Adrian stays true to roots
U.S. swimmer avoids flash, focuses on craft
There’s video footage of RIO DE JANEIRO 5-year-old Nathan Adrian flailing about in a swimming pool as part of a club team, a clip that makes 27-year-old Adrian chuckle.
“At that age, it’s crazy, because the kids look like they’re drowning,” Adrian said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ It probably took me over a minute to swim (25 yards), but I did it.”
Back then swimming was entirely about fun — and a way to do what his older sister and brother were doing. His parents liked the sport, in part because it kept their kids safe in their hometown of Bremerton, Wash., which sits along a peninsula, and also because it wasn’t violent.
“All the kids, I remember telling them, ‘You can do anything you want,’ ” said Jim Adrian, Nathan’s father and a retired nuclear engineer. “We encouraged him to set goals and be successful. Not to worry what other people think, not one iota.
“Be content, and don’t hurt anybody along the way — that’s one of the reasons that I didn’t want them to play football.”
Instead of taking up a violent sport, Adrian took to the pool. And he had piano lessons.
He learned to knit and how to sew a patch onto his clothing. His mother, Cecilia, grew up in Hong Kong and wanted to expose him to as many different things and places as possible.
As he developed into a world-class swimmer — a career path that still amazes his parents — it’s this foundation that has kept Adrian so grounded, so likeable and so consistent, even as his profile has grown exponentially as he’s racked up six Olympic medals and counting. Two of those have come in Rio, a gold he secured as the anchor of the 4x100 freestyle relay and a bronze in the 100 free. He will swim the 50 free, an event in which he holds the American record, on Friday and the medley relay Saturday.
But to understand Adrian the swimmer, one must first get to know Adrian the person. FOLLOWING HIS SIBLINGS He grew up the youngest of three, almost six years behind his brother, Justin, and eight years younger than his sister, Donella. He followed them from pool to pool and city to city as they competed in swim meets.
“I can’t remember a time when he wasn’t going to swim,” Jim said. “Because he was always tagging along, even at 2 and 3 years old, with his sister and brother.”
Said Cecilia: “They call those the pool rats, the youngest siblings.”
Donella and Justin earned scholarships and swam collegiately. It seemed only natural that Adrian would follow in their footsteps, even though he dabbled in other sports as a kid. He likes to say that he didn’t choose swimming; it chose him.
Growing to be 6-6 with broad shoulders and flat, flexible feet helped.
“His feet really work better in the water than on land,” Cecilia said, laughing. “He has really flat feet.”
Swimming kept Adrian busy, especially as he started to devote more and more time to it as a teenager.
“I didn’t grow up in the nicest of towns,” Adrian said. “The graduation rates, at least when I was in school, were super low, 50 or 60% or something. They’ve since gotten them up. … But my parents wanted something to keep us out of trouble. Swimming is a really good way to do it, because you’re going to always be tired, so you don’t have enough energy to get yourself in trouble.”
And it can get you to college — while teaching you humility.
“A lot of life lessons are taught in swimming,” Adrian said. “It’s not out of the ordinary to train an entire year and put everything that you have into it and not get a best time. Those are the kind of lessons that you are forcibly taught through this. ... There’s not really shortcuts.”
Adrian’s path has included training and earning a degree at Cal and working hard to eventually make three Olympic teams. He first sneaked onto the U.S. roster as a relay-only swimmer in the gold medal-winning 4x100 freestyle in 2008.
Then London happened. In 2012, much of the pre- Olympic attention in sprints focused on the Australians — James Magnussen, in particular. He’d been the world champion in the 100 free the year before and swam a blistering 47.10 seconds at trials. He was a heavy favorite. “All eyes for the 100 were just on James,” said Adrian, who was 23 at the time. “It wasn’t who was going to win. It was more, how much James was going to win by and was he going to set the world record? … 2012, it goes kind of like a dream, really.”
Adrian remembers being questioned by Australian reporters because his time was a full second slower than that of Magnussen coming into the Games.
“It’s so stressful, and you never know,” he said of his experience leading up to the London Games. “Are you going to get food poisoning? Are you going to get sick that week before just because you didn’t wash your hand after touching a door handle? All these sorts of crazy things that could happen.”
The craziest thing of all did: Adrian beat Magnussen by one hundredth of a second to nab gold in the most exhilarating race of the London Games. He added two more medals, a gold and silver in relays. ALL ABOUT THE OLYMPICS Olympic athletes measure time in four-year chunks. Adrian’s coach, Dave Durden, has a four-year calendar in his office, so he can list goals and schedule meets for his swimmers with a focus on the Olympics.
Over the past four years, Adrian has been perhaps the most boring of all Olympic swimmers. Unlike some of his peers, he has not uprooted himself and moved across the country. He has not changed coaches, become a father or dyed his hair.
He has simply trained and competed — at a consistently high level.
“There’s no story there,” Durden said. “It speaks to Nathan’s personality, too. He’s got a very quiet way, a ton of humility, about the way he goes about doing what he does. ... It’s a testament to Nathan the person and how he handles his business. It speaks a lot about how he goes about his day-to-day, year-to-year.”
Durden, who has coached Adrian at Cal since 2008, has long understood that a lot of this has to do with the swimmer’s character and upbringing. Durden remembers the first time he met Adrian’s mother in December 2008.
Durden is always a bit nervous when he meets the parent of an elite athlete, and he was this time, too.
“It’s usually, ‘How’s he doing? Is he training well? Is he racing well?’ You know, this, this and this,” Durden said. “It couldn’t be further from that. It was, ‘Is he behaving himself ? Is he being a good young man?’ It’s like, ‘Yes he is.’
“It had nothing to do with what was going on from a training or racing or performance. It was more about how is he doing as a young man. Is his moral compass pointed in the right direction? Is he following through?”
Even now, nearly eight years and six Olympic medals past that initial impression, everything remains the same. Ask Adrian’s parents what they’re most proud of, and they say it’s that their son is kind and considerate. They’ll tell stories of kids he has met at camps over the years who keep in touch with their son.
They love that, despite the medals and the fame that has accompanied them, he’s the same person he was when he was 5, splashing around in a pool.