Rush for the Gold: Mystery at the Olympics

by John Feinstein

  Stevie would actually be covering the meet for the Herald. Bobby Kelleher was going down to write columns, but the Herald wasn’t sending a staffer, so that meant Stevie would get to write the leads. Susan Carol had told Stevie that the Post had wanted her to write a daily journal on her experiences at the meet, but the Lightning Fast people had nixed it.

  They said we don’t give away anything, she told Stevie in an email. Anything I do outside a press conference, they want to get something in return.

  Does this mean you can’t talk to me? Stevie had emailed back.

  I hope not, she answered, without a hint of humor.

  Stevie watched Susan Carol’s Wednesday press conference live on ESPN News. Apparently the Lightning Fast people had told ESPN they would change Susan Carol’s pre-meet press conference to Wednesday if it would be covered live. And ESPN had agreed.

  Susan Carol walked into the press conference looking like a human billboard. She had on her Speedo sweats with a different corporate logo on each arm. She was wearing a Kellogg’s baseball cap. When a photographer asked if she could take off her cap, she shook her head. “Can’t,” she said. “The Kellogg’s people want y’all to see their logo.”

  Stevie groaned. His girlfriend looked like a cross between a NASCAR driver and a PGA Tour golfer. Getting the logos airtime was their key to success in life.

  But apart from that, Susan Carol handled the press conference with ease. When someone asked her about missing three days of school, she laughed. “Oh, I brought my books with me,” she said. “And my teachers are being nice about letting me make up the work. My whole school’s been so supportive. One of my teachers asked if she could come with me.” The southern accent was turned on full power and so was The Smile. Stevie figured her sponsors would be very happy.

  On Thursday afternoon, he watched the Phelps press conference. Michael Phelps was clearly an old pro at this, but he didn’t have Susan Carol’s spark or charm. Then again, he didn’t need to sell himself: He’d already made his millions, and the 2012 Olympics would be the last swim meet of his career.

  After watching that press conference, Stevie headed for the airport, and by nine o’clock he was in Charlotte too. He took a taxi from the airport to the downtown Marriott, where a lot of the swimmers—including Susan Carol—were staying. Bobby Kelleher had somehow secured a suite so that Stevie could share it with him and his wife, fellow newspaper columnist Tamara Mearns.

  “A buddy of mine named Terry Hanson is a big-shot radio guy here,” he had explained. “He was able to get us the upgrade.” Most of Kelleher’s stories on how he got things done began with the words “a buddy of mine.”

  Stevie called Susan Carol from the cab, hoping they could see each other as soon as he got to the hotel.

  “Why don’t you come to my room when you get here,” she said. “You can order some room service because I know you’re hungry and we can talk a little before I have to go to bed. My first swim is at 8:30 in the morning, so I have to be up by 6:30 to get over to the pool and warm up.”

  “Sounds great,” Stevie said, liking the idea of some quiet time, even if it would be limited by her need to get a good night’s sleep. “You’ve got 100 fly first, right?”

  “Right. Trials in the morning, finals at night.”

  “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  When the cab pulled up to the hotel, Stevie stopped at the front desk, where Kelleher had left him a key, and then he went straight to Susan Carol’s room. He knocked on the door and felt himself grinning in anticipation as he heard Susan Carol’s footsteps. He dropped his bags to prepare for a hug.

  The door opened and he put out his arms.

  “Can I help you?” Some guy in a pressed shirt and tie with perfect hair was standing in the doorway looking at him as if he had just landed from Mars. Stevie put his arms down.

  “I’m Stevie Thomas,” he said, forgetting that he introduced himself to strangers as Steve.

  “Oh yeah,” the guy said. “Come on in. You can stay for a few minutes. We told her this one time it was okay. The rest of the weekend, though, you’ll have to come to the press conferences like everyone else in the media.”

  O-kay. Not exactly the greeting he’d been hoping for.

  “Stevie?” he heard Susan Carol say. “Is that you?”

  Stevie raised an eyebrow at the guy and walked around him into what turned out to be the living room of a suite. Susan Carol jumped from an armchair to run across the room and hug him.

  “About time you got here,” she said, giving him a firm kiss on the lips, which he happily returned. Now that was more like it.

  As usual, Susan Carol looked great. She was wearing a blue-and-gold Goldsboro High School Swimming T-shirt, shorts with a Speedo logo on them, and flip-flops.

  “Is Goldsboro High one of your sponsors now?” he said, smiling.

  “No,” someone behind her said. “If we were out in public, they wouldn’t let her wear it, believe me.”

  Stevie recognized Ed Brennan, Susan Carol’s coach, who he had met when he had gone to Goldsboro to visit for a few days—before Susan Carol became a star.

  Coach Brennan walked over to shake Stevie’s hand. He was the only one in the room other than Susan Carol who appeared glad to see him.

  “Stevie, I guess you already met Bill at the door,” Susan Carol said, clearly unaware of their exchange. “This is J. P. Scott and Susie McArthur—they’re from Lightning Fast, like Bill. And this”—she was pointing at someone standing by the window—“is Billy McMullen. He’s from Speedo.”

  “And for the record, the flip-flops have our logo on them too,” Billy McMullen said, shaking hands with him and smiling, unlike the Lightning Fast people, who barely managed to nod in his direction.

  “What do you want to eat?” Susan Carol said, picking up a phone.

  Before Stevie could answer, J.P. was shaking his head. “Susan Carol, I think it’s too late to order any food for your friend. We really need to finish talking and get you off to sleep.”

  Susan Carol looked at her watch. “J.P., it’s 9:30. I can stay up another hour and get eight solid hours of sleep. I’m fine.”

  “You need to wind down,” J.P. said.

  “Talking with my friend is my way of winding down,” Susan Carol said, and hit a button on the phone to dial room service.

  “Stevie?” she said.

  “Burger, fries, Coke,” he said—his normal room-service order.

  “Anyone else?” she asked.

  “I’ll do the same thing,” Coach Brennan said, instantly winning Stevie’s loyalty for life.

  “Coach, don’t you think she needs her rest?” Susie said as Susan Carol was ordering.

  “I think hanging out with Stevie is exactly what she needs after her long day,” Ed Brennan said. “I think she could use a little space.”

  Susan Carol hung up. The Lightning Fast trio were now glaring at Ed Brennan.

  “We’re not done yet, Ed,” J.P. said.

  “I’m sure whatever you’ve got can wait till the morning.” Ed glared right back.

  “Well, I’ve got to get going,” Billy, the Speedo guy, said. “Good luck tomorrow, Susan Carol. I’ll see you at the pool.”

  That diffused the situation a bit and the Lightning Fast people all said their good-nights, some with less grace than others.

  As soon as the door closed, Stevie looked at Susan Carol and smiled.

  “Nice representation you’ve got there,” he said. “Super-friendly.”

  “You saw them on a good night,” Coach Brennan said.

  Susan Carol collapsed into one of the chairs. “I can’t wait to get into the pool in the morning and just swim. ”

  4: ON THE BLOCKS

  The moment Susan Carol had been waiting for came at 7:32 a.m. the next morning. That was the moment she found an opening among the swimmers warming up for the morning session of the 27th annual Charlotte UltraSwim and slipped into the water.

  Being in
the water was therapeutic for her. It always had been, ever since she had started to swim competitively at age twelve. No matter what else was going on in her life, the pool was a place she could escape. Focusing on her workout cleared her head in a way nothing else could.

  The scene in her room the night before with her various agents and sponsors had upset her. Having three or four people around her all the time, all seeming to want something from her, was exhausting. The more time she spent with them, the more she longed to escape. And then seeing how they treated Stevie, and hearing his take on them … In the reporting she and Stevie had done, especially on some of the really big stories, the agents they had encountered had been—almost without fail—people you couldn’t trust. That had even proved true of her own uncle on one story.

  And now every time J.P. began talking about how rich she was going to be, she remembered something Bobby Kelleher had said to her and Stevie early on: “You know how you can tell when an agent is lying? His lips are moving.”

  She knew the Lightning Fast people were good at what they did and that it was in their best interests for her to succeed. And yet she couldn’t shake the tension that built up whenever she talked to them. Even more, it worried her to see how friendly her dad had become with all three of the Lightning Fast people. It was strange that he seemed to trust people her instincts said shouldn’t be trusted.

  She had glided through the first 100 of her warm-up knowing she had to shake all those disturbing thoughts out of her head. As she went into her second flip turn and began to stretch out her stroke a little bit, she tried to focus on feeling her muscles loosening up as the cool water and her body meshed. She picked up her pace a little more, and by the time she popped her head out of the water at the end of her first 400, she felt far more relaxed. She took a long, deep breath and was about to push off when she heard Ed Brennan’s voice.

  “Remember, don’t over-sprint this morning,” he said. “We aren’t trying to go that fast until tonight. Don’t do more than about 1,200 or 1,300, then get on the blocks a couple of times and get out.”

  He was standing on the deck right above her, and she moved over to the lane line so she wouldn’t be in the way of other swimmers who were turning.

  “Got it on the sprints,” she said. “You sure that’s enough yardage?”

  “Plenty. You’re going to warm up again tonight, and you’ve got to swim the 200 fly twice tomorrow. You need rest right now more than yardage.”

  She nodded. Ed was the other person besides Stevie she trusted without question. A lot of coaches, especially small-town high school coaches, might have seen her sudden stardom as their way to a bigger, more lucrative job. Ed was happy coaching where he was—he just wanted what was best for her. She followed his instructions, finished her warm-ups, and was heading into the locker room to shower and change into a dry suit when she saw J.P. coming toward her dressed in a Speedo warm-up suit.

  “You ready, kid?” he asked.

  “J.P., how did you get down here?” she asked. “It’s supposed to be just swimmers and coaches on deck.”

  He smiled and pointed at the credential dangling around his neck, which said COMPETITOR SUPPORT. “They’ll give Phelps’s people pretty much anything they want,” he said. “These badges are for close friends.”

  “But you don’t represent Michael Phelps.”

  “The people running the meet don’t know that. Now look, are you ready to go? There’s media all over the place this morning. Phelps doesn’t swim until late, so you can knock their socks off early.”

  “I don’t want to knock anyone’s socks off in the morning, J.P. I just want to have a decent swim and be ready for the final tonight.”

  He frowned. “But it’s just the 100. You can swim it hard twice, right? It’d get great coverage.”

  She looked at him and shook her head. “I’ll take my swimming instructions from Ed, if you don’t mind. That’s what I need to be thinking about right now—swimming.”

  She slipped her feet into her flip-flops and headed for the locker room. It was 8:25 in the morning and she was already feeling stressed. The sooner she could get back in the water, the better.

  Stevie barely got to the pool in time to see Susan Carol swim. For once, Bobby Kelleher hadn’t planned ahead when it came to parking. When they got to the pool shortly after eight o’clock, there was a security guard blocking the entrance to the parking lot.

  “Completely full,” he said as Kelleher rolled down the window.

  Kelleher displayed his media credential. “I was told there was a section of the lot for media,” he said.

  The guard nodded. “There is. It’s full too.”

  Kelleher smiled. “You mind if I go take a look? Sometimes there’s a space that’s opened up or you can’t see.”

  The guard shrugged. “Be my guest,” he said. “But you aren’t going to find anything.”

  He was right. There were only eight spots designated media and no one to stop someone who wasn’t media from parking in them. Kelleher sighed. “This is the problem when you’re dealing with people who aren’t used to a lot of media showing up for their event.”

  “But they’ve had Phelps here before …”

  “Not in an Olympic year. And not with a budding star from in-state also swimming.”

  They circled back to the guard. Kelleher asked him if he had any ideas where they might park.

  “There’s a lot about two blocks down on your right,” he said. “But they’re gouging today. I think they’re charging fifteen dollars for the day. If I were you, I’d go on over to the McDonald’s and just park there. They won’t mess with you.”

  Kelleher thanked him and laughed as they drove away. “I guess gouging is a relative term,” he said. “In Washington, fifteen dollars a day to park is a good deal, and in New York you would figure something was wrong with the lot if they only asked for fifteen bucks.”

  They found a spot near the back of the McDonald’s lot and then Kelleher insisted on going inside for coffee.

  “Two reasons,” he said. “One, I could use another cup; two, I’ll have a receipt showing I was a customer in case there’s some problem.”

  Stevie was practically jogging—worried that they might miss Susan Carol’s swim—but Kelleher wasn’t nervous at all. “This isn’t the Olympics,” he said. “I’ve never been to a meet like this where they stuck to the timeline.”

  Kelleher had picked up both their credentials the day before, so they got right in and found what looked like the last two empty seats in the media seating section, which, thankfully, was a good deal larger than the parking area.

  Stevie saw that the swimmers climbing on the blocks were male and they were swimming the 200 freestyle. That was the event before the women’s 100 fly. He paged through the heat sheets they’d been handed and saw they were on heat eight of ten. There were eight heats in the women’s 100 fly, and Susan Carol was in the sixth. Christine Magnuson, who had the fastest American time in the event in the last year, was in heat eight. Taylor Ames, who swam for University of Tennessee Aquatics, had the second-fastest entered time and was in the seventh heat.

  Stevie could see how the system worked: The three fastest-seeded swimmers were in lane four of the last three heats with seeds four through six next to them in lane five. The sixth seed in the 100 fly was Becky Ausmus, Susan Carol’s high school rival. She was the only other pre-college swimmer seeded in the top twelve from what Stevie could see.

  The pool started to get loud. Stevie glanced up from his study of the heat sheets to see what was going on.

  “Lochte,” Kelleher said, pointing to where Ryan Lochte was climbing onto the blocks in lane four for the last heat of the 200 free. Lochte was considered the biggest threat to possibly outshine Phelps in London. He had beaten him the previous summer in Shanghai in both the 200 individual medley and the 200 freestyle. Phelps wasn’t swimming the 200 free because the order of the finals that night was men’s 200 free, women’s 100 f
ly, women’s 200 free, and men’s 200 fly. That would mean he’d have to swim in the 200-fly final about fifteen minutes after the 200 free, which wasn’t enough time to recover. Phelps had opted to swim the fly.

  Lochte blitzed the field in his heat, touching in 1:48.55—winning the heat by almost five seconds. “I’ll bet he’s under 1:45 tonight,” Kelleher said. “He’ll only be a couple seconds off the world record. The guy looks like he’s ready for London already.”

  “How much swimming have you covered?” Stevie asked.

  “A fair amount,” Kelleher said. “I’ve done several Olympics and trials, but Washington is also a huge swimming area.”

  Stevie was always amazed at the depth of Kelleher’s knowledge. He’d thought swimming might be one sport where Bobby had to do some studying. But the fact that he knew the world record in the 200 free off the top of his head told Stevie he was wrong.

  An announcement came into the media section: “Ryan Lochte will be available in thirty minutes in the interview room, which is at the diving-board end of the pool. Thirty minutes.”

  Stevie judged Susan Carol would be swimming in about fifteen minutes since the first heat of the 100 fly was being called to the blocks. He should have time to talk to Lochte after. Maybe he could ask him about Susan Carol—what did he know about her? Did he have a chance to watch her swim?

  As was often the case, Kelleher read Stevie’s mind. “Might be worth talking to Lochte, you know, ask him if the old swimmers notice the new ones,” he said.

  “I’m on it, boss,” Stevie said.

  Kelleher smiled. “I’m not your boss, I’m your colleague.”

  “You’re my CIC,” Stevie said. “Colleague in charge.”

  “I like that,” Kelleher said. He pointed at the pool as heat one was finishing. “Four heats to go.”

  Susan Carol had spotted Stevie and Kelleher when they walked in. She was toward the back of the deck, sitting in her chair, wearing headphones—not to listen to music but in the hope that no one would talk to her. The only person who knew she didn’t have any music clanging in her ears was Ed Brennan.