Here's the book on Beard: not afraid of 8 a.m.; misses her boyfriend, who lives abroad; can't get tickets to Arizona men's basketball games. Heinz Kluetmeier/SI

By John Walters

The world's most downloaded female athlete draws no stares -- not one -- as she strides intently across the Arizona campus. It's 7:48 a.m. Beard, clad in a gray u of a sweatshirt and khakis and clutching a cup of coffee as maternally as she once famously clutched a teddy bear on an Olympic medals podium, is determined not to be late for her 8 a.m., a course in business writing.

"Last week I was one minute late," says Beard, 23, "and when I got to class, the professor had locked the door. She was nice, though. She let me in."

This is what Amanda Beard, a three-time Olympian with seven career medals and the world record in the 200-meter breaststroke, is not doing: treading water. The Orange County native has a full-time modeling and endorsement schedule that takes her away from Tucson at least 100 days a year. She trains twice a day, for a total of five hours, with her former Wildcats teammates at the Hillenbrand Aquatic Center on campus. She goes to class. And she fields, from random faces on campus, the same question over and over.

"What are you doing now?" a female student asks Beard outside a Tucson pizzeria. "Just going to school and swimming?"

Beard is unfailingly polite -- and effortlessly unpretentious -- but such queries prompt her to roll those famous, fabulous blue orbs. "I'm really passionate about getting my education," says Beard, who began school in 1999 but is a junior in standing.

Amanda Beard is a paradox. In some ways she is a typical undergrad, struggling mightily and not always successfully to budget her time. Then again, Beard, who has a tattoo of a star on her left heel, is a celebrity, the brightest luminary in Tucson's astronomy-addled atmosphere. (You can add your own "celestial body" joke.) Seriously, has anyone in goggles ever been so Googled? By the closing ceremonies of last summer's Olympic Games, Beard was the most requested female athlete on Google, MSN, Yahoo! and Lycos.

When you consider both sides of Amanda Beard -- undergrad/overachiever -- your entire perspective does a flip turn. She's like any other college student. She's unlike any other college student. Consider:

• After her second year of college, in 2001, Beard spent two months backpacking across Europe. Then again, in order to make that trek she chose to skip swimming's world championships. "I'd just turned pro," she says. "My sponsors kinda scratched their heads about that one."

• Her best buds, besides fellow jocks such as men's basketball players Channing Frye and Salim Stoudamire, are her earbuds. "I love my iPod," she says. Then again, while other students pirate music, Beard has no trouble affording legal downloads. "I don't download other people's lists," she says. "I just buy songs off iTunes. Hello! It's only 99 cents a song."

• Beard considers Michael Phelps "a hottie." Then again, she's won only one fewer Olympic medal than he has and calls him "a little brother" -- they e-mail, chat or text-message weekly.

• Beard lives off-campus. Her roomies are a pair of pooches, Harlee and Jerry, and she lives next door to four rugby players. Then again, since her house was broken into, she has decided to move to a better neighborhood. Her new crib, which she just closed on, has 3,100 square feet and is located on two acres. Beyond her backyard is nothing but the Sonoran desert for miles and miles.

• Beard struggles with the headaches of maintaining a long-distance relationship -- and her boyfriend, Ryk Neethling, isn't only one state or one time zone away; he's 30 hours away by plane, in South Africa. Then again, the two still manage to see each other nearly every month, for a week or two. And Neethling, a gold medalist in the 4x100 freestyle relay last summer in Athens, was recently voted South Africa Cosmo's "Sexiest Man for 2005." (Don't fret; you didn't have a shot anyway.)

Amanda Beard has an awesome, albeit impractical job: being Amanda Beard. She makes personal appearances all over the country. Today, a Tuesday, immediately after business writing -- the only class she is taking this semester -- she must fly to Atlantic City, where she will spend five hours on Wednesday making an appearance as part of her endorsement deal with Pentair. She will immediately fly back to Tucson, arriving late Wednesday evening, just in time to grab a few hours' sleep before her class meets again at 8 a.m. on Thursday.

"I get scared when I approach teachers and tell them that I'll probably be able to attend only half the classes," says Beard, a retail and consumer sciences major. "I'm scared that they're going to drop me. In the fall of 2002 I signed up for five classes and had to drop three of them."

What is Amanda Beard doing in school, anyway? At her bewildering, Van Wildering academic pace, you might think that her favored stroke is the crawl. Besides, she already has fame, fortune and an FHM cover. "I'm going to graduate," says Beard, who reports that she has earned nothing but A's and B's, "no matter how long it takes."

Her pursuit of a degree is charmingly earnest. "What if I want to go work for Speedo?" she asks, referring to her major sponsor. "What if I get into the interview and they see that I don't have a college degree?"

Exactly. "Miss Beard, it says here on your résumé that you appeared in three Olympics and are the second-youngest medalist in U.S. swimming history. That's nice. But where did you graduate from college?"

"I don't want to get handed anything," she counters. "I want to deserve it."

Beard, who swam for the Wildcats for two seasons (winning the NCAA championship in the 200 breast in '01) before turning pro, endeavors not to receive VIP treatment. A huge college hoops fan ("Did you see that Rutgers is beating Syracuse by 18 at halftime?" she mentions over a dinner of salad and pizza at a Tucson restaurant), she, alas, will not attend the Pac-10 game of the year, Washington at Arizona, scheduled for two nights later.

Why not? "Can't get a ticket," she says. "Game's sold out."

But you've thrown out the opening pitch at a Los Angeles Dodgers game, participated in the coin toss before an Indianapolis Colts game. You can't get a ticket to this? "Nope," she says.

A few years ago Beard was more the typical U of A student. O.K., so maybe she didn't stumble out of Dirtbags on Saturday nights or frequent frat parties (she's yet to attend one), but she did go to as many hoops games as she could. (She and her father, Dan, a Washington State point guard during the 1968-69 season, have a standing bet of a car wash whenever the two schools play.) And Beard even took an off-campus job working at a clothing boutique, Butz Jean Co.

"I worked there for a year," says Beard, a shopaholic and jeans connoisseur who stays hip to the latest styles. "I'd taken the year off from school and was doing double-session workouts. I needed something to do with myself between practices, so I worked there four hours a day."

If Beard were on the newest season of The Apprentice, she admits that she'd be torn between the Street Smarts and the Book Smarts squads.

"It's funny how much more you can learn in the real world," she says. "I had an accounting class. A lot of stuff we learned about buying a house, from escrow to putting down at least 20 percent for tax purposes, I learned all of that spending an hour with my loan officer."

So why is she still in school? And in Tucson?

"I can train anywhere in the world," says Beard, who plans to compete in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. "And I've thought about that. But my relationship with my coaches [Arizona head coach Frank Busch, associate head coach Rick DeMont and assistant Augie Busch] is the most important thing to me."

Even when she doesn't have class, Amanda Beard is up at 8 a.m., swimming at the Aquatic Center. She has just begun a 2 1/2-hour workout, the first of two today, that will leave her spent. Her former Wildcats teammates have the morning off. She is training. Pursuing her dreams in solitude. Working hard today for a big payoff later.

Just like any other ambitious college student.

Issue date: February 3, 2005