For U.S. Swimmers, Team Effort Brought Stunning Success In An Individual Sport

Maya DiRado after her upset win over Hungary's Katinka Hosszu in the 200 backstroke.  DiRado had a full set of medal colors in individual events and a second gold in 4 x 200 free relay.

Maybe it came from the team’s group music video, “Carpool Karaoke,” which has drawn 4.6 million YouTube views in the first 12 days since going online.

Maybe it came from the cowbell ringing in the warm-up pool to salute each U.S. swimmer as he or she went to the ready room before a race.

Maybe it came from assistant coach Greg Meehan’s history-lesson-cum-motivational-ploy of having each of the women swimmers plant an American flag on grass near their building in the Olympic village, claiming the land for their own the way the 1862 Homestead Act had encouraged settlers to move West.

Maybe it came from the “ice-breaker games” Meehan, the Stanford women’s head coach, had the team play at their pre-Olympic training camps in the U.S. Those games were designed to last five minutes but sometimes turned into 45 minutes of belly-laugh bonding.

Maybe it came from the positive vibes created as swimmer after swimmer had stunning performances in practice at those camps in San Antonio and Atlanta.

Or maybe it was all those reasons, both intangible and real, that explain how 47 athletes in an individual sport created a team that utterly – and a bit surprisingly – dominated the eight days of Olympic swimming that ended Saturday.

FOR MY WHOLE STORY ON TEAMUSA.ORG, CLICK HERE

Why it is time for me to say, "Adeus, Rio"

With my friend and long-time colleague Tim Layden of Sports Illustrated at the Rio Aquatics Center.  The 2016 Olympics began and ended for me at that venue.

Life sometimes delivers important lessons at unexpected moments.

Mine came when I nearly fainted twice from heat and exhaustion while covering the swimming preliminaries on the first full day of the Rio Olympics.

It was a clear sign that the intense effort necessary to do this job the way I always have at a Summer Games would be too much for a body turning 70 years old next month.

Late nights (actually early mornings).  Minimal sleep.  Meals catch as catch can.  (Often coming up empty handed.)  Standing to wait for buses running on a once-an-hour schedule after midnight.  It took me only a couple more days to realize I no longer had the stamina for such a daily routine, no matter that I am – when properly rested – still able to do long, hard rides on a road bike.

My problem is having just one journalistic speed: all-out.  And despite my best intentions to put a governor on it, that didn’t work.

So my 18th Olympics is going to end after a week, at least as far as being a first-hand witness is concerned.  When I get back to Chicago, I will watch the way nearly everyone else does, via television, something I have not done since 1984, when a career move meant I missed the Los Angeles Summer Games.

Maybe it’s fitting that the last Olympic event I saw here was Michael Phelps’ overwhelming win in the 200-meter individual medley.  He has said this year and four years ago these were his last Olympics.  I said the same thing in 2012 and again this week.

Now there is a feeling Phelps may change his mind, with an eye on Tokyo in 2020.  Why not?  He is still young (31) in the big picture and clearly at the top of his game.

Me?  Much less likely, even though, at the risk of ego indulgence, I can say unabashedly my work remained at the same high standard I have demanded of myself in nearly a half-century as a journalist.

Having left the Chicago Tribune last fall, I jumped at a chance to cover this Olympics for the U.S. Olympic Committee’s web site, TeamUSA.org.  That also provided me the chance to catch up with longtime colleagues from other news organizations around the world.  Their camaraderie was always a primary reason why I loved the Olympics.

I cannot thank enough everyone on the USOC’s communications staff, especially Patrick Sandusky, Mark Jones and indefatigable web site editor Brandon Penny, for allowing me to be part of their team.

I leave Rio with a sense of relief and sadness.  I leave having spent my final day watching Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky and Michael Phelps.  There could be no better way to say goodbye.

For Biles And Ledecky, Greatness Comes From Going Beyond The Top

RIO DE JANEIRO – In two hours Thursday afternoon, I went from watching Katie Ledecky, who defies the clock in a pool, to watching Simone Biles, who defies gravity on a gymnastics floor.

These two 19-year-olds, born three days apart in March of 1997, each dominates her sport in a way that leaves their rivals in awe.

“If Katie swims the way she can, we all are swimming for second or third,” Denmark’s Lotte Friis, a 2008 Olympic bronze medalist, told me two months ago.

“I knew Simone was going to win; I was just hoping to get second,” her U.S. teammate, Aly Raisman, said early Thursday evening, when Raisman had done just that as Biles took the Olympic all-around title by 2.1 points, the largest victory margin in the last 40 years.

Biles has a team gold medal. And the all-around gold. And she will be favored to add three more in the individual events.

Ledecky has three golds and a silver. She is heavily favored to win a fourth gold Friday after setting an Olympic record in the 800-meter freestyle preliminaries Thursday.

What Biles and Ledecky share is the same plan for getting farther ahead of the opposition when triumph already is a foregone conclusion.

FOR THE WHOLE STORY ON TEAMUSA.ORG, CLICK HERE

From A Distance, Debbie Meyer Seeing Herself Again In Katie Ledecky

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RIO DE JANEIRO - Every day, as Katie Ledecky gets closer to matching Debbie Meyer’s singular Olympic swimming triple, Meyer finds herself feeling closer to Ledecky. 

In ways big and small. 

“The similarities seem more and more as time goes on,” Meyer said via telephone this week from Truckee, California. 

From some 7,000 miles away, she is assiduously following Ledecky’s quest to become the second woman to win the 200, 400 and 800 freestyles in the same Olympics. 

Meyer did it in the 1968 Olympics. Now that Ledecky has won the 200 freestyle, the only race in which she was not an overwhelming favorite, it seems a foregone conclusion that she will attain the same elevated status as Meyer after Friday’s final of the 800-meter. In 2016, no one has come within 11 seconds of Ledecky’s time in the event, a world-record 8 minutes, 6.68 seconds. 

FOR MY WHOLE STORY ON TEAMUSA.ORG, CLICK HERE

How Michael Phelps Changed My Mind: Now (And Forever?) He Has Become The Greatest Olympian Of All Time

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RIO DE JANEIRO – The crowd at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium was different Tuesday night.

It reacted unlike the swimming crowds had the first three nights of the Olympic meet, when the loudest noise had been reserved for Brazilian athletes, none of whom had yet contended for medals. I suddenly felt as if I were at a Passover seder, hearing the question, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

The difference was a chance to see an athlete for the ages, to see him firsthand in his first individual final of these Olympics, a moment of universal significance, a moment the spectators relished.

When Michael Phelps was announced at the start of the 200-meter butterfly, the crowd roared and roared.

It was that way at the end, too, after Phelps had extracted payback for his loss in the event four years ago. He straddled a lane line, flexed his right arm, put the index finger of each hand in the air. The noise grew. Phelps gestured with his hands, asking the crowd for more, and they responded with fervor.

The victory and the acclaim, for his swimming achievements and his impact on the sport and the Olympics, all of it has combined to convince me of something I had argued against in the past.

Michael Phelps is no longer just the most decorated Olympian of all time and the best swimmer of all time.

He is the greatest Olympian of all time.

FOR MY WHOLE STORY ON TEAMUSA.ORG, CLICK HERE