She sat in the ready room and could not take a breath to relax. The 400-meter individual medley scared the living daylights out of her, and here was Katie Hoff, baby of the U.S. Olympic team, about to begin her Olympic career by swimming it at the 2004 Athens Games.
It all had happened so fast. She was in the Olympics with the fastest time of the year in the 400 IM when five weeks earlier, barely 15, Hoff was hoping somehow to get a place on the team. All the attention that followed her victories in the 200 and 400 IMs at the trials, all the focus on the sport’s newest ingenue, drained her emotional energy. She felt overwhelmed.
It had happened so fast that her coach, Paul Yetter, had no accreditation to be with Hoff on the Olympic pool deck, and, at that stage of her career, she relied on Yetter to boost her confidence.
Now she had no coach and no confidence, enough to make anyone hold his breath figuratively, so much that Hoff did it literally, getting more tightly wound by the second before her preliminary round race.
Hoff dove into the pool and was so nervous she came unstrung. She cramped up and hurt in a way she never had experienced while swimming. It made Hoff so nauseous that after the race she threw up, which never had happened to her before because of swimming and has not happened since. She was 17th fastest of the 24 swimmers in the prelims. Eight made the final.
Family has plan now
Then the story took a painful turn.
Her hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun, noted Hoff was believed to be the only U.S. swimmer in Athens without a parent present.
The Sun had reported a week before the Olympics that John and Jeanne Hoff were not coming for reasons that included the independence they long had fostered in her, but now it seemed different. Now it seemed they had forsaken the baby in her moment of distress.
“It was so exaggerated, so blown out of proportion,” Hoff said. “I came on so quickly, there was no time to prepare for it, to spend the money for the trip to Athens. I had my teammates, and I talked to my parents on the phone every day, but the story sounded like I was all alone, and it almost turned people against my parents, when they had done nothing wrong.”
The Hoffs were wounded by the perception they were uncaring. Since she was 9, they often had stayed home while she went to meets with her team.
“It was very hurtful to us,” Jeanne Hoff said. “It made it seem like we had abandoned our child. A lot of people misunderstood. I wasn’t like she was a sheltered kid heading off to Athens.”
It will be different this time. Hoff’s parents and brother Christian, 15, have had plenty of time to prepare for a trip to Beijing because Hoff recovered from what she called her “huge disaster” in Athens to become the leading female swimmer on the U.S. team, a stature made completely clear when Hoff won five events at last month’s Olympic trials.
“There weren’t a lot of positives about the last Olympics for Katie, except it being part of a maturing process for her,” Jeanne Hoff said. “It was very traumatic.”
Maturation in Montreal
The trauma ended for good a year after Athens, where she also had finished seventh in the 200 IM. At the 2005 world championships in Montreal, where the 200 IM was her opening event, Hoff won the first of four individual world titles.
“[The] 2005 worlds was crucial,” Hoff said. “My confidence was pretty down after the Olympics, and I wanted to prove to myself and the world I wasn’t a one-hit wonder. It was a turning point in my career.”
To Yetter, the Athens performance, not the Montreal one, was the singular occurrence.
“By the 2004 Olympics, I had coached her about 740 days, and one day out of those 740, she wasn’t herself,” Yetter said of Hoff’s Olympic debut. “I had no doubt she was going to do real well in her next big meet. Katie is a stud.”
Calling a young woman a “stud” would sound odd if the coach were saying it anywhere else but the Baltimore pool where Michael Phelps had trained to win six gold medals and two bronzes at the 2004 Olympics. Yetter, 32, merely is comparing Hoff to the pedigree of excellence in multiple-event swimming Phelps bred at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club before he and his coach, Bob Bowman, moved to the University of Michigan.
“Michael cleared the way for swimmers to do multiple events at major international meets,” Hoff said. “Five or six years ago, it would have seemed ridiculous.”
Her own model
The temptation is to see Hoff as the female version of Phelps, who is four years older and cannot resist teasing her the way a brother does a little sister. Phelps won no medal in his first Olympics and headed into his second, the one that made him a star, at 19. Hoff won no medal in her first Olympics and heads to her second, the one expected to make her a star, at 19.
But even a cursory analysis of their records makes it clear why Hoff, 2008 model, is not Phelps, 2004 model, as the Beijing Olympic Games begin.
Phelps went to Athens as the dominant world record-holder in three events, both individual medleys and the 200 butterfly and a close second in a fourth, the 100 butterfly. He won those four and added a bronze medal in a fifth, the 200 freestyle, where that was the most anyone expected of him.
Hoff goes to Beijing as the world record-holder in one event, the 400 IM (that record, set at the U.S. Olympic trials, bettered Australian Stephanie Rice’s mark set in March by less than four-tenths of a second) and the world’s second-fastest swimmer this season in four others: the 200, 400 and 800 freestyles and the 200 IM.
And, thank goodness, Hoff has nothing to do with the greasy spoon in a blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood where Phelps would take visiting journalists for breakfast before the Athens Games.
Hoff’s visitor is relieved when she steers her BMW 335 toward the fancy Roland Park area, where she favors a considerably more upscale place called Miss Shirley’s Cafe.
High expectations
Like Phelps four years ago, as he barely missed a $1 sponsor’s million reward for matching Mark Spitz’s landmark achievement of seven gold medals, Hoff is expected to gorge herself on Olympic success. The headline of a March 3 story on SwimNews.com: “Step Aside Phelps, Hoff Might Get to 7 Golds First.”
“I read that, and I just rolled my eyes,” Hoff said on this May morning, ticking into a hearty repast of scrambled eggs and French toast.
“I feel like I’m an underdog at this point going into everything, which is nice for me because I feel like it takes the pressure off. For me, it is a cool thing not to think about gold, but just think about medals, about being able to say, ‘I have this many medals at the Olympics.’ In my mind, I don’t have to think about winning, winning, winning, just getting on the medal stand.”
She should make that climb seven times, as long as U.S. coaches use her on both freestyle relays and neither team botches a start. The possibility Hoff could top the six golds East Germany’s Kristin Otto won in 1988 — the record for a female athlete in a single Olympics — has gained rather little currency so far.
In the IMs, her principal rival is Rice, who finished behind Hoff in both at the 2007 world championships but has set world records in both this season.
In the 200 and 400 freestyles, her primary competitors are France’s Laure Manaudou, reigning world champion in both events, and Italy’s Federica Pellegrini, world record-holder at 400 and former world record-holder at 200.
Even with the advantage Hoff had from the new high-tech racing suits, which neither Manaudou nor Pellegrini wore for their best swims, she never has been as fast as the two Europeans at either freestyle distance.
She trains tough
All Hoff’s world titles have come in the individual medleys. Freestyle has become an equally featured part of her repertoire only in the last year, playing perfectly into Yetter’s plan to channel Hoff’s fierce but potentially confidence-damaging competitiveness by devising unexpected challenges in her 10 weekly training sessions.
“I had a problem where I needed to prove myself every day, so we would do [training] sets for time, and I was obsessed with it,” Hoff said. “Now I don’t need to get a best time every day.”
In a workout two months before the Olympic trials, Yetter gave Hoff an unprecedented set: 2,000 yards of freestyle, in which she was to alternate “cruise” 100s with fast 100s. Hoff did the workout brilliantly, averaging less than a minute per 100 and covering the final two lengths faster (27.9 seconds) than any of her other 50-yard splits.
“It’s crazy how she can do distance stuff even if we’re usually not doing a lot of distance training,” Yetter said.
He noticed that ability when a 14-yar-old Hoff produced a stunning workout of 200-yard interval repeats, averaging 1:55 for 20 of them. That was not long after her family had moved from Virginia to Maryland, partly so her father who sells tax-strategy seminars, could be closer to his main sales area and partly to give her a better swimming environment.
Her parents met at Stanford, where her mother, now an insurance administrator, was a star basketball player from 1979 though 1983. She still has the highest field-goal percentage in Stanford history.
Those genes apparently were not passed down.
“I took to the water right away, but I’m not very coordinated on land,” Katie Hoff said.
Jeanne Hoff began home-schooling Katie at 10, but she switched to a correspondence-based schooling program as a freshman in high school, from which she graduated in 2007. She plans to attend Loyola University in Baltimore part time and be a volunteer assistant coach there after the Olympics and maybe get back into hip-hop dancing, which she used to do once a week.
What the future holds
Like Phelps, Hoff gave up college eligibility for an endorsement contract with Speedo. Hers, a 10-year deal, was the longest such contract in swimming history when she signed it after the 2005 worlds. Peter Carlisle of Octagon, the company that handles Hoff’s management, said he can envision a career that would take her beyond the end of that deal — even as far as the 2020 Olympics.
“If I’m still enjoying it, I can see myself doing that,” Hoff said. “Obviously, I won’t be swimming the 400 IM or the 800 freestyle. If I can transform myself into more of a sprinter, it won’t be as much training or mental pressure.”
She had enough mental pressure for anyone, let alone a 15-year-old, in the 400 IM at Athens. Once again, Hoff will open her Olympics with that race.
“I still get ultra-nervous about the 400 IM,” she said. “It has taken me a long time to learn how to deal with those nerves.”
Now that she has, Katie Hoff’s swimming is breathtaking.
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phersh@tribune.com
