I used to despise Dana Vollmer.
OK, despise is too strong of a word. Dread better describes my feelings back in 2008. I was a young newspaper columnist, and there was a single local swimmer competing at the Olympic trials — Vollmer. I also had an editor from her hometown in Granbury, Texas.
“Did you get her? Did you get her?” he’d ask 20 times a day.
So while Michael Phelps was positioning himself to be the greatest swimmer in the history of the Olympics, I was waiting in the hall to talk to a 24-year-old whose dream was falling apart less than four years after winning a gold medal in Australia. Neither of us was particularly happy about this situation, a situation that did not improve when we finally talked.
She had failed to make the Olympic team. I had to ask her about it.
“You do not know what else she is going through,” my dad chided when I complained to him later. “Write it with the compassion you would want shown to you in that moment.”
I have not thought about Vollmer a lot in the four years since, except when reminding myself compassion is an OK opinion. And then a couple of weeks ago, in a meet in Indianapolis, somebody suggested talking to Vollmer.
She is making a comeback, and my first thought as she approached was how much happier she looked.
“Yes,” she said. “I think going into ‘08 I was so much more focused on what would happen if I failed. Who would look bad if I didn’t swim well?
“It wasn’t about me wanting it or me having fun in the sport.”
It turns out the other things she was going through were almost too many to name — back injuries, a constantly sore stomach, the pressure of knowing if she didn’t make the Olympic team she would have no income and no health insurance, the responsibility of family who had skipped the trials to save money to travel to Beijing, fear that people would judge her coach’s training methods if she failed.
That is what she was dragging with her up to the blocks, along with the usual pressure of trying to make an Olympic team.
“I was so focused on what would happen if I didn’t swim well that I didn’t swim well.” Vollmer said. “I knew when I didn’t make the Olympics I was not going to make rent.”
This information made the fact she had stopped at all that last day in Omaha amazing. This was not simply an athlete mourning the death of a dream, and on that day I have to imagine Vollmer thought her last best chance at another Olympics as gone. This was a young woman wondering what would happen if she fell and broke her arm. How would she pay? What would she do?
No really, what was she going to do?
Swimming was her life, and it looked like her life was over.
“Broken,” was how Vollmer described herself four years later in Indy.
Every time I hear a story like Vollmer’s — and many people would be surprised how many world-class athletes tell tales of almost quitting, of being driven to their knees, of feeling broken — I always ask why they kept going?
I phrase the question this way because it sounds much better than “why not quit?”
“In 2008, after not making it, I definitely had a period where I was like ‘Why? Why do I do this to myself?' I have so many injuries I wasn’t having fun with it,” Vollmer recalled.
Ready to quit, Vollmer instead went to Fiji to teach people how to swim. On an island, it is that or drown. It was a different perspective on swimming beyond “how I had failed to do what I want to do” which had become Vollmer’s tunnel vision view.
“Realizing I did love the sport made me realize I had to change how I was approaching it,” Vollmer said. “If I had made the team in 2008, I might have said ‘I might not be enjoying this and I might be broken, but something is working because I am swimming fast.’ So I might have continued what I was doing and not have gotten where I am today.”
Happy is just the starting point of where she is today. She is married, for starters, to a guy who simply saying his name makes her face light up. She is healthy. Her balky back finally healed, allowing her to address her stomach issues. She never wanted to bring them up, figuring it made her sound like a whiner after missing a week of practice with her back to complain about her stomach. So she just kind of accepted that eating twisted her all up.
A blood test finally connected her stomach cramping to food allergies. It turns out she is allergic to gluten and eggs, which had long been staples of her diet.
“It has just been amazing how big of a difference that has made,” Vollmer said. “I feel like the food I am eating is helping my body and doing what it is supposed to do instead of causing me pain and anxiety going into a pool.”
The stuff she cannot eat is crazy — green beans, yellow squash, tomatoes — healthy stuff she would have never imagined as problematic. It has been a slow process.
In the beginning, she took a picture of every meal she ate with her iPhone and sent it to a nutritionist for approval. Now it is just how she eats.
Where the difference can really be seen is in her body and in the pool.
She is leaner, yet stronger. She has more stamina. She trains harder and swims faster. Her times in the 100-meter butterfly, 100-meter freestyle 200-meter freestyle as she prepares for the US Olympic Swimming Trials in June in Omaha have been phenomenal.
And when she approaches the blocks, she does so with less baggage and more confidence. She is no longer afraid of what will happen if she fails.
This is not my concern any more. I no longer work for a newspaper with regional interests. I am sure nobody will care if I get Vollmer or not. The bigger stories are Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte and Missy Franklin.
I will probably wait anyway, hoping the conversation is about making the Olympics. I have come to like Vollmer.
No, like is not strong enough of a word. I admire her for failing, for fighting, for stopping that day in Omaha four years ago. And if you are looking for an American to cheer for at this Olympics, I can think of no one better than Vollmer. She is an athlete who symbolizes perseverance and overcoming obstacles in trials so familiar to most of us — losing a job, lacking insurance, failing at your dream only to come back stronger and better for it.
She is also a reminder that, when in doubt, compassion is always OK.
