a compliment. He just winced and nodded.
I climb out of the pool and walk, dripping, across the tiled floor. NBC and the other television media ignore me as I pass them. Just yesterday they were holding up microphones to me, starry-eyed to talk. But now they avert their eyes. They’re waiting for Florent Manaudou, the gold medalist, the one who matters now. Or one of the other two, who won the “lesser” medals. Those of us who didn’t medal move unseen, as if in a cloak of invisibility. Like some shame to be avoided.
The coffee I drank before my race, in combination with the lactic acid, has dried out my mouth and left me parched. My suit constricts me even more now that my body is swollen from all the blood pumping through it. I walk down the hallway under the stands where I pick up my clothes and belongings from a basket. I pass a logistics manager, who awkwardly murmurs, “Good job,” and looks away.
I soon get to the team prep area, where athletes mill about, getting ready for their races. I sense pity from all sides. Most of them gingerly keep their distance from me, either unsure of how to interact with me in my disappointment or lacking confidence that they’re close enough to me to approach me. A few offer a tentative congratulations but nothing sounds authentic. I deck change in a towel and sit by myself on a plastic chair. I don’t feel pitiful, but I’m conscious of the pity that others are projecting upon me.
I’m not alone for long. Natalie Coughlin comes over and sits next to me. Aside from greeting me, she says nothing. But she understands, she’s been in this position before. I don’t need words. What matters is that she’s here, fully here, not acting or tiptoeing around me as if I need to be avoided. It’s all I need.
Tomorrow the press won’t even mention my name. And to think that yesterday the Guardian referred to me online as “possibly the most interesting athlete in the entire Games.”
I don’t know how interesting I am. But it sure has been a strange ride.
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2. Or to quote the architect’s (Zaha Hadid) Wikipedia entry: “Her buildings are distinctly neofuturistic, characterized by the ‘powerful, curving forms of her elongated structures’ with ‘multiple perspective points and fragmented geometry to evoke the chaos of modern life.’” Return to text
3. By 100 fly, I mean 100-meter butterfly. From this point forward I’ll use this form, which leaves out the -meter or -yard suffix and abbreviates the name of the stroke (freestyle=free, butterfly=fly, backstroke=back, breaststroke=breast). In some cases I’ll specify whether a race is in yards or meters, but then again, if you’re not a swimmer you probably don’t care, and if you are, you probably don’t need anyone to tell you. Return to text
4. I take some credit for his flight down the stairs. When it became apparent his sister was going to win, he began throwing his arms and jumping around. This offended the disgruntled British fans seated behind him, who’d put all their hopes for a UK swimming gold in their fellow Brit and defending Olympic champion Rebecca Adlington. They began booing and barking that he sit. Flustered and overwhelmed, he tried to tell them that Katie was his sister. “Just run down to the balcony,” I urged him. “Security won’t stop you. You’re her brother.” When Ledecky touched the wall, I cheered, perhaps overzealously, mostly to rub in the victory on his behalf, but by then the belligerence of the British fans had gone out of them. Return to text
PART II
GOLD
3.
The Iron Fence
Man does not control his own fate. The women in his life do that for him.
—Groucho Marx
And if you wanna find hell with me
I can show you what it’s like.
—Danzig, “Mother”
Anthony Lee Ervin’s first sprint was out of the womb. The orderlies at California’s Northridge Hospital didn’t even have time to wheel his mother, Sherry, into the delivery room. They were running her down the corridor, urging her to hold on and paging the midwife, when he slid out onto the gurney. The only thing the doctor delivered was the afterbirth. Within fifteen minutes Sherry was up on her feet again. “The easiest part about me and Anthony was his birth,” she says. “After that it all went downhill.”
For the first six or so weeks of his life, Anthony had gastroesophageal reflux, a condition where the valve connecting the esophagus to the stomach opens at the wrong times, causing regurgitation. Sherry had to hold him at an angle and feed him slowly so the milk would stay down. Breastfeeding sessions could take two hours. Even after the nursing, Anthony was a slow, fussy eater. Sherry sometimes prechewed the food because he found it more palatable. He rarely ate meat, although his mother once walked in on him sitting on the kitchen floor, surrounded by grizzle and smeared in what looked like Crisco: he had eaten half a package of raw bacon.
Graduating from diaper to toilet was initially a source of anxiety for Anthony. The prospect of discharging directly into the toilet bowl terrified him, possibly out of a fear that he was losing part of himself. He’d stand in the corner of the bathroom, arms tightly crossed, refusing to participate in this monstrous violation of his anatomical integrity. Sherry found creative ways around such biological and existential obstacles. To first get him to pee standing up, she poured glitter into the toilet water and told him to shoot for the stars.
He was restless from infancy. Sherry doesn’t even remember him crawling. Athletic and wiry, he went “straight from the crib to running.” Even the crib phase was brief: he soon began clambering out of it. She once found him standing on the rails, his back against the wall and arms outspread. That night his mother transferred him from the crib to a bed, but he wouldn’t stay put. He was back on his feet every time she left the room: “I must have put him to bed forty times that first night.” This pattern would play out metaphorically for many more years: her trying to put him to bed, him trying to get out. Even when asleep, he wouldn’t stay in bed. An intrepid somnambulist, Anthony once sleepwalked right out of the house. His elder brother Jackie recalls waking to his mother’s cries that Anthony was gone. The front door was wide open. His parents found him around the corner, standing on the sidewalk, still fast asleep. After that Anthony’s father, Jack, installed a chain on the door.
For the first four years of Anthony’s life, the Ervins lived in a house with a pool in Canoga Park, an ethnically diverse, predominantly Latino neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. His mother occasionally took him into the pool with Jackie, who was six years older. But it wasn’t until Anthony was two, shortly after his brother Derek was born, that he had his first unmediated encounter with the water. It was an especially hot afternoon. Exhausted from nursing, his mother unintentionally dozed off on the living room couch with Derek, who was also asleep in her arms. Outside, beyond the glass patio doors, the pool sparkled, the sun flashing and vanishing on the surface like flaring matches. Moments after she fell asleep, Anthony awoke from a nap in his bedroom.
Wakie wake. Stretch ssttrreettcchh
