe had been the youngest before that, sixteen years and ten months.
Not accomplishing my goal in Sydney had driven me for all the months in between. I had always known how badly it hurt to lose, how much I hated it. Now I had concrete proof of how losing could motivate me to reach my goals at the highest levels of swimming.
The win in Austin earned me a trip to the 2001 world championships, in Fukuoka, Japan. I won the 200 flyâmy first world titleâand lowered the world record again, to 1:54.58.
That summer, I started to get asked more and more about the 2004 Olympics. If I could make the team, I said, Iâd like the chance to medal in more than just one event. I was looking at the two flys, the 100 and 200, and the two medleys, the 200 and 400. This wasnât bragging. This was a reflection of how I had always trained, with an emphasis on versatility.
That summer, too, I signed an endorsement contract with Speedo. The deal was for four years, through 2005. I was barely sixteen, the youngest American male swimmer to turn professional.
It was about that time as well that, as I kept saying to Bob, why are all these people all of a sudden asking me about Mark Spitz?
Mark made himself legendary in Munich in 1972. But his excellence and potential had been apparent for years. In 1967, when he was seventeen, he won five gold medals at the Pan American Games in Mexico City. He then predicted he would win six golds at the 1968 Summer Games, again in Mexico City. He did win two golds, in the relays. But no more. In his last individual event, the 200 fly, he finished last.
Mark went to college at Indiana. In those days, there was no such thing as turning professional. There were no professionals at the Olympics then, and there had not been ever since the Gameswere revived in 1896, in Athens. In the ancient Games, way back when, at Olympia, winners got only an olive wreath; when the modern Olympics got started, it was with that ideal in mind. The rules of eligibility originally were driven by the notions of European aristocracy, in particular the idea that it would be cheap and undignified to play for pay. Thatâs why Jim Thorpe was stripped of the medals he won in the pentathlon and the decathlon at the Olympics in 1912 in Stockholm; the year after the Games, he acknowledged he had earned $25 per week playing minor-league baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910. By the strictest definition of the rules, he had been a professional athlete and therefore ineligible to compete at the Olympics.
The president of the IOC from 1952 through those Munich Olympics in 1972, Avery Brundage, an American, made the amateur code his official passion. It made no difference to Brundage that athletes in, say, the Soviet Union could get a commission in the army. If Spitz wanted to swim in Munich, to avenge his performance in 1968, he had to do so as an amateur. He could go to college, accept a scholarship, but that was it.
This story was all part of the lore of swimming.
And, as well, what happened in 1972.
First Mark won the 200 fly, beating, among others, Gary Hall, Sr. He anchored the winning 400 free relay. He won the 200 free, after which, waving to fans
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