Post by Admin on Jun 25, 2021 22:13:49 GMT
It was years in the making, a climb built on the archetypal elements of swimming success: grueling workloads; dedication to pre-dawn training; difficult teenage choices made to prioritize the pursuit of excellence. Living in Louisville and competing for Lakeside Swim Club, which has produced Olympic swimmers since 1936, helped. Coming from a family of swimmers also helped: Tricia, my wife, swam at Northwestern; Brooke's older brothers, Mitchell and Clayton, swam at Missouri and Georgia, respectively. We were all in it together. Brooke was the best of the bunch, possessing a toughness and perseverance passed down from her mother.
Her dedication, talent, peers and coaches elevated her everywhere a swimmer could go—state championships, a scholarship to powerhouse Stanford, NCAA championships, a place on the USA Swimming national team, major international meets. Everywhere except the very top. The Olympics.
But Brooke never once said out loud the Olympics was her goal, and actually resisted the premise of gearing her career toward that. Her interests and passions extended in many directions beyond the only swimming competition that matters to most people. She wanted to see how good she could be, and she wanted to be an Olympian. But she told her Stanford coaches she did not want to come to the pool every day thinking about making the Olympics.
It was better—safer emotionally—to keep that in the background. The task was too daunting, the chances too slim, to carry that weight daily. She feared disappointing people she knew who had put her on an Olympic pedestal years earlier. So it was compartmentalized for as long as possible, until the calendar demanded she confront it—a demand she almost rejected.
The closer she got to that five-ring summit, the harder it became. The doubts and the fear and the weight of expectation made the last year very difficult, with several jolts from the COVID-19 pandemic adding to the burden. And then there was this olympic trials meet itself, always a cauldron of pressure but with a uniquely stressful twist just for her. The last week was the best and the worst, in varying doses.
How did she get there, in the very end? (And I do mean the very end. Stay with me.) By overcoming one trauma at a time.
Brooke Forde (third from left) poses with teammates, from left: Bowe Becker, Patrick Callan, Bella Sims, Catie Deloof, Hunter Armstrong and Jake Mitchell during their medal ceremony during the 2021 U.S. Olympic Team Swimming Trials.
May 28
A text from Greg Meehan just before 9 a.m. ET, 6 a.m. in California: Brooke has tested positive for COVID-19. Again. Minutes later, here comes another distraught phone call from her.
She is stunned—she’s fully vaccinated and already had the virus that same calendar year. She is devastated—16 days out of Olympic Trials, Stanford wants to send her into two-week quarantine. She might as well not even go to Omaha after being out of the water for that long, that close to her first event. It’s a cataclysmic development.
Ten terrible hours ensue, in which Stanford resists giving her a second COVID-19 test and we resist having her report to quarantine. Medical and legal advice are gathered, in preparation for a fight. She gets a rapid antigen test that is negative. Finally, Stanford re-tests her original sample and finds it was a false positive.
Crisis averted. But at the expense of a week’s worth of emotional energy.
June 13
It is, at long last, go time. Five years and a lifetime in the making, the immensely pressurized Olympic trials are starting. The 400 IM is the first day. The Reticent Olympian is here.
Today is also Stanford graduation day. While her senior classmates are going through commencement back on The Farm, Brooke is trying to make the Olympic team. She had her picture taken on the pool deck in Omaha in cap and gown with teammates and friends Katie Ledecky and Katie Drabot, a lovely ode to their parallel tracks of achievement. The pride in earning a Stanford degree is immense, but also a secondary emotion on this day.
Never at her best in morning preliminaries, Brooke labors through the race and barely qualifies for finals, grabbing the last of eight spots. Having watched her in this race countless times, we could see the struggle. Normally a super-strong finisher, she wallows through the freestyle leg as if physically spent.
But she at least made finals, invoking the old swimming saying: if you have a lane, you have a chance. Maybe she could summon a 400 IM from 2018 or ’19, when she was one of the two fastest in America.
Ultimately, she couldn’t. She finished sixth, but her time was her best in two years and the winners went extremely fast. A tip of the cap to them, and a feeling of some closure for Brooke—given where she was in March, getting out in the middle of a race and declaring she’d never swim the event again, this was a triumph few people recognized. She left that race feeling justifiably proud of herself.