Natalie Coughlin has a feel
for the water
By CYNTHIA GORNEY // The New Yorker
// July 6, 2004
Coughlin has broken six world records and thirty-five national records, and,
in a sport that trains its stars to specialize in one or two strokes, her
records encompass all four-freestyle, butterfly, backstroke, and individual
medley, which requires a segment of breaststroke, her weakest stroke. (If she
were a baseball player, this would be roughly the equivalent of batting .350,
pitching a nohitter, and setting a stolen-base record,
all while playing against the best teams in the world.) But it is the
backstroke, Coughlin's signature race, that puts her
most memorably on display. The backstroke racing start is both explosive and
elegant: swimmers are taught to crouch against the pool wall, fists clenched
around the metal handles of the starting blocks, before springing up out of the
water and backward into the air. The hips rise, the body arcs, the reaching
fingertips cut the water as cleanly as the tip of an arrow, and it is just after
this point in the race that Coughlin, typically, vanishes.
I've seen spectators shake their heads in astonishment while Coughlin is
underwater during a backstroke heat, or grab each other and gesture excitedly at
the pool. The other racers have popped up already and are swimming hard, while
the surface of Coughlin's lane remains unbroken; from the poolside risers, if
the swimmers' kicking is not creating too much splash, a single streak of
swimsuit is discernible deep below, like a glimpse of a river trout. When
Coughlin finally appears, first her manicured hands and then the outstretched
rest of her, she has almost invariably left her opponents behind. From then on,
there often appear to be two separate events taking place in the pool-seven
vigorous young women racing furiously against one another, and a languid,
contemplative eighth person, her strokes slow and long, a body length or two
ahead of everybody else. "It was absolutely beautiful,"
By the time I met Jordan, this spring, at a Cal-Stanford meet in which
Coughlin was dispatching her opponents in various distances of butterfly and
freestyle, I had heard Coughlin's swimming described not only as beautiful,
which is something people frequently say about it, but also as a kayak slicing
past rowboats, a ballet performed amid polka dancers, and a symphonic instrument
tuned one octave lower than all the others. These were coaches' metaphors, not
sportswriters'; in recent months, coaches trying to explain to me what happens
when Coughlin is in water have made reference to dolphins, cheetahs, gummy
worms, screwdrivers, knives, javelins, bows, and the hockey player Gordie Howe. ("I grew up in
The Trials, which last for a week, begin on July 7th, in
Coughlin was a sensation at sixteen, and then she was not, and then she was
again, and what has happened to her in the past six years is sometimes cast, in
swimming circles, as a cautionary tale about the burden of expectation and the
fragility of physical gift. On the Cal campus, where she is majoring in
psychology, Coughlin was indistinguishable this year from all the other
sweatpants-clad students hurrying to class with cell phones pressed to their
ears, except that during any given week she was simultaneously negotiating an
Olympics preparatory training regimen, a backlog of interview and photo-shoot
requests, and a full courseload. I once asked her how
she was managing it, and she gave me a quick, sharp look before answering. "I
had a small version of this in my teen-age years, so I learned to get used to
it," she said. "Then I fell off the map."
Zennie Coughlin, Natalie's mother, has been
asked the same question about her daughter so many times that she has a
good-humored stock reply. "I was pregnant with Natalie and swimming in my
maternity suit," she says. "So Natalie was swimming before
she was born." At that time, the Coughlins lived in
Natalie began
swimming in neighborhood clubs and racing in competitions around the age of six.
She was enthusiastic and fast, but not enough of either to generate much
excitement. Ray Mitchell, a coach, watched Natalie race for the first
time when she was about ten; she struck him as a determined thrasher, which is
what swimmers call racers who look as if they're at war with the water. Natalie's head was all over
the place; she didn't know how to keep her elbows up; her crawl stroke was a
lopsided gallop. She won, though. "The kid had one speed," Mitchell recalls,
"and that was all out."
Mitchell coached a team called the Terrapins, which was based at a suburban
public pool a half hour from the Coughlins' home.
Except for the fact that it was named after a Grateful Dead song, "Terrapin
Station," the club is a fairly typical component of the national network that
grooms pre-collegiate swimmers in this country-some six thousand organizations,
including Y.M.C.A.s, swim-club leagues, and
municipal-pool-based programs.
The classic swimmers' training regimen makes most other sports look sluggish;
by the time the most serious racers enter high school, they are already deep
into a year-round, twicea-day routine that can begin
long before sunrise and end after dusk. The Coughlins,
who were beginning to think that Natalie might be good
enough to earn a college scholarship, were told that Terrapins coaching pushed
hard and produced national-event qualifiers. At Coughlin's first big meet after
joining the Terrapins, a Junior Nationals competition in Washington State,
Mitchell watched her dive in for the thousand-yard-freestyle race-in competition
that's a brutally long swim-and tear through the first four laps so fast that
she was ahead of pace for the American adult record. She was thirteen years
old.
"Everybody was, like, 'What was
At sixteen, with the Sydney Olympics still a year and a half away, Coughlin
had set three national high-school records and was being named as a possible
Olympian in a multiplicity of strokes and distances, which would have placed her
on a short list of the century's most celebrated swimmers. "That's what really
blew us away," Mitchell says. "This kid was getting good at everything." What
she lacked was an internal modulator-she swam all out when she was tired, when
she was trying something new, when the times didn't matter at all. One afternoon
in March, 1999, Mitchell had his swimmers doing butterfly sets: three fast
lengths, rest a few seconds, three fast lengths again. "Typical Natalie set, racing the
guys," Mitchell remembers. "She's going out incredibly fast. She's doing some
amazing times. Then the technique starts to deteriorate. I can see the stroke
getting short, she's dropping her elbows, but she's still flying down the pool,
and it's one of those sets where the guys are starting to get pissed. And
there's a fleeting thought in my mind: I shouldn't let her do this last
one."
But he did. That night, Coughlin was awakened by searing pain in her left
shoulder. "It was just throbbing like crazy," she recalls. "Hit-your-thumb-with-a-hammer-type pain." She resolved to
bully herself through the pain, in the stoic-athlete manner, but at practice the
next morning she jumped into the water to help pull the pool cover off and found
that she couldn't move her arm. The diagnosis was a tear in the labrum, the
cartilage rim around the shoulder joint. For the next fifteen months-long enough
to embarrass herself at several important meets and then fail at the 2000 Trials
to make the Olympic team in any event-Coughlin was a swimmer in rehab: icing,
taking anti-inflammatories, consulting orthopedists,
driving herself forty-five minutes each way to physical therapy. When she used
her arms in the water, her shoulder hurt and made her feel slow and clumsy; for
months at a time, Coughlin spent her Terrapins workouts in what she called the
"gimp lane," where she sometimes logged three and a half miles (in a
twenty-five-yard pool, that's almost two hundred and fifty laps) using nothing
but her kick.
"I cried probably every single practice," she told me. "And crying when
you're swimming is bad, because you can't breathe. Your nose is running. It gets
worse and worse. Ray called me an emotional basket case. After a few months of
this, I was so sick of it I didn't care about anything. It went from 'My goal is
the Olympic team in three events' to 'Get the Olympic
Trials over with.' If college wasn't around, and I wasn't going to get a free
education out of it, I would have quit. I
The competition-pool area on the U.C. Berkeley campus is a cheerless expanse
of water and concrete, flanked on three sides by the athletic building and
blocked from the street by a low wall that reads "
Four years ago, when McKeever was recruiting
Coughlin for the
McKeever says that her initial instinct, once
Coughlin was a freshman on the twenty-four-woman squad, was to back off and let
her swim. But McKeever observed Coughlin carefully
during practices, gathering ideas, and one day during that first season she
invited an Oregon-based stroke coach named Milt Nelms
down to
Watching Coughlin in the water, Nelms says, made
him think of a wounded animal that has had to figure out how to compensate in
order to survive. "Like a coyote that's chewed its leg off in a trap," he says.
"When you have a trauma like that, your nervous system creates movement patterns
to avoid utilizing whatever's hurt. It was like she was bucking on one side, and
maintaining her movement on the other-like jamming a skateboard forward on one
side and kind of coasting on the other."
McKeever and Nelms called
Coughlin out of the pool, and what he remembers most vividly from that afternoon
is the way she listened to their suggestions-ease up on the aggressiveness of
her arm stroke, soften the angles, make certain to breathe on both sides rather
than turning her head in only one direction-and then jumped into the water and
swam as though she had absorbed everything they had said, completely and all at
once. Never before or since, Nelms told me, has he
seen an elite swimmer respond so effectively to coaching guidance: "I work with
athletes, and with issues like that, for
weeks."
Nelms believes that Coughlin is a physical genius
in water, and when I asked him what he meant he had to think about how to
explain it. In many respects, a swimmer who is good enough for the Olympics is
like any other champion athlete-exceptionally well coordinated, exceptionally
competitive, and willing to devote enormous effort both to over-all conditioning
and to training for a single sport. But most of us learn to swim before we're
old enough to appreciate just how daunting and counterintuitive a proposition
rapid swimming actually is. The body has to propel itself horizontally, for one
thing, which is weird for human beings. Gravity has stopped working in the
familiar way it does on land. ("You no longer have a platform," Nelms says. "Plus, since your lungs are your aerobic
chamber, it's like a water-polo ball is trapped inside your body, so there's a
part of you that falls
Coaches know that this push-back factor, or resistance, increases
exponentially as a swimmer's time drops, and that each small time improvement
demands significantly more physical effort. Fast swimmers manage this resistance
by both exploiting and eluding it, pulling against the thickness of the water
while simultaneously slithering the body through. The more water they can
"hold," as swimmers say, and the more efficiently they slither, the farther each
stroke propels them; that's why so many of the swiftest racers are not only
strikingly graceful but also look as though their limbs are moving more slowly
and easily than everybody else's.
There's no visible fight with the water at all when a great swimmer is
racing, and although coaches and biomechanics experts have learned a lot in
recent decades about how this works-nearly every development in modern swimming,
from stroke changes to the invention of the low-drag bodysuit, is essentially a
refinement in managing the resistance of water-they also know that some people
just seem to feel water, as they move through it, in ways that others cannot.
This is meant literally, as in some heightened physical perception of the water
around the body, and without it, in competitive swimming, nothing else much matters. "The greatest athlete in the world, the most
genetically gifted, can come into your program as an eight-year-old," says John
Walker, the
Nelms says that what sets Coughlin apart from other
world-class swimmers he has known is her uncanny ability to connect coaching
suggestions instantly to that feel-as though there were a direct route from her
ears to her muscles and nerve endings, with no detour through the thinking
brain. Both Nelms and McKeever regard this ability as central to Coughlin's speed.
McKeever recalls talking briefly to Coughlin, moments
before the start of one freestyle race during her sophomore year, and giving her
a new suggestion for improving her turns at the wall. "Then she just
But there is also, famously, the Natalie Coughlin kick.
Coughlin's miserable injury year, as it turned out, delivered her to
McKeever had one additional coaching directive for
Coughlin, a particularly unorthodox one in the high-discipline, high-yardage
culture of competitive swimming. Once in a while, McKeever insisted, Coughlin was to ease up and stay away
from the pool for a few days: get out of Berkeley and go surfing (she describes
herself as a "decent" surfer), or spend some time with her boyfriend, a U.C.
Santa Barbara swimmer whom Coughlin had met during her Terrapins years. Within a
year of her arrival at
By the time I arrived in
All season, Coughlin's races had been very, very fast; in dual meets,
The first hint of trouble in Barcelona came during one of the opening events
of the meet: a hundred-metre butterfly that placed
Coughlin and the three-time Olympian Jenny Thompson-who, at the age of thirty,
was back in competition while attending Columbia's medical school full time-in
adjoining lanes. It was a morning qualifier, and the risers were nearly empty of
spectators; the top sixteen from these heats would proceed to an evening
semifinal. Thompson won, by just under a second, which at that level of
competition is a considerable lead. I heard surprised murmuring in the press
seats, as Coughlin hurried away for her warm-down swim. When she reemerged some
hours later for the butterfly semifinal, she had been demoted from lane four,
the traditional mid-pool placement for the swimmer with the fastest qualifying
time, and assigned a lane closer to the wall. She came in third, behind Thompson
and a Polish swimmer. One of the American sportswriters turned to me, when the
heat was over, and remarked, "Natalie looks like
shit."
That night, at the press conference, Coughlin was distracted and subdued. The
evening had actually ended well for the American women, who won their first
relay; Coughlin had swum the opening leg, but Thompson had heroically anchored
it home, and when the reporters' attention turned briefly to Coughlin she talked
mostly about admiration for her teammate's decision to come out of retirement.
"Every time she swims, she's getting better and better," Coughlin said, smiling.
Then somebody asked her about rumors that she was sick. She said that she had
run a fever the night before, but she sounded dismissive about it. "I think the
first day, also, is rough," Coughlin said. "The first swim, I was in a bit of a
daze."
The next morning, early, was the women's hundred-metre backstroke. Coughlin's celebrated world record, 59.58,
loomed on the scoreboard above each round of qualifying-heat swimmers, nobody
coming anywhere near it: 1:04.94 for the Israeli; 1:02.93 for the Canadian;
1:03.16 for the Finnish girl, who had been touted as a serious threat. Finally,
the last heat was called, and here now was Coughlin, in the center lane in the
fastest group, crouching, springing, disappearing, reaching-except that something was wrong. The Spanish swimmer
was pulling ahead of her. Then the Chinese swimmer pulled ahead of her, and
Coughlin's measured stroke quickened, as though she were grabbing at the water;
then the Croatian pulled ahead, and the Zimbabwean, and as the women touched in
at the wall the scoreboard times lit up and the arena grew quiet. Of the sixty
starting competitors in the hundred-metre backstroke,
Coughlin had come in twenty-second, at 1:03.18. She had not even made the
semifinals cut.
This time, the reporters were yelling into their cell phones as they ran
toward the roped-off passage where the swimmers were supposed to give post-race
interviews. The atmosphere was agitated and sad, as though a famous racehorse
had just collapsed on the track. An Australian coach was shaking his head and
saying, "Damn shame, a champ like that," and after a long wait, and many
swimmers expressing bewilderment in many languages, Coughlin came out. She had
tears in her eyes. "I've had a fever," she said. "I thought it was getting
better. But I think last night's swims took a toll on me. It's one of those
challenges I have to face. I'm working with a doctor." Somebody asked if she was
disappointed, and she said of course she was, but she didn't say it snappishly;
nor did she volunteer any of the details that we were to learn later, such as
the fact that she hadn't slept for two days, and had lain in her hotel bed that
morning alternately sweating and shivering. (The fever peaked at nearly a
hundred and three degrees.) She just stood there, red-eyed and lank-haired and
polite, and said that at least not making the backstroke semifinal would allow
her to rest for the next couple of days. That night, she swam the hundred-metre-butterfly final, which Jenny Thompson won, in 57.96,
setting a new World Championships record. Coughlin came in last.
Natalie
Coughlin explained her personal racing strategy to me this way, one afternoon a
few weeks after returning home from the Worlds: "Go out hard. Come back hard."
She chuckled as she said it; she had just finished recounting her feverish
backstroke heat-"The whole thing just felt like crap. It was slow, it was
difficult, it was obvious that everybody else was ahead of me"-and when I asked
why she decided to swim again that night, knowing that she was sick, knowing
that she was likely to fail, she shrugged. "It's a personal thing," she said.
"You're competing not only for yourself but for your country. For me, scratching
is almost cowardly, like being afraid. I didn't want to do it, but I couldn't
get any worse than eighth. I did my best. My goal in that race was just to go
out as hard as I possibly could, and see how long I could hold on. I got a
pretty good advantage off the start-I have a really fast start-and then died.
Died miserably. It was incredibly painful. Just burning, lactic acid, legs, arms. It's awful. But you
get that feeling a lot, even when you're doing well sometimes. So that really
hurt. I gave everything I had in that fly."
In competitive swimming, as in track, numbers are ubiquitous, precise, and
tyrannical. Swimming people like that about the races, the cold impartiality of
the timing clock, and when I was following Coughlin's pre-Olympics season I
occasionally made the outsider's observation about how relentlessly the system
drives its best young athletes toward a single instant on a single day. This is
intrinsic to Olympic sports, of course, but because so many swimming events are
over in times like one minute three seconds and eighteen one-hundredths of a
second, the compression factor struck me as almost unbearable: five or ten years
of twice-a-day training, all those laps, all those drills, all those hours in a
pool-"the cement prison," I once heard a college coach say-all reduced to the
final fraction of a second in which one outstretched hand reaches the timing
touch pad first.
I expected coaches and swimmers to scoff at me for brooding about this, but
they didn't. "You see how thin the line is in our sport," a staff member from
U.S. Swimming, the Colorado-based governing body for the sport, said to me three
days into the Barcelona meet. "No matter what Natalie does over the next
twelve months, all that counts is what happens in
A lot of technical work goes on at U.S. Swimming-the use of cameras and
computers to calibrate racers' exact stroke cycles, for example-and one
experimental new project is the collaboration of two engineering professors, one
at Rutgers and the other at George Washington University, both experts in fluid
mechanics. Deconstructing precisely what happens when a solid object moves
forward in water is much harder than you might imagine, especially when the
solid object contains the minute, pulsing variations of a living creature's
muscles and skin. No engineer has ever been able to build an underwater vessel
as efficient or maneuverable as a fish, and when the computers at G.W. were put
to the task, recently, of analyzing a single swimmer's stroke-using video clips
to create a computer simulation, and then displaying all the stroke-created
underwater eddies and turbulence that a human eye would be unable to see-the job
took the computers hundreds of hours of processing time. "And these are not your
garden-variety computers," Rajat Mittal, the
professor supervising the G.W. research, told me. "These are souped-up machines."
I asked Mittal what a
comparably time-consuming simulation might be for his souped-up machines. "Gene sequencing," he said. "Galaxy formation." Both Mittal and I are lap
swimmers, dedicated but unencumbered by any natural talent, and he seemed to
understand why I was so taken with the idea that a computer might find human
movement through water as complex an enterprise, in its own modest way, as the
creation of new galaxies. One of the video clips that Mittal is currently
feeding into his simulation program is of Natalie Coughlin, sinuous
as a ribbon, underwater dolphin-kicking seventeen times in a row down the length
of a pool. Should it ultimately prove useful as a training aid, one result of
this research might be computer-calculated instructions for the mechanically
perfect stroke, the one that science has determined will produce the lowest
turbulence, the optimal arrangement of invisible
eddies, the swiftest route through the water. But the things that a computer is
least equipped to factor in-drive, vulnerability, the mysterious relationship
between racer and water-are the things that Coughlin makes swimming people talk
about. "It's like listening to Yo-Yo Ma," Boomer says. "When you listen to him
play, you don't understand how he does it. We don't understand how she does it.
In my forty years of coaching, I've seen glimpses of that any number of times.
But she's right up there at the top."
Coughlin's last races as a