Erin Popovich: Swimming to her place on the wall
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Erin Popovich won 19 medals, including 14 gold, at three Paralympic Games.
Posting this story I did about a member of the Class of 2019 of U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame.
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One day about 10 years ago, Erin Popovich was walking down the hall to the pool at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, where she was training for her fourth and final International Paralympic Committee Swimming World Championships.
As usual, Popovich passed the gallery of photographs on the hallway wall of champion swimmers who had trained in that pool. Michael Phelps. Janet Evans. Matt Biondi. Natalie Coughlin. And many more — all swimmers she had looked up to during her career. Pictures she had seen very often but that still continued to arrest her eye, even if only in passing.
“It truly was a wall of legends,” she said.
And then, on this day, Popovich stopped in her tracks. There was a new photo of a swimmer on the wall: Erin Popovich.
“No one had told me it was going up there,” she said. “I hope I have done it justice and that it can stay up there a while longer.”
As it turns out, the pictures have come down during a renovation.
But Erin Popovich’s place among U.S. swimming legends is assured forever with her selection to the Class of 2019 of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Hall of Fame.
