“Just like that?” Stevie asked.
She nodded.
“They said Ed had done a great job getting me this far, but I needed a big-time coach who’d been to the Olympics before, and Joe was that guy,” she said. “I’m afraid I kind of lost it then. I started screaming. I told them Ed was my coach, he was my only coach, and no one else was going to coach me. My dad said this wasn’t my decision; that the grown-ups knew what was best, and they had done a lot of research before hiring Joe.
“And then I said things to my father I can hardly believe. I told him that he didn’t know a damn thing about swimming—”
“You said damn to your father?” Stevie said, earning himself a sharp look from Kelleher, who always reminded him to never interrupt someone in mid-story, no matter who it was.
Susan Carol nodded, starting to tear up. “I did. I can’t believe it, but I did. I told him I was the swimmer, not him, not J.P. Me. And that the only reason I was here and doing this well was because of Ed and that I still needed his support.
“He said it was done. He’d already told Ed about Joe and that Ed was upset but that he understood. I said, ‘Well, I don’t understand. I don’t understand why you are trying to cut me off from everyone who cares about me. Anyone I can rely on. Because I clearly can’t rely on anyone in this room.’
“I just left. I practically ran out of there. I don’t know if I can do this anymore. I don’t know if I want to do this anymore. It’s not worth it.”
She was sobbing by the time she finished. Stevie couldn’t help but wonder how many young athletes had been put through something like this. He wrapped his arms around her and looked at Tamara and Bobby, hoping they had some kind of answer. Bobby was leaning forward in his chair, hands under his chin.
“Have you talked to Ed since this happened?” he asked.
Susan Carol composed herself and nodded. “I called him on the way here,” she said. “He told me to be calm and to be at the practice pool at noon tomorrow just like we planned. That we’d worry about all this when the trials were over. He said he’ll be my coach in London if he has to pay his own way there and not to worry about it.”
Bobby nodded. “Ed’s a good guy,” he said. “I think you’ve put your trust in the right person. I’m surprised they sprang this on you tonight, though. I guess they figured Ed or Stevie would tell you anyway.”
Stevie looked at Susan Carol, who was nodding.
“I wouldn’t have, I don’t think,” Stevie said. “I don’t know if that’s right or not. I didn’t want to upset you before your race. But I don’t like the idea of lying to you either. And really, you are the toughest person I know.”
She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.
“I mean, if anyone can perform under pressure, it’s you,” Stevie said.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank all of you.”
They figured that Susan Carol’s team would back off as she prepared for the 200 fly, and they were right. Ed Brennan was waiting for her on the deck the next day as usual. She wrapped him in a big hug, and he gave her a squeeze too. But then he straightened up, gave her his usual swat on the back of the head, and said, “Okay, then. Into the pool,” and they got on with her workout.
But even though her father and agents weren’t hovering, Susan Carol couldn’t clear her mind the way she knew she had to. She swam so poorly on Thursday that she barely qualified for the final—finishing seventh among the semifinalists, meaning she would be swimming in lane one the next night. The top qualifier was Elizabeth Wentworth, who was quickly becoming the star of the meet.
“It’s actually not all bad that everyone is focusing on Wentworth,” Ed Brennan said, biting into a piece of toast late on Thursday night. Stevie, Bobby, and Tamara had driven to the outskirts of town to meet Susan Carol and Ed at an all-night diner once they had finished their stories.
“My dad is barely speaking to me,” Susan Carol had told Stevie when he asked if he knew she was meeting them. “I think they’ve all decided this isn’t the time to push me. Joe Berger did come up to me on the deck tonight after I warmed up to ask if I felt better than I did in the morning.”
“What’d you say?” Stevie asked.
“I told him it wasn’t really any of his business.”
“You can bet that’ll get reported back.”
“I really don’t care at this point.”
Stevie knew she meant that. The problem was that she didn’t care about anything at the moment. Susan Carol’s greatest strength was her passion. She cared about doing what was right and not letting the bad guys win. But now the best guy she had ever known—her dad—appeared to have thrown in with the bad guys. And clearly it was affecting her swimming. And if Susan Carol had taught Stevie anything about swimming, it was that you could not fake the 200 fly. With a sprint you could just hit the water, blank out your mind, and go as hard as you possibly could. The 200 fly required being in great physical and mental shape. If you weren’t thinking with absolute clarity when you stood on the block, there was no way you could swim your best.
Dinner was quiet—clearly they all had a lot on their minds.
“What do you mean it’s better if everyone is focusing on Wentworth?” Kelleher said, picking up Coach Brennan’s thought.
“He means I should be able to concentrate because I won’t have people coming at me all day long,” Susan Carol said. “And he’s right. I just have to get my head cleared of all this so I can swim tomorrow night.”
“Maybe you should sit down with your dad and just tell him exactly how you feel, get it all out,” Stevie said.
“Bad idea,” Ed Brennan said. “Too complicated. That’s for later, before we leave for London. This right now is pretty simple, actually. Susan Carol, you have to decide if you want to swim the 200 fly in the Olympics. I don’t mean ‘Yeah, I’d sure like to.’ I mean you want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted in your life. That’s the way you swam the 100. If you don’t feel that way, you should scratch, let the first alternate swim because being in the final will be the thrill of a lifetime for her. If you’re not thrilled to be swimming tomorrow night, you shouldn’t swim.”
Stevie was a little shocked.
“Ed, has anyone ever been thrilled to swim a 200 fly?” Kelleher asked half joking, trying to lighten the mood.
Ed looked him right in the eye without a hint of a smile when he responded. “Only the great ones,” he said.
Maybe it was Ed Brennan’s tough-love, post-midnight talk, but something clicked for Susan Carol the next morning. Unlike Wednesday night, when she had tossed and turned and had nightmares most of the night, she slept soundly and didn’t wake up until after ten o’clock. For someone accustomed to being up most mornings at 5:30, that was major.
She went to the pool to meet Ed for her late-morning warm-up swim and was bursting with energy, wishing she could swim the race right then.
Sitting in the ready room that night with the other seven swimmers, she was convinced she was going to win. The others all looked nervous, which was perfectly normal. They were swimming for the chance to race in the Olympics. Only she and Wentworth already had spots on the team clinched.
They marched onto the deck to huge cheers, Susan Carol leading the way since she was in lane one. That’s the way it should be—qualifying times aside—she told herself because when this was over, she was going to be leading the way again. The introductions seemed to take about an hour because Susan Carol was dying to get on the block. Finally she heard her three favorite words: “Take your mark …”
And they were off. Susan Carol was swimming next to Penny Bates. The only thing she knew about Bates was that she would probably go out slow and come back fast. If Bates was close to her at the 50 or the 100, that would be a bad sign.
She wasn’t worried. The first 50 felt easy. She found her rhythm quickly and reminded herself to stay low and stay smooth—that was her mantra for the first 150 meters most of the time. But she wasn�
�t going to let Wentworth or any of the other swimmers in the middle of the pool get out too fast on her. That was the disadvantage of being in an outside lane: The only time she could really see the top qualifiers was when she turned.
The way she saw it, five swimmers had a chance to finish in the top two: Aline Wylie, Jane Blythe, Teresa Crippen, Elizabeth Wentworth, and herself. The other four were in lanes three to six. As she stretched to the wall at the 50 and swiveled her legs to turn, she glanced at the middle of the pool and saw that no one else had reached the wall. She couldn’t even see Bates.
Normally, leading at the 50 of a 200 would have semi-panicked her. Now she smiled as she pushed off. She knew—just knew—she hadn’t put anything extra into the first length and she was still out front. She wouldn’t really get another look at the other swimmers until the 150, but that was okay; they wouldn’t be seeing her out here in lane one either. Her second length normally took twenty-five strokes. This time she only needed twenty-four, which meant she was doing a good job of keeping her stroke long.
As she turned at the 100-meter mark, she could hear the drumbeat of noise in the arena rising. She assumed it was because the race was close. She reminded herself not to get caught up in racing anyone on this length. It was way too soon. Stay low, stay easy, she kept repeating as she closed in on the 150 wall.
As she picked her head out of the water at the turn, she could hear very clearly that the building was going crazy. When she glanced across the pool, she could see that she still had the lead. By how much she wasn’t sure—she just knew no one else was on the wall when she was and if someone had been ahead of her, she would have seen her pushing off.
Now, she told herself, now the race starts. This was what all those early mornings were about, the sets of 200s, the crawling out of the pool and lying on the deck too tired to even stand. The next fifty meters were what all of that had been for.
Halfway home, for the first time all night, she felt her arms starting to tighten. It was okay, though, she could handle tightness. It wasn’t the piano, just a small piano bench. She began to pick up her kick and made certain that each stroke was stretched out as far as she could get her arms to go. She knew her stroke was shorter now in the final meters—but she wanted to get everything she could out of each one.
Then she was under the flags and she knew she had never gone this fast in the 200 fly before. The question was, how fast had the other girls gone? Just about out of air, she forced herself to stay down for the last three strokes. As she always told Stevie, she would have plenty of time to breathe later.
One stroke, two, three, and she was on the wall—gasping as she pulled her head out of the water. She gasped again when she looked to her right just in time to see Wentworth and Crippen hit the wall. Then came the others—behind them. She almost didn’t want to look up at the board, but when she did, she gasped again.
Next to her name was the prettiest sight you could see in swimming: the number 1. She had blown away her best time and had blown away the field, finishing in 2:01.96—a new American record, less than a second away from the world record. Wentworth had finished second in 2:03.44—Susan Carol’s exact time in Shanghai. Crippen was third in 2:03.97. No one else had broken 2:05.
From out of the cauldron of sound, she heard Ed’s voice saying, “Unbelievable, just unbelievable.” Blinking up at him, she saw tears in his eyes. She had never seen that before.
Wentworth and Crippen had both come under the lane lines to congratulate her. When she climbed out of the water, she saw the NBC people and the USA Swimming people and the photographers rushing at her.
Ed managed to get five seconds alone with her before they spirited her away.
“That break you got the last couple of days from all the attention?” he said, talking into her ear so she could hear and no one else could.
“Yeah?” she said.
“It’s over.” He grinned.
“Soon as you finish with Andrea Kremer, we have to get you right to Costas,” someone was saying.
Ed was right. The real work was just beginning.
16: LONDON CALLING
Stevie hadn’t thought it possible that a city could feel more crowded and more intense than New York. But London quickly proved him wrong.
Maybe it was just the out-of-sorts feeling he had watching traffic go by on the wrong side of the road during the cab ride from Heathrow Airport to the Gloucester Hotel.
“Do you get used to it?” he asked Bobby Kelleher, who had covered fourteen Wimbledons and had spent a good deal of time in Great Britain.
“No,” Kelleher answered. “Every instinct you have driving a car or even crossing a street is wrong when you’re here. You have to stop and think about it all the time.”
Most of the media were staying in rooms set aside by the International Olympic Committee, which, according to Bobby, were little more than glorified dorm rooms.
“The media isn’t exactly the IOC’s main priority, so the accommodations are usually lousy,” Kelleher had said. “If it’s a night or two, no big deal, but when you’re going to be someplace for a couple weeks, it makes a difference.”
Kelleher always stayed at the Gloucester when he covered Wimbledon and had become friends with the general manager over the years. He’d made arrangements a long time ago for him and Tamara to stay there during the Olympics. And when Stevie had been added to the traveling party, he had been able to get bumped to a junior suite, meaning Stevie would be sleeping on a pullout couch in a sitting room—which was fine with him. He was just excited to be here.
“Once we get to the hotel, we’ll take the subway to Olympic Park every day,” Kelleher had explained. “The Gloucester is a block from the Gloucester Road underground station. That’s what’s great about it—location. It’s right in Kensington: lots of restaurants, not too far from Harrods, where we’ll have to shop at some point so you can tell people you were there, and, most important for you, twenty-four-hour room service.”
That sounded perfect to Stevie.
The first thing he wanted to do when they got to the hotel was eat. The plane had left New York just after 10 a.m., and with the five-hour time change they had landed at Heathrow at a few minutes before 10 p.m. It had been close to 11 by the time they had wended their way through customs, gotten their luggage, and found the taxi line—or, as Kelleher explained, the taxi queue. “In London there are no lines,” he said. “But there are plenty of queues.” By the time they pulled up to the Gloucester, Stevie was starved.
He knew he would have to wait until morning to call Susan Carol. She had flown over with the rest of the American swim team a week earlier, on July 18. The opening ceremony was now just two days away, and Susan Carol would swim her first race—a 100-butterfly heat—the day after that.
There had been many scuffles with her dad and the Lightning Fast people since the trials, and many desperate emails and texts and phone calls as she vented her frustrations. The latest drama was about whether she should take part in the opening ceremony.
They don’t want me to do it, she had written. Apparently you have to be on your feet for quite a while waiting to march in and they’re nervous about that. A lot of people who are swimming on Saturday aren’t going to go, so they aren’t being completely crazy. But who knows if I’ll ever be on an Olympic team again? How could I possibly miss it?
Ed is okay with it. He checked, and apparently while you’re waiting, they have seating areas reserved for athletes who have to compete the next day so you don’t have to stand for too long. And really, I don’t have to swim all that fast to make the semis.
The best news of all had come earlier: The Joe Berger-as-coach experiment had ended before it even began. After Susan Carol’s incredible swim in the 200 fly in Omaha (and after her refusal to be coached by anyone else), Don Anderson had decided to stick with Ed Brennan. Plus, he had asked J. P. Scott directly if he did in fact, represent Joe Berger.
Turns out Ed had that one exactl
y right, Susan Carol had written. And the best part is that I think the whole incident finally made my dad step back and take a fresh look at J.P.
Shortly before boarding the plane in New York, Stevie had gotten a text from Susan Carol saying she had also won the opening ceremony battle. After receiving assurances from the US coaches that she wouldn’t have to stand for too long, Reverend Anderson had sided with her against the Lightning Fast folks.
“Maybe her dad is coming around,” Stevie said, showing Kelleher the text while they were boarding. “This makes two wins in a row for the good guys.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” said Kelleher, always the last skeptic standing. “We’ll know more after she swims the 100. Sarah Sjöström is looking really strong. I think she’s got the edge over Susan Carol in that race. So let’s see how they react if she gets beaten.”
“What if she does win?”
“Well, then the pressure’s off. Or on. If she wins, Susan Carol will officially be the It Girl of the Games.”
Kelleher was right. She was already a huge headliner star of the games. She seemed to be in every pre-Olympic profile show or article or photo spread. Stevie had her on Google alerts for a while but finally turned it off. There were several fan sites dedicated to her, and Stevie had had his fill of reading about all the boys (and men) who were in love with Susan Carol. He knew jealousy was pointless. And Susan Carol had proven in the past that she wasn’t wowed by looks or money or star athletes.
Still …
He was off in Stevie-world getting ready to fight off … well … everyone for Susan Carol’s affections when they pulled up to the hotel. Before he was even out of the cab, the doorman was hugging Tamara like a long-lost relative.
“Bonus for us this summer, having you two back again,” he was saying to Tamara and Bobby. “Feels like you were here for Wimbledon last week.”
“Well, it was only three weeks ago,” Kelleher said. “So you aren’t far off. Edward, meet our friend and colleague Steve Thomas.”
Rush for the Gold: Mystery at the Olympics Page 12
