No Limits (19 page)

And then, for the finals, what strategy. The day before, Gross had won the 200 free in world-record time; American Michael Heath had come in second. An hour before the relay, Gross had to swim the 100 fly finals, which he won in another world record, out-touching Pablo Morales of the United States. Normally, the American coaches would have Heath, who had obviously just proven he was the fastest guy on the U.S. team at 200 meters, swim the anchor, matching him up against Gross. Given that Gross was so super-fast, though, the U.S. coaches switched it up. They put Heath first, with the idea that he would build up the
biggest lead he could. The other two would try to push the lead. Then it was hold on and see what Gross had in him.

Bruce Hayes was told he'd be swimming the anchor leg; the year before, Hayes had anchored the winning 800 relay at the Pan American Games. Jeff Float, fourth in the 200 free behind Gross, swam the third leg; David Larson pulled the second.

Float had lost most of the hearing in both ears after coming down with viral meningitis at the age of thirteen months. The crowd was so loud during his swim that even he—in the water, no less—could hear the roar.

The American strategy had been to give Hayes a lead of about three seconds at takeoff. It was only about a second and a half. Gross made all of that up in the first 50. At 100 he passed Hayes. At 150, Gross had a lead of maybe two feet. But then, Hayes turned it on. At the Trials, Hayes had finished third in the 200 free; the 800 relay was thus the only event he had qualified for; he had spent training time since practicing his finishing touch. Practice paid off. Gross swam what was then the fastest 200 relay leg ever. But at the final wall, Hayes outtouched Gross by four-hundredths of a second. The Americans were Grossbusters, the new world-record holders by more than three seconds, in 7:15.69.

For his part, Gross couldn't have been more gracious, saying, “I just ran out of gas. That was a really hot race. It was an honorable defeat.”

All of us on the Athens relay team knew about that 1984 relay. We also knew that, going into that 2004 Olympic 800 relay final, the Australians were riding a seven-year winning streak. They had won three straight world titles and had broken the world record five times. In Sydney, they had beaten our American team by more than five seconds.

In Sydney, Klete swam the anchor. He had slipped from second to fifth, then powered back in the final lap to second again, touching just six-hundredths ahead of van den Hoogenband and
the Dutch, Hoogie swimming the fastest 200 relay leg ever, 1:44.88.

In Athens, Klete was going to swim the anchor again. The Aussie anchor: Thorpe. The Dutch hadn't qualified for the final. So, just as it was in 1984, everyone knew this was a two-team race, this time the Americans and the Aussies. And, as in 1984, our plan was to give our anchor as big a lead as we could. Klete had taken nearly three-quarters of a second off his lifetime best in the 200 the night before, in the Race of the Century, and still had come in fourth, behind Hoogie and me, 1.42 seconds behind Ian.

So Klete knew all too well what Ian could do. But we all knew from that Sydney relay what Klete could do, too.

I was named to swim the lead leg. Lochte pulled the second, Peter Vanderkaay the third. Just as we were set to walk out to the deck from the ready room, I said, “Wait. Come back.” The four of us huddled together. “I don't know if you remember the scene in
Miracle
before the Soviet game where Brooks tells the team, ‘This is your time.' Well, this is our time. I don't care what happened in the past. This is us. This is now.”

I swam that first leg against Hackett. These were the Olympics, sure. But in a way it was just like it had been the year before at our little training camp in Australia. Just he and I. He turned one-hundredth ahead at 50; I moved ahead by a tenth at 100; then by three-tenths at 150; then I really turned it on. I swam that last lap in 26.78 and hit the wall in 1:46.49. The lead: 1.01 seconds. Ryan held the lead. Then Peter swam the best 200 time of his life to get us through 600 meters in 5:21.80. Klete dove in with a lead of 1.48 seconds.

Ian made it all up in the first 50. He and Klete seemed to be in a dead heat.

On the blocks, at the other end, Ryan, Peter, and I were jumping and screaming. Ian kept surging; Klete kept holding him off, barely. At 150, Klete turned first. I looked over at our team in the
athlete seating area—there was Vendt on his feet, screaming, too. Jon and Bob were standing nearby. Jon knew it already even if the rest of us didn't. “If he didn't catch him there,” Jon said, referring to Ian, “he's not catching him.”

And he didn't. Klete got Ian at the final wall by thirteen-hundredths.

Leaning forward there on the deck, I couldn't tell immediately who had gotten whom at the wall. I had to look up at the scoreboard, and there it was, the 1 on the line that said United States. I had always been fairly reserved in my victory celebrations, especially on the world stage, but at that instant I couldn't help it and didn't want to; I raised both index fingers to the stars and let loose a scream of joy that seemed to have no end. Ryan was pumped, too. Peter, as reserved as they get, was bouncing up and down. I reached down to congratulate Klete. He, too, was usually a study in reserve. This was as excited as I'd ever seen him. He yelled, “Yeah, we did it! We kicked their butts!”

Ian, dejected, stayed in the pool a very long time. Finally, he hoisted himself up and came over to where the four of us Americans had huddled around each other in intense excitement and happiness. He waited patiently, then shook hands and walked away. It was his first 800 relay loss in international competition. The Aussie streak was done. We had finished in 7:07.33, the Aussies in 7.07.46.

It was, for me, until the 400 relay in Beijing, the most exciting moment I had ever been a part of on a pool deck. That night in Athens, I had trouble going to sleep. I kept playing the tape of the race in my head, over and over and over again.

•   •   •

In Melbourne in 2007, the four of us—me, Ryan, Peter, Klete—not only swam the 800 relay again, we lowered the world record the Aussies had set in 2001 in Fukuoka. They had gone 7:04.66. We went 7:03.24.

We knew the time in Beijing could be faster.

The thinking in most quarters was that it would be faster because of the suit: the Speedo LZR Racer. The suit that most of us on the American team raced in at the 2008 Olympics.

The suit was not the only reason we knew the time could be faster. But all of us spent untold hours answering questions about the suit beforehand, at the Trials and at the Games, because the suit had taken the swimming world by storm.

The full-body LZR was a major step forward in swimsuit design. It was made of special water-repellent fabrics. Built into it, to hold your stomach and lower back tight, was a corsetlike compression unit. To reduce drag, the suit had no stitches; instead, the pieces were ultrasonically bonded together. Even the zipper was bonded into the suit to help keep the surface as smooth as possible.

NASA scientists helped develop the LZR. So did, among others, Bob and I. We made a trip after those 2007 worlds in Melbourne to the Australian capital, Canberra, to what's called the Australian Institute of Sport, to do some testing before it was introduced publicly, checking where the hot points were in the suit, what happened to it when you dove in, what it felt like in it.

It feels like wearing a girdle, or at least what I imagine wearing a girdle would have to feel like. It sucks everything in. It compresses everything. It's tight around your neck. You definitely had to get used to it, and you saw a lot of swimmers reach for the zipper in the back as soon as they were done racing because it was so tight.

The suit first got noticed in a big way at the 2008 short-course world championships in England. Swimmers wearing the LZR set seventeen world records.

Lochte, who set a handful of those records, then said, “When I put it on, people joke around about this, but I feel like I'm some kind of action hero, like ready to take on the world. That's just
when I put it on. It makes me feel like when I dive in that water like I'm swimming downhill.”

Then came controversy, with swimmers and coaches who were not tied to Speedo wondering whether it was unfair. It was not. The suit was available for anybody and everybody. Any single person in the world could wear the suit. Speedo made it available for anybody, and as the months went along some other companies said it would be okay if their swimmers wanted to wear the LZR at the Olympics, too.

Alberto Castagnetti, the coach of the Italian swim team, may have done more than anyone else to make the controversy what it was. He called the LZR “technological doping.” Still, when he came several weeks later to the U.S. Trials, he was quietly exploring whether it might be possible for any of his swimmers to wear the LZR Racer.

I was watching ESPN's
Pardon the Interruption
on one of my breaks during the Trials, and laughed when I saw that one of the upcoming topics was the suit. It got to the point where, at every press conference, we were asked about the suit.

Even Spitz, who swam in a brief and without goggles, the way it was done back in the day, got asked about the suit. Working in a reference to me, he said at the Trials, “I said this sort of tongue-in-cheek, that if that suit had hair on it, Michael would set world records in it and everyone else would get in the same type of suit. I don't really think it's the swimming suit, and if it was the suit then I am going out and buying Tiger Woods' golf clubs, because it means no matter who the swinger is, I am going to be able to score like that.”

Maybe the best line of all came from Markus Rogan of Austria, a 2004 two-time silver medalist in the backstroke. Markus went to high school in suburban Washington, D.C., then to college at Stanford. He said, “I tested it. I threw it in the pool and it didn't move at all. So I'll still have to swim.”

A lot of hard work went into the suit. But the suit helped make a difference of a hundred or a tenth of a second. That was not going to get our relay team under seven minutes.

This was, though: It was an Olympic year. Everyone everywhere was training for the Games. That's why times were dropping and records falling.

•   •   •

The Olympic record, going into the prelims, stood at 7:07.05, set by the Aussies in Sydney in 2000. That lasted as long as it took for Walters, Berens, Vendt, and Keller to swim. They finished in 7:04.66.

As it was within the 400 relay prelims, there was a competition within the competition itself in the 800 prelims—the fastest guy of the four would get to swim in the finals.

Here's how it broke down:

Walters, swimming the first leg, went 1:46.57.

Berens, second, 1:45.47.

Vendt, 1:47.11.

Keller, 1:45.51.

Erik, at that time, was definitely not going to swim in the finals. It was disappointing for him, I'm sure, because it was for me. But what was there to say? Nothing. If we won gold in the final, he would get a gold, too. That would speak volumes.

The coaches had a tough decision to make. Ricky was four-hundredths faster than Klete. But Klete had abundantly proven himself, especially in that Athens 800 relay.

Swimming is a tough sport. There's little if any room for sentiment. All anyone looking at the situation had to do was to think back to what the U.S. coaches faced in Sydney, when Chad Carvin swam in the 800 relay prelims. If anyone was deserving of extra consideration, it had to be Chad. Before Atlanta and 1996, he was considered a virtual lock for a gold medal or two; then, though, his times began to creep up. He couldn't figure out why.
He became so depressed he attempted suicide by swallowing sleeping pills. In the hospital afterward, doctors discovered why he had gotten slower—a heart condition. Chad watched the first day of the 1996 Trials in tears. He rededicated himself and was diagnosed with a degenerative back problem. Again, he came back. At the 2000 Trials, finally, he earned his spot on the team in the 400 free and in the 800 relay. In Sydney, he didn't have it the way he had hoped. He finished sixth in the 400 free, seven seconds back. And then he could not convince the U.S. coaches that he deserved one of the spots in the relay finals.

One of those spots, instead, went to an incoming college freshman who in the prelims had gone faster than Chad: Klete Keller.

Ricky had gone fastest in the 2008 prelims. So, just as it was for Klete eight years ago, now it was for Ricky. Ricky got the spot in the finals.

The rest of us knew Klete, sure. But we also knew Ricky was swimming fast and, if you swim a time, you're going to be on the relay. Just as I deserved to be on that 400 free relay in Athens, Ricky had earned his spot. Klete handled it this time around with graciousness.

Not to sound cocky by any means but, as a team, we knew going into the 800 relay finals that we were going to win. We had won this relay easily in Melbourne; no single country was close at that meet to our times, and no evidence had surfaced since that anyone was going to be close; this was not a situation like Athens in any way. The only way we weren't going to win was if someone was disqualified for a false start.

But could we break seven minutes?

I knew going into this final that I was going to swim fast. For one thing, I had not gone as fast in the 200 fly as I'd wanted to because of the equipment malfunction; this relay was the next place to prove what I still had in me. For another, when I lead off a relay, I want to help my teammates by giving them open water; if they have open water, they're going to swim faster. Thirdly, I
had not done what I'd wanted in my leadoff leg in the 800 relay at the Melbourne worlds; I had wanted to back up the 1:43.86 I'd had there in the open 200 with a similar swim but, instead, went a full second and a half slower, 1:45.36.

I was still mad about that.

And then, looking up into the stands, we saw several of the stars of the U.S. Olympic basketball team, including Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Chris Paul, Jason Kidd, and Carmelo Anthony. No way were we giving it anything less than 100 percent with those guys on hand to watch. On deck, we could even hear them cheering. That was cool, those guys cheering for us.