When Bronze is the Purple Heart of Swimming

U.S. Olympic Swim Trials: where dreams are squashed

Many of you may not know this but swimming is, or at least was, a big part of my life. I was a competitive swimmer in high school and college and, later, a swim trainer. I also have co-authored a book with Anthony Ervin, who was also a former swimmer, but unlike me, a freakishly fast one.  

This is our book, published in 2016 by Akashic Press:

Many of you may also be surprised to learn that the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials are currently underway. Yes, you read that right: even though swimming at the Paris Olympics begins on July 27 – a mere month away – the U.S. is only now selecting its team. The meet is being staged at a temporary Olympic-sized pool and diving well inside a football arena in Indianapolis. It’s the first time a swim meet has taken place in an NFL stadium.

Not your typical NFL game

U.S. Olympic Swim Trials is arguably the most competitive swim meet in the world. As I described in Chasing Water:

“The competition at US Swim Trials can be faster and fiercer than at the Olympics because of the sheer number of fast swimmers. Only the top two finalists in every event make the team (except in the 100 and 200 free, when the top six make it because of relay considerations). This means you can be the third-fastest swimmer in the world and not even make the Olympics. A third-place finish at US Olympic Trials—“swimming’s version of a Purple Heart,” as writer Casey Barrett called it—holds only heartache.” (CW, p. 121)

U.S. Olympic Swim Trials is also the most entertaining, over-the-top swim meet in the world. Take the 2012 Trials from Omaha, Nebraska, for example:

“The meet organizers at USA Swimming didn’t hold back for Olympic Trials. American pizzazz and excess was on full display in Omaha, with strobe lights swinging amidst the darkened arena and neon-pink lights and cascading green waterfalls of light and award ceremonies with gold medalists emerging godlike out of the floor on a mechanized elevating podium and company logos everywhere and announcers egging on the crowd to, “Come on, let’s make some NOISE!” and hissing ten-foot walls of fire blasting up off the deck after every record-breaking swim, emitting a heat that could be felt in the stands.” (CW, 278)

The 20,689 in attendance on the first day, Saturday night, broke a record for most spectators at an indoor swim meet. Even if you’re not into swimming, I’m sure you would be if you attended. Let me try to convey some of the drama. Here’s one last excerpt¹ from my 2012 Omaha experience:

“There’s plenty to be nervous about in a 50 free race, especially in an Olympic Trials final: there’s little to no margin for error. A bad start, a bad breakout, a bad finish, and your gold medal can turn into no medal. Compound this with the injustice that, despite year-round competitions and world circuits and Grand Prix, swimming only exists to the non-swimmer public once every four years. Being sick or injured or just off during Trials or Olympics can make the difference between international acclaim, sponsorships, and a book deal on one hand, and history’s memory hole on the other. Compare swimmers to, say, high-ranking tennis-players, who get four Grand Slams per year in which to vie for glory and who, within each match, have dozens of games and hundreds of points in which to recover from their errors. Not so with a swimmer, and even less so with a sprinter. Screw up once and you may well be screwed for good. And it’s not as if those who do come out on top are set for life. Try to imagine a scenario where a top NBA player like Kobe Bryant takes a job teaching basketball for thirty dollars an hour after leaving the sport; yet I know of several swimmers of comparable achievement who have done exactly that.

If you’re a fervent fan, this period immediately before the race begins is when your stress levels are in the red zone: the point when you’re trying desperately to convince yourself that none of this really matters, not next to life, love, family, etc., that it’s just a damn race, just one of millions of races that have taken place and will go on taking place until the end of the human species, that no matter what happens the sun will still be there tomorrow. But though you know these things to be true, they don’t feel true: the hairs on your arm are sticking straight up and your heart is throbbing from somewhere inside your Adam’s apple. It may all be irrational, just as rooting from your home team may be irrational, but there’s an invigorating activation of glands and caveman fibers inside your body in these moments. Normally squelched by antiseptic day-to-day life, these primal howling-at-the-moon aspects of our being can now emerge. You’d be hard pressed to find such a mass display of human passion in one place outside war and genocide. Screaming and howling in public is generally frowned upon, so sports offer us a socially sanctioned place where we can all do it together without killing each other.

We empathize with athletes for the pressure they face before important races, but spectators are an ignored, invisibly suffering bunch (except when fan-suffering is exploited to boost TV ratings like in the World Cup, where cameramen revel in the ironic pathos of fans with colorful painted faces who look like they’ve just been told their dog is dead).

There’s more jitters and overactive bladder activity in the stands than behind the blocks, where autopilot mode and prerace routines help keep nerves at bay.

Every hyperstressed spectator copes with these tensions differently. Some turn to trash talking, others to prayer, while still others, perhaps lacking faith and/or feeling hostility, seek alcohol’s balm. But booze can also backfire, as it did for Elliot twenty minutes earlier when, blinded by nerves and a beer-fueled craze, he threw a fist pump and yelled out, “YEAH, Coach Troy!” to the head Olympic coach Gregg Troy after his Florida Gators swimmer Ryan Lochte touched third in the 100 fly. It was a genuine gesture on Elliot’s part because it was a personal best time for Lochte, but it was also obviously, at least to those of us unfortified by four pints in one hour, a disappointing finish: to qualify for the Olympics in an individual event you must place first or second, so to come in third is to be first loser. Elliot’s shout-out came a split second after the mustachioed Troy—who in heated moments looks like a cross between Gary Oldman in his more dynamic personas and Super Mario after eating the fire flower—cried out, “Damnit!” while slamming his rolled-up heat sheet against the balcony rail. The brief stormy glance he then cast back in our direction instantly sobered Elliot, the alcohol suddenly operating on him as the depressant it really was.” (CW, 279-281)

You can watch U.S. Olympic Trials every night from 8 to 10pm EST until this Sunday June 23 via streaming or broadcast TV on NBC / Peacock.

I will have more Olympics and swim-related posts as we near August. If you enjoyed these excerpts and want to dig deeper into the swimming world in the leadup to the Paris Olympics, you can buy Chasing Water and/or read reviews here.

1. Btw, this is a first for me. I never reread my words once they’re published, let alone retype them. There’s too much of a heavy-handed editor in me who wants to apply slash and burn tactics or even just tweak sentences into eternity, so I find avoidance to be the best tactic.