FINDING GLORY
ADAMS’ FAMILY SEES VALUE IN THE SPORT GOING BEYOND POOL
Given everything under way in her life, Cammile Adams’ two-week stay at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro almost qualifies as downtime.
A few days after competing in her favorite swimming event, the women’s 200-meter butterfly, Adams will return to the United States, pack up her belongings in Charlotte, N.C., her training base for the last 18 months, and move back to Houston, where she will begin student teaching the day after the Closing Ceremony and prepare for her wedding in October.
Fortunately, she has a plan for how she’s going to pull all this off.
“I’m on the OCD side of things, and now that I’m engaged I’m even more so,” she said. “I’ve got a lot of things going on in the fall.”
Adams, 24, will be competing at her second Olympic Games after finishing fifth in the 200 fly at the London Games, and she plans to continue swimming upon her return to Houston with an eye on Tokyo in 2020.
“I’ll swim as long as I’m having fun, and I’m having more fun right now than I ever thought I would in my life,” she said. “I’m still learning so much in and out of the water.”
She and her twin sister, Ashley, were essentially born into the sport as the daughters of Eddie Adams, a former Lamar University swimmer who has coached in Houston for almost 40 years, currently as head coach of the Lone Star Swim Club.
The girls trained with their father until age 10 before competing for several Houston-area swim teams. They gravitated toward different events, with Ashley focusing on distance events, and swam together through Cypress Woods High School and into their sophomore year at Texas A&M.
Ashley Adams said she and her sister enjoyed the social elements of swim clubs — Cammile met 11 of her 12 bridesmaids through the sport — but also loved being teammates.
“I think having a twin is the greatest gift God could ever give me,” Ashley Adams said in an email. “Having each other to go to practice and meets with helped keep us going. We swam for different club teams for a period in high school and that was a somewhat draining time in my life, and I was glad when Cam switched to my club team.”
Ashley gave up competitive swimming at A&Mwhile her sister continued, but she said Cammile has tried to keep a balanced lifestyle through guitar lessons and her manic affinity for adult coloring books, cats and Justin Bieber.
Symbolic of their bond is the tattoo “Two is better than one,” which each sister has on one foot.
While Adams has developed into the best the U.S. has to offer in the 200 butterfly, in which she is a two-time NCAA champion, a two-time national champion and a 2015 world silver medalist, she said she got off to a slow start as a competitive swimmer.
“I wasn’t the best swimmer when I was younger, so it started as a joke,” she said. “My dad said, ‘Well, Cammile, there’s never a full group in the 200 fly.’ I just wanted to take something home with me, and they said to do the 200 fly and I could get a pink or a purple ribbon. That’s all I cared about, because those colors are better.
“But now I love it. I love racing it. I love training for it. I encourage as many little kids as I can to give it a shot.”
Adams said her technique, which includes an unusually high “catch” at the top of the stroke that allows her to pull more water, has contributed to her success in the 200 fly.
“Her hands grab the water, whereas some swimmers will slide a little bit and don’t catch until they get deeper into the stroke,” Eddie Adams said. “It’s more of an elbow lift and a hand dig. She does it differently than most swimmers, and it keeps her body position in line.”
Given her exacting technique, it was particularly startling when she was briefly disqualified from a preliminary swim at the Olympic trials in Omaha when race officials thought they detected an improper turn.
“I smile about it now. I was not smiling at trials,” she said. “When you go into an Olympic trials, you prepare for so many things — they call it the meet of surprises, and some people call it other things — but no one prepares themselves for a DQ.
“I didn’t know what to do, but the head coach came over and my dad was on the pool deck, and they knew the steps that needed to be taken. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, but the stress of the perhaps not having it overturned weighs on you.”
Reason prevailed, fortunately, and now Adams is focused on race strategy while training with her Olympic teammates, including Michael Phelps.
“I’m a back-half swimmer. That last 50 (meters) is my strong suit,” she said.
“I’ve spent more time in the weight room to help with the start and the first 50, and that has worked out really well. I’m excited to press that first 100 a little more and still have a strong back half.”
After Rio and her marriage to Rad Brannan, Adams will resume training, probably with her father, later this year and into 2017 as she looks toward another Olympic cycle.
“As a dad, I want to see her go to Tokyo,” Eddie Adams said. “But that’s in God’s hands.”
First, though, the challenge of Rio awaits. She has the seventhfastest time in the world this year at 2:06.80, 1.33 seconds behind 2016 pace-setter Madeline Groves of Australia.
“I would love to be at the top of the medal stand,” she said. “That’s what my eyes are set on.”