My Sportsman Choice: Natalie Coughlin

On a warm afternoon in Sydney last January, Natalie Coughlin sat in a meeting room off the deck of a local pool with the rest of the Cal swim team and started to cry. Her teammates, even some of her closest friends, had been grumbling for months about what they perceived as the special treatment she'd been receiving as she wrapped up the greatest career in collegiate swimming history, and now, in the midst of a training trip down under, Golden Bears coach Teri McKeever had come to the star senior's defense.

"You guys need to stop worrying about what Natalie's doing and focus on yourselves," McKeever angrily told the group. "She might not be doing what you're doing, but trust me, she's preparing the way she needs to prepare."

Then, turning toward Coughlin, McKeever continued, "I'm not sure if Natalie would want me to share this with you, but she confided with me the other day that she wants to have the best Olympics of any swimmer in history. So believe me, she's not slacking off. She's trying to set world records and win gold medals."

Seven months later, Coughlin emerged as one of the stars of the Athens games, becoming only the sixth American woman in any sport to win five medals (two golds, two silvers and one bronze) in a single Olympics. Yet for all of her brilliance in the water, she was somewhat lost in the wake of Michael Phelps' aquatic mastery as the Baltimore Bullet fell just short of Mark Spitz's 1972 heroics. It's tough to pick against Phelps as the Sportsman of the Year, but if you know Coughlin's story -- you'll have an opportunity to digest it when my book Golden Girl comes out next fall -- a compelling case can made that she's an equally worthy winner.

Coughlin was chewed up, spit out and discarded by her sport before she legally earned the right to vote. Thanks to a torn labrum in her shoulder and a strained relationship with her ultra-demanding club coach, Coughlin washed out in the 2000 Olympic Trials and was on the verge of quitting when she signed with Cal, figuring she'd parlay her past glories into a world-class education and be done with it. But McKeever, an intuitive and innovative instructor, offered an alternative approach that stressed technique over volume and challenged the sport's traditional training sensibilities.

Coughlin went on to achieve unprecedented success on the collegiate level -- she lost only one meaningful race in four years, on the last day of this year's NCAA Championships -- and became a long-course world champion, setting a world-record in the 100-meter backstroke. She uplifted her team, spurring an emotional dual-meet victory over rival Stanford last February, the Bears' first in 28 years, and emerging as an eloquent spokesperson for the program and the university.

Still, until she came through in Athens, there were whispers in the swim community that she'd wilt under the pressure. In the 2003 World Championships in Barcelona, Coughlin, an extremely versatile swimmer who is America's best in the backstroke, butterfly and sprint-freestyle events, took on a Phelps-like schedule only to come down with a severe virus that denied her all but a relay gold, prompting a foreign journalist to ask, "How does it feel to dishonor your country?" It was as if she had carried around a backpack full of boulders for 5 1/2 years, and only a stellar performance in Athens would allow her to shed it.

Done no favors by the Olympics schedule, Coughlin chose to swim only two individual events and, doing her country a great solid, to serve as the centerpiece of all three U.S. relays. She swam well in the team's silver-medal effort in the 400 free relay and then took gold in the 100 back. Two nights later she led off the 800 free relay with a true 200 split that bettered the time of individual-event winner Camelia Potec of Romania, spurring the U.S. team to a gold-medal runaway that erased the oldest world-record in the swimming books -- set 17 years earlier by the East Germans in an era of steroid-enhanced suspicion. Having eschewed a probable gold in the 200 back to test herself against a star-studded field in the 100 free, Coughlin scored an impressive bronze. Her leadoff leg in the 400 medley relay was a blistering thing of beauty -- her time of 59.68 seconds was the second-fastest in history, behind only her world-record effort of two years earlier -- though the U.S. ultimately finished second to the powerful Australians.

When the Games ended, Coughlin, 23, came home to receive congratulations from legions of new admirers, but her pretty face and All-American smile masked the scars of a trying journey -- and the competitive grit that carried her back from the brink of extinction. "Everyone says, 'Wow, you won five medals,'" she said a few days after returning to Berkeley. "I sit there thinking, Wait -- I expected five medals. I could have done even better."

Years from now, I'm guessing, she'll have a far different perspective: Given the burden she carried and the choices she made, Coughlin was truly golden.