LIFE IN FAST LANE Missy found Olympic glory & tough times
WHAT HAPPENED to Missy Franklin?
The Team U.S.A. swimmer went from being the golden girl of the 2012 London Olympics to utter humiliation this summer in Rio.
She was only 17 when she won four gold medals and a bronze in London. Four years later at the Rio Olympics, billions watched Franklin’s agonizing failure to even make the finals in any of her individual events.
In “Relentless Spirit,” Franklin tries to explain it herself but in the end she seems as mystified as anyone.
The book is written with her parents, D.A. and Dick Franklin, a doctor and a business consultant, whose love and support for their only daughter has been unrelenting throughout.
They raised Missy in Littleton, Co., both with busy careers but willing to set everything aside to support Missy’s budding Olympic ambitions.
Their little girl grew into a 6-foot-1 woman with size 13 feet — or “flippers” as the family joked. Missy leaves it to her parents to narrate the story of the London Olympics where she came away covered in gold and glory. But she intervenes to detail what she considers her one single failure at the games.
Franklin says she felt genuine joy when she surfaced from the 200-meter freestyle to see teammate Allison Schmitt celebrating her gold.
Then it registered that she’d missed the bronze by only one-hundredth of a second. “I was despairing,” she writes. It was a shattering blow, one she used to fuel her drive to train harder, swim faster toward Rio.
Franklin returned to finish her senior year at Regis Jesuit High School as a teenage celebrity. Photographers trailed her every move.
At Regis, Franklin had emerged as a prodigy in the pool, but she found another personal joy there as well. Her faith.
As a freshman, she’d brought God into her life and converted to Catholicism.
Franklin feared at first that her staunchly religious classmates might reject her if they knew she was born by surrogacy when her parents were in their 40s.
But she found being a “child of science” was no hurdle in embracing her new faith — a faith she’d need to lean heavily on in the years to come.
Even at the notoriously free-wheeling Berkeley campus of the University of California, Franklin found a community of support.
Teri McKeever, the head coach of the California Bears, had pulled together in the way of painkillers. Holed a close-knit group of up in a hotel room with her parents, young women who sincerely welcomed over the next two days she the Olympian into their literally took baby steps testing midst. against the pain.
McKeever was by her side She simply had to get back in hour by hour when an agonizing the water. injury threatened to derail Franklin The Pan Pacific meet is a key at the 2014 Pan Pacific Championships marker for the Olympics and the in Queensland, Australia. last chance to qualify for the FINA World Aquatics Championships.
Franklin was going into a In 2015, “the Worlds” backstroke when her back would be staged in Kazan, Russia. spasmed, unleashing a tsunami of pain that paralyzed her at the Even though she could barely pool’s edge. move, Franklin swam in all
Since Franklin was “in competition,” events. Astonishingly, she qualified. little could be given to her
Back at Cal, she learned that her slight case of scoliosis had caused bone mass to build around more than one vertebra. It was a condition that couldn’t be cured, but it could be alleviated with training.
There were other concerns. Franklin had turned down millions of dollars in endorsement deals to stay an amateur and train at Berkeley. But she felt she wasn’t getting what she needed.
Swimming with the team meant making sacrifices. Franklin was the world’s best backstroker, but Cal already had strong backstrokers, so Franklin was deployed in other races for the good of the group.
In the end, it felt like she was taking too many for the team.
Her goal was to compete internationally in long-course racing but by 2015, it looked liked she was going backwards. In the 2013 Aquatic World Championships, Franklin set a glorious record by winning six gold medals. But after two years at Cal, her dominance in the sport had pretty much faded.
In a move that looked like a direct repudiation of McKeever, she decided at the end of her sophomore year to return to Colorado to train with her old coach, Todd Schmitz.
McKeever didn’t take it well, though Franklin doesn’t reveal the details of their “endless” and “painful” conversation.
Back home, nestled with her loving parents again, Franklin turned pro. Major brand endorsement deals, including Wheaties, followed. They’d been waiting for her.
Franklin was earnest about giving her sponsors their due when it came to making appearances, and she flew all over the country.
When her friends returned to
their college lives at the end of summer, she unexpectedly found herself alone and achingly lonely.
“Emotionally, I was shaken, torn,” she writes.
Swimming became a job instead of a joyful passion as she intensely trained for the 2016 Summer Olympics.
The first signs of trouble surfaced at the Olympic trials in Omaha. Franklin hoped to qualify in four events. She had smoothly qualified for seven in the London games.
Her mother got a late-night call from Missy in her hotel room. D.A. found her daughter sobbing and took her into her arms.
“What happens if I don’t make it?” Missy cried out.
This was not the sunny optimist, the exuberant competitor from years past. This was a young woman whose hopes were shattering.
In the 100-meter backstroke semifinal, she felt she was back in form. But at the turn, she saw something wholly unfamiliar. The whole field was ahead of her.
The defending Olympian champion managed to qualify for only three events. Full-out panic attacks were now part of her repertoire.
Franklin’s Rio Olympics was a start-to-finish humiliation and she felt every moment of it.
She didn’t even make the finals in either of her individual events.
While Franklin swam in the preliminary for 4x200-meter freestyle relay, she wasn’t invited to join the final four who would compete that night. Alone in her room, she watched her teammates take the podium to receive the gold on television.
As part of the relay team, she shared that gold. But Allison Schmitt, Katie Ledecky, Leah Smith and Maya Dirado were the new shining stars. Franklin was a has-been at 21. She writes that her worst moment came watching the 200-meter backstroke final. Franklin had won the event in London, setting a record that still stands.
Now she sat in the bleachers wiping away tears as Dirado pulled off a thrilling win.
On arriving in Rio, Franklin had walked past the huge billboard in the United Airlines terminal where she was featured as one of the faces of the Olympics.
Now she was determined to show the world a new face, the face of a failure who behaved with grace, openness and honesty. “An inspiration in disappointment,” she writes, “the phrase just kind of lit up in front of me.” Franklin is now back at Cal, training with the men’s coach, Dave Durden. She recently joked that “swimming broke up with me.” Well, the two are back together. It remains to be seen if the relationship can be saved.