Golden Girl: How Natalie Coughlin Fought Back, Challenged Conventional Wisdom, and Became America's Olympic Champion - Hardcover

MICHAEL SILVER, a senior writer at Sports Illustrated, is a highly respected sportswriter and coauthor of several bestselling sports memoirs. He lives in Northern California.

NATALIE COUGHLIN has built a reputation as the most versatile, dominant swimmer in the world. Seizing five medals at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens—two gold, two silver, and one bronze—Natalie's performance is considered the best in Olympic history by any American woman.

CHAPTER ONE

JUST THE TWO OF US

The foreign journalist took the microphone, stood up in a crowded press conference, and, in perfect English, asked Natalie Coughlin a pointed question.

How does it feel to dishonor your country?

This was a strange time to have a bad flashback, but given her state of delirium, Coughlin wasn't entirely surprised. Here she was, at the 2003 FINA World Championships in Barcelona--the last major international competition before the Athens Olympics--slogging through some warm-down laps after one of the more astonishing outcomes of her career. Coughlin, the world record holder in the 100-meter backstroke since the previous summer, had just done the unthinkable: She'd failed to advance past the preliminary rounds. As she completed her last, painful turn in the warm- down pool, her Speedo goggles were filled with tears.

Coughlin's head, meanwhile, was full of dreadful possibilities. Her mind jumped back to her most recent international disappointment, at the 2002 Pan-Pacific Championships in Yokohoma, Japan, the previous August. In the wake of the favored US team's defeat to Australia in the 400-meter medley relay, Coughlin, after a slew of reasonable questions, had been asked how it felt to dishonor her country by the Asian sports media's answer to Mike Wallace on speed. At the time, she'd nearly started laughing. Coughlin hated to lose in anything, but coming up short in a relay against the formidable Aussies certainly didn't qualify as a domestic disgrace.

Now, however, as she exited the warm-down pool and gathered her belongings, she was in no mood to field outlandish queries. Physically, she doubted she could make it up the steps to the podium. Her face pallid, her body shivering under a nylon sweat suit, Coughlin felt disoriented. She was reeling emotionally as well. This was supposed to be her meet, and it had gone so terribly wrong. Poised to showcase her amazing versatility and stamp herself as the swimmer to watch at the Athens Games, Coughlin had taken ill at an inopportune time. Just as the weeklong competition was about to begin, she'd been felled by a virus that caused a headache, sore throat, and 103° fever.

La polivalencia, the locals called it.

The worst feeling in the world, Coughlin called it.

The previous evening she had sucked it up and, in her third race of the meet's opening day, propelled the United States to victory in the 4 x 100- meter freestyle relay with a blazing leadoff leg. Now, however, the woman who had hoped to win as many as seven gold medals at the Worlds had hit the wall. On this warm August morning, Coughlin, the only woman in history to have broken the 1-minute barrier in the 100 back, had finished her heat in 1:03.18, more than 3.5 seconds shy of her world record. By morning's end she was in 22nd place, not good enough to advance, an outcome that did not bode well for the rest of the meet.

It was the biggest story of the day, if not the entire meet, and Coughlin wasn't eager to be grilled by the press, even though she had a legitimate explanation. Following her warm-down swim, she shared her feelings with coach Teri McKeever, who urged her to meet with the media. "You're going to be competing in this sport for a long time," McKeever told her. "The classy thing to do is to go to the press conference, acknowledge that you don't feel well, and answer their questions."

So off Coughlin went, and McKeever braced herself for several days of poolside skepticism. Make that 12 months. Instead of validating 3 years of cutting-edge achievement, Coughlin was providing fuel for the cynics who'd doubted that she would ever come through on the big stage. That had begun before the 2000 Olympic Trials, when a torn cartilage in Coughlin's left shoulder derailed her designs on making the US team as a teenager. Skeptics wondered whether she was a china doll doomed to crack under pressure. With her body having failed her yet again at a critical juncture, the resolutely confident Coughlin was bound to be confronted with self-doubts, as well. It was, McKeever would later conclude, "the first time I've seen a chink in her armor."

Protective by nature, McKeever, 42, was like a surrogate mother to Coughlin, who'd come to her as an emotionally and physically scarred teenager on the verge of quitting the sport. The oldest of 10 children, McKeever had been a caretaker her entire life. In her march toward improbable success in her field, she had given so much focus to her career that she felt it had impacted her personal life--an issue, given that she harbored dreams of becoming a wife and mother. Instead, it was as if she had 25 de facto children, and Coughlin was the one with whom she was the closest.

McKeever had known something was wrong the day before the meet, when she realized Coughlin was literally hotter than the Spanish summer sun. As was her custom before a big meet, McKeever bought a small gift and a card for both of her swimmers in Barcelona--Coughlin and former Cal star Haley Cope, a backstroker/sprint freestyler--and scrawled personal messages that she presented separately to each woman. When Coughlin read McKeever's card, which spoke of their journey and the exciting opportunities ahead, she hugged her coach as a thank-you gesture. McKeever instinctively recoiled: "You're burning up." Coughlin conceded that she felt a little flushed but assured McKeever she could swim through it.

That night, a worried McKeever tossed and turned in her hotel bed. Natalie never gets sick, she thought to herself. In 3 years together, the coach couldn't remember a single practice in which Coughlin had been too ill to participate. The girl was tough, mentally and physically, as if her intensely competitive nature wouldn't allow an infection to mess with her body.

Empathetic to the core, McKeever also had some selfish reasons for considering the impact of Coughlin's physical breakdown. A coach's prominence is often tied to the success of his or her elite swimmers, and with breastroker Staciana Stitts, a recent Cal grad and a 2000 Olympian, having relocated to Southern California to swim for Dave Salo of the prominent Novaquatics club, Coughlin and Cope represented McKeever's best chance for career enhancement. Cope, perhaps the most unlikely world-class swimmer in recent American history, was regarded as somewhat of a miracle, having emerged from a broken home to become a world champion--and one who had continued to improve even after her collegiate career. But Cope at her best still wasn't as formidable as Coughlin on a bad day. McKeever knew that Coughlin, when it came down to it, was her ticket to Athens.

No woman had ever served on the coaching staff of a US Olympic swim team, and McKeever, one of the few prominent females in her profession, aimed to be the first. The process of naming assistant coaches was political and inextricably tied to the makeup of the team itself. Were Coughlin, as expected, to emerge as the centerpiece of the US women's squad, selecting McKeever as one of the assistants would be a natural means of keeping the swimmer in her comfort zone. McKeever had a good relationship with the University of Southern California's Mark Schubert, already appointed as the coach of the women's team, though their philosophies were strikingly different. The bottom line was this: With Coughlin at the peak of her powers, McKeever was a slam dunk to be selected.

Though this was hardly her primary goal, McKeever desired the distinction as a means of uplifting her program, which was struggling to break into the national top five, and because it might pave the way for other women in her field to achieve similar success. Most of all, though, she wanted to prove something to herself: that the sacrifices she had made over the past 2 decades--really, since she was 4 years old--had paid off in a blatant and tangible way.

Teri McKeever, by all rights, was ordained for athletic excellence. Her father, Mike, a USC football star, had an identical-twin brother, Marlin, who had also been a gridiron hero for the Trojans. The McKeever twins were famous across the land and seemed destined to be professional football players. A series of injuries derailed Mike's NFL hopes, but in 1961, the Los Angeles Rams would make Marlin the fourth overall pick in the draft, and he would enjoy a productive, 13-year career for four teams as a linebacker and tight end, making the Pro Bowl after the 1966 season. The popular twins also acted in several movies, including The Three Stooges Meet Hercules and The Absent-Minded Professor, and appeared on the covers of numerous national magazines.

Teri's mother, whose maiden name was Judy Primrose, had been a youth swimming champion who had once finished second in the mile at US Nationals. Had the Olympics featured an event longer than 400 meters for women back then--"long enough so that I could wear everyone else down," in Judy's words--she likely would have qualified to represent her country.

Like classic characters from an old movie, football hero Mike and homecoming queen Judy hooked up as college kids, got married, and started making babies. Teri was the first, and she was not an especially easy child. "From what I was told," Teri says, "I was sort of an awful little kid."

After Teri came Mac, and then Judy got pregnant again. The McKeevers had an idyllic life that seemed emblematic of the American dream. And then, in an instant, their picture-perfect existence was shattered. On December 4, 1965, Mike McKeever was broadsided by a drunk driver while driving in Long Beach. He fell into a coma. Ten days later, his second son, Barry, was born.

Teri barely remembers her father, but she distinctly recalls her mom telling her in the aftermath of the accident, "All right, I need your help now."

It was a heavy burden for a 4-year-old. From that point on, little Teri became a caretaker. She was especially protective of Mac: When he would rile his mother by, say, dropping his jacket on the ground, Teri would jump in and plead, "Mommy, don't yell at him. I'll pick it up for him."

On August 25, 1967, some 20 months after the accident, Mike McKeever died in a Los Angeles hospital. Teri remembers "sitting at the funeral and seeing people walking by and looking at us, and every one of them was crying." From then on, whenever she saw her uncle Marlin, Teri would chillingly be confronted with a vision of what her father would have looked like at that age.

Judy met a man named Gary Gannon and married him in 1969. The two ended up having seven kids together--for a total of 10 in the household. In reality, though, there were nine kids and a de facto third parent--Teri. She changed diapers and got her younger siblings dressed, fed, and bathed. When she turned 16 and got her driver's license, Teri also received a credit card from her mother, so she could do the grocery shopping and run other errands.

The family lived in Escondido, a town north of San Diego, in a nice house that had 25-yard and 50-meter pools in the backyard. Many of the kids gravitated toward sports--Mac played football for Long Beach State and San Diego State, while Barry played for Stanford. Years later, younger sisters Kelli and Kristi Gannon would earn spots on the US national field hockey squad.

Shy by nature, a trait she shared with her late father, Teri felt most comfortable in the water, an environment in which she could escape the hectic pace of a life spent caring for her brothers and sisters. Swimming also offered the best chance for individual attention from her mother, who imparted the lessons she had learned while training for legendary coach Peter Daland at the Los Angeles Athletic Club.

While many youth swimming standouts built their endurance bases through rigorous, monotonous workouts, that wasn't an option in Teri's world. Time was always of the essence. She typically swam in the backyard while supervised loosely by her mother, who had one eye on her eldest daughter's technique and the other on the younger kids. "Sometimes Mac and Barry would swim relays against me," McKeever recalls. "Sometimes the younger kids would be riding their bikes around the pool while my mom tried to coach me. I remember at least one time when one of them fell in, and my mom had to reach in and fish her out in the middle of my set. I never knew when my workouts were going to be, because it depended on everyone's nap schedule."

When mother and daughter did have uninterrupted time together, it was inevitably rushed, so it was essential that every minute count. The result was that Judy emphasized technique and form over mind-numbing repetition and often instructed her daughter to practice at race speed, rather than stressing the value of going long distances at slower speeds. Judy also felt that Teri's tall, slender build was not particularly suited toward the overtraining that most coaches favored. Instead, she focused on the mental aspects of preparation, painstakingly explaining the rationale for each element of the workout and imploring her daughter to participate mentally in the process.

Judy might not have realized it then, but she was creating the basis for a philosophy that would guide her daughter to an impressive stint as a competitive swimmer and a revolutionary career as a coach. At the very least, growing up in an environment that necessitated quality over quantity would later compel Coach McKeever to ask the questions that most of her peers dared not broach: Why do we make them swim so much more than their race distances, over and over again, in practice? If you're more efficient in the water, doesn't that also enable you to retain more energy for when you need it most?

Before becoming an all-American at USC, McKeever, a butterfly and middle- distance freestyle specialist, excelled as a youth swimmer and competed in numerous meets across the country. Those trips had special meaning for her, not because she was going head up against the best in the United States but because of the quality time she got to spend with her coach and traveling companion. While many of the competitors behaved like social butterflies, McKeever kept to herself, sitting with her mother and beholding the spectacle. "The only time I remember being alone with my mother," she remembers, "was at those national meets."

As an adult, McKeever essentially had more than two dozen children--and the big meets represented an opportunity to bond with the highest achievers. Coughlin, who arrived at Cal as a confused, burned-out teenager, had trusted McKeever like a child trusts her mother. In many ways McKeever was the one person--besides herself--in whom Coughlin had complete faith. Though Coughlin's parents were in Barcelona to watch her swim, it was McKeever to whom she turned for support when she fell ill.