‘I should be dead. One thing that saved my life was an ability not to care’
Casey Legler — Olympic swimmer, drug addict and sex abuse victim — has now told the story of her darkest days in an award-winning book. Interview by Oliver Brown
“I was one of the fastest swimmers in the world, and yet so deeply unpredictable.” One day, Casey Legler might be tempted to make this her epitaph, although her story suggests it errs on the side of understatement.
At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, the French-American broke the world record in the 50 metres freestyle in practice, only to rank 29th quickest on the day of the heats. The next day, she was dealing drugs to her fellow athletes.
What ensued was a tailspin of addiction and emotional anguish so acute that it is a wonder Legler has survived to conduct this interview at all.
“I should be dead,” she admits. “Or at the very least incarcerated.”
But somehow, through the tumult, her life has become one of diverse joys. For a start, there was the distinction of becoming the first female signed to a men’s modelling agency. Today, she lives according to the principle of “throwing a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks”, juggling roles as writer, artist, mentor and advocate for the United Nations on women’s equality.
She is desperate to write a crime novel, too, although her wife, Siri, a human-rights activist, is limiting her to two projects at any one time.
The literary gift is self- evident from her startlingly frank memoir, Godspeed, which has won International Autobiography of the Year at the Telegraph Sports Book Awards.
No less an authority than Michael Stipe, former lead singer of REM, has described it as a “cut-to-the-bones blues song in chapter form”.
The language is defiantly her own: fluid, sensual, visceral. One explanation for this choice is her bilingualism. Another is her lifelong grappling with identity: Legler is non- binary. But a darker force swirls around the wildness of her words, given that for much of her teenage years as an international swimmer, Legler was physically abused.
“I write it in the book in ‘surround sound’, so as to convey the confusion,” she explains. “That something not meant to be happening is happening, but without me fully comprehending what it is.”
Legler, now 43, was 13 when she was sexually assaulted by a physiotherapist during a treatment session. The man had been recommended to her by her coach, and her mother happily took her along to appointments. It was not until she was 22, on a visit to a holistic doctor for chronic back problems, that the full horrors of her adolescence revealed themselves to her.
“He had a beautiful examining room, and I took off all my clothes,” she says. “The doctor came in and said, ‘Woah, you can put your clothes back on ’ . It was in that moment that I understood I had not needed to take my clothes off as a child.”
Hers is an experience that assumes grim resonance in the context of the scandals convulsing US gymnastics. Having spent two childhood years in Louisiana, moving subsequently to Vermont, she has watched with mounting outrage as a parade of young female gymnasts, from Simone Biles to Aly Raisman, disclosed that they were victims of abuse at the hands of their doctor, the prolific sex offender Larry Nassar.
“It was the sigh of recognition,” she reflects. “The procedure that Nassar had said was required was the same one that this French doctor had spoken about. At that moment, it hit home in a profound way just how systematic this was. The violence and oppression we went through as children, we only now have words for as adults. It was just how normal it was. That was the horror of it.”
In recent days, British gymnasts have also been sharing their own accounts of being beaten and starved, strengthening Legler’s conviction that sport’s institutional code of silence has to end.
“The stories are telling us that we have to go further,” she argues. “It becomes a very important conversation when we’re asking young people to push themselves to physical extremes. Sport is classically the thing that builds self-esteem, communication, camaraderie. At the elite level, we need to keep talking about how we can take better care of our athletes.”
The bleakness that assailed her youth was beyond all reasonable limits of endurance. While still a virgin, she was raped by two men. At 15, she was a raging alcoholic. By the time she reached Olympic competition, she was not just taking drugs but supplying them, too.
So rapid was her descent into the maelstrom, it would be decades before she could tell the unvarnished truth. “This book could only have been written 20 years after the facts, so that I could deal with them, so that I could hold some of the sadness.”
Legler, for all the torment of her past, radiates an earnest warmth, adamant that she wants her book to serve not just as a chronicle of mayhem but as reassurance to those in similar distress that they can discover a better path.
“At 13, I imagined I would kill myself,” she says, hand on heart. “But, at 22, someone told me, ‘Casey, you won’t always live your life with suicide as an option’. Now that emptiness on the inside has gone away. I was trying in the book to relay the darkness that brought me such melancholy and pain. But by writing it, I hope it’s able to offer some company to the children reading it, showing them it doesn’t have to stay that way.”
At some level, it is difficult to understand how Legler ever managed to combine her peak conditioning as a swimmer with her inveterate drinking and substance abuse. In part, she attributes it to her off-the-charts metabolism: “I still don’t understand what a hangover is.”
But in a French swim team who prided themselves in the Nineties as hell-raisers, she insists that her behaviour was less the exception than the norm.
“Sport is not this super squeaky-clean thing that the public discourse has made it out to be,” she says. “At least in my time, there was no-one who was the epitome of mental health and wellbeing. You can’t train at that standard and become so able to sustain physical pain, and not be savage in some way.”
Come the Atlanta Games, she had shaved her head and started to score drugs. In view of the vigour with which the Olympics are policed, it appears extraordinary that she was able to do so without regard for the danger or the consequences.
“One of the things that saved my life was my ability not to care,” Legler says. “It was such a relief when that happened. As a young child, I was so sensitive, so easily overwhelmed and flooded just by what it meant to be alive. So, when I drank for the first time, it was like having a spiritual experience. So much so, that I could only imagine tolerating life while drinking.”
She takes a long pause, over 20 seconds. “I look back on this, and I am amazed I made it out.”
Make it out she did, though, engineering a remarkable reinvention from Olympian and drug addict to an award-winning author who has spent almost half her life clean. “In many ways,” she says, with a knowing grin, “my darkest past is my superpower.”