Jenny Thompson has always preferred the deep end to the shallow. There are pictures of her at 6 months old playing underwater in a moms-‘n’-tots class, her cheeks happily puffed out. As soon as she could crawl, she crawled toward the lip of the pool.
“I never had water wings,” she said. “I loved the water. I was never scared of it.”
She was 9 years old when she and her older brother Aaron decided to enter a pairs competition their local swim club called a biathlon: a 4-mile run followed by 66 lengths of a 25-yard pool. Aaron, then 14, was to do the dry-land portion and Jenny the aquatic one.
He finished the run and tagged her. She plunged into the pool. “Practically everyone in this competition was an adult,” Aaron Thompson said. “She was so small, but she was doing great.”
Pairs were supposed to run to the finish line hand in hand, but when Jenny climbed out of the pool, Aaron could see she was dragging. “I didn’t really take the time to ask her,” he recalled. “I picked her up and ran with her in my arms, and we won the brother-sister division.”
That may be the last time anyone has had to carry Jenny Thompson.
Thompson enters her third Olympics with a theoretical chance to equal the record for most gold medals by any single athlete: nine. The mark is shared by an august quartet: swimmer Mark Spitz, track legend Carl Lewis, Russian gymnast Larisa Latynina and distance runner Paavo Nurmi, the flying Finn.
Her current stash of five (plus one silver) ties her with Bonnie Blair for the most golds won by a U.S. woman. But there is an asterisk. All her gold medals have been won in relay events. And despite her four world championship titles and 23 national titles and two world records set an incredible seven years apart–since erased–it is the absence of that shot alone on the medal podium that has made her a largely unknown star, a sprinter who flies under radar.
But there is respect accorded to longevity, and Thompson finally is reaping that reward. She has lasted long enough to see her rival Dara Torres retire and come back. She has lasted long enough to see swimming revolutionized by bodysuits and wounded by drug scandals.
What may be most important to Thompson, though, is that she has lasted long enough to give herself a last and best chance to be recognized.
“Obviously, people burn out and they don’t have the longevity I’ve had,” she said. “I guess I attribute that to having a laid-back attitude about it, especially in the years since ’96, enjoying it a lot more than I ever have. It’s one aspect of my life and not all of my life.
“I was one of the `new kids on the block’ in ’92–Summer [Sanders], Nicole Haislett, Janie Wagstaff–and I’m the only one still swimming by four years. Everyone is way retired. I’m the only one left.
“I think I’ve gotten over the hump of being concerned about other people thinking that I’m not getting on with my life, because this is what I love doing. I’m making more money doing this than anything else I’d be doing at 27. I have goals for after I’m done swimming, but right now I’m focusing on this.”
This being winning an individual event. Relief was written in man-walks-on-moon-sized headlines on Thompson’s face the night at the Olympic trials in Indianapolis last month when she qualified for the team in the 100-meter butterfly, her first shot.
Unfinished business
Not that she doesn’t value relay medals. Thompson is the quintessential cornball, rah-rah-team trouper, the face-painting, flag-waving type a college coach loves. In fact, that quality was the first thing Stanford coach Richard Quick noticed when he started recruiting her.
“I loved her spirit,” said Quick, who also is the U.S. women’s Olympic coach. “When she made her first world championship team in high school, she was all red-white-and-blue banners and stars and stripes.”
Everyone who knows Thompson said she has had one bad meet in her life, that it happened to come at the ’96 Olympic trials. When she made the 100-meter freestyle as a relay swimmer only, she spiraled downward into a week of sleeplessness and sinking confidence.
For anyone else, winning a piece of three gold medals in one Summer Games would have amounted to a pretty good couple of weeks. But when asked in Atlanta how she’d handle retirement, her stomach churned angrily and she knew right then she had unfinished business.
“Speaking from an athlete’s perspective, you think with time, you’ll be better,” Thompson said. “If not, why do it anymore? I went from the ’92 Olympic trials, where I broke a world record and won two events and qualified in several, to ’96, when I didn’t qualify in any [individual events].
“It was really hard to sit up in the stands in Atlanta. My events were slow. . . . I’d been faster than that the year before, maybe even that summer. It was really hard to watch that and know that I had the potential to win the gold medal, knowing in my heart I could have done that.
“But I think I handled it well. That was when I had my shift in thinking about the whole sport and why I’m doing it. That disappointment turned me around and helped me have all the success I’ve had over the last three years.”
The process actually started right after the trials as she leaned on an old habit cultivated with Aaron.
“It was always lemons into lemonade with them,” said their mother, Margrid Thompson. “If there was failure, they ignored it.”
In the swimmer’s version of the old adage, life is what happens between personal bests. Thompson used the months before the Atlanta Olympics to stop timing herself and remember what had drawn her into the water in the first place, and that’s why she’s still hauling herself over the edge.
She had it all mapped out. That’s why she doesn’t blame anyone else for thinking she was through after ’96. She had a Stanford degree in human biology, she had two Olympic scrapbooks and it was time to move on to Act 2.
“All my friends my age were getting jobs, going to graduate school or moving away from Palo Alto, at least, and I’ve been here all along,” Thompson said. “It was hard for the first couple years, up till maybe the world championships in ’98. When I had a really good performance there, I said, `This is right. It’s good that I’m still swimming.”‘
Energy and work ethic
Thompson’s elite career began at 12. Margrid, divorced since her daughter was tiny, moved her and her three older brothers from Massachusetts to Dover, N.H., mainly so Jenny and Aaron could swim under the tutelage of coach Mike Parratto at the Seacoast Swimming Association. The club featured a 50-meter pool, a rarity in New England.
The move meant Margrid had to commute 120 miles round-trip to her job as a medical technician at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass., and often made Aaron Jenny’s driver and de-facto caretaker.
“It was never a matter of helping her overcome disappointments, because there weren’t that many,” said Aaron Thompson, now a high school teacher and swim coach in Havre de Grace, Md. “It was just a matter of supporting her emotionally, from a family standpoint.”
It also gave Jenny, by osmosis and example, a chin-up stoicism that is pure New England granite, unchanged, she says, after nearly a decade in the snowless belt.
“I think I have that weathered, tough spirit and the work ethic that goes with being a Nor’easter,” said Thompson, who has told her family she may buy a home back in Dover.
In some ways, she never left. She receives letters there with no street address, there are signs honoring her at the city limits, and the pool where she swam as a junior is now named after her.
After her disappointing ’96 trials, Thompson consulted with family, friends, her coach and a sports psychologist. Some of the most valuable advice she got had nothing to do with her stroke.
“I realized that the thing that brings out the best in me in the sport is the energy, the fans, the kids,” Thompson said. “I love the human aspect of the sport. Once I realized that and I practiced that, everything changed. Instead of tunnel-visioning, if I just relax and enjoy myself and laugh and feel the energy of the situation, I swim much better.”
`You are who you are’
With the pressure largely off in Atlanta, Thompson reveled in her relay swims. Then she set about the process of recreating herself. She would win two individual events, the 100 freestyle and the 100 butterfly, and a share of two relays at the 1998 world championships–the same events she will swim in Sydney, likely along with the medley relay.
Last year, at her first competition in the Olympic pool in Sydney, she shattered the oldest record in swimming: Mary T. Meagher’s 100-meter butterfly mark, which had stood since 1981. After shaving 15100ths from Meagher’s time, finishing in 57.88 seconds, Thompson presciently predicted that others would surpass her.
“I think people got this idea in their head that this was the impossible swim because this record is so old,” Thompson said. “But now that I’ve done it I think the times will drop. You see that a lot in sports. It’s a mental barrier that keeps people from going faster.”
Indeed, Inge deBruijn of the Netherlands has since carved more than a full second off Thompson’s performance and is the favorite in Sydney.
Last year Thompson undertook a rigorous weight program with a private trainer, complementing it with yoga and stretching. Using free weights for the first time in her life, she resculpted her body to its current, more muscular proportions.
“When I was younger, I was more concerned about getting bulky, looking unfeminine, and now I really don’t care as much about that,” said Thompson, who caused a minor furor by posing naked from the waist up, hands over her breasts, for Sports Illustrated last month. “With age you realize you are who you are, and I just want to max out my potential. If I have huge muscles, that’s the way it’s going to be.”
The other thing she rolled around in her brain over the last few years was her future career. Thompson had thought she might pursue a job in public health but realized after graduating that she had shied away from her real goal, to be a doctor, because she was intimidated by the more intense science courses she would have to take.
She decided to attack that as she had Meagher’s record and commuted to Oakland to take special postgraduate courses. Thompson was accepted by Columbia Medical School this year and expects to start in 2001.
Swimming may be wasted on the young, Thompson said. In her late 20s she has finally mastered the art of rationing her adrenaline. It has given her the water wings she once scorned.
“I think I have that ability to stay at a lower emotional level, not put very much mental energy into something, and then when I want to I can turn it on,” she said. “That also has helped me be able to do this for so long because I’m not wasting emotional energy when I don’t need to. I’ve just learned how to manage everything so I know I’m going to be the best I can be when I get behind the blocks.”
