by Brian Honicky, Swimming World College Intern
When you set foot on deck at Olympic Trials for the first time, you can’t help but stop and take a step back. As you look around at the arena, the pool, and the stands, you know that you’re about to be in the presence of the very best that the sport has to offer.
With the cameras, the lights, and the electric energy in the air, it’s clear that at some point over the next seven days, you’re going to witness something special. This is our Super Bowl, our World Series, and the country is watching. It’s a week that promises to shock and awe with triumphs, heartbreaks, and fast swimming guaranteed.
It was a little jarring at first as someone who has never attended a national meet on anything close to this scale. Like many, my only Olympic Trials experience had been from my living room couch. Swimming on national television alone is exciting to see, and it can help to highlight at least some of the grand spectacle. But until you look up at a three-story high picture of Katie Ledecky, mouth wide open post-race as if giving a powerful victory roar, you may not be getting the full experience. This is a swim meet?
Yes, it certainly is, and events of this size are a solid validation that, for swimmers and non swimmers alike, swimming can be incredibly cool. It’s no secret that this meet is something special. For a sport that doesn’t get that national attention during non-Olympic years, this is the time swimming gets to be a little flashy, to extend an invitation to the rest of the country into our little world. It’s the time to say “Welcome, come and see what we have to offer.”
Photo Courtesy: Brian Honicky
To be fair, my first experience attending Trials was not your typical one. It wasn’t as a swimmer or a spectator, but working for Swimming World as a social media intern. The role gave me so many incredible and unique experiences that I couldn’t have dreamed of gaining in any other situation. I was so lucky to have access to the pool deck, the mixed zone, and the athlete press conferences among other things that gave me the behind the scenes perspective on the meet that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.
I’ll admit, as a fan of swimming, it wasn’t easy being professional when your athletic idols were right at your fingertips. I learned quickly that the press conference room probably wasn’t the time for autographs. But what I lacked in the coveted signatures of popular Olympians, I made up for tenfold in much more meaningful learning.
Photo Courtesy: Brian Honicky
Seeing the athletes that I’ve grown up watching swim on TV at this meet reminded me that Olympians are just people. I think that this realization came most in seeing all of the new faces that were added to the Olympic team this year.
Thirty swimmers qualified for their first Olympic team. That’s thirty new faces from the swimming world that will be introduced to the United States this year. That’s 30 more people to help grow the sport in our country, 30 more people for young people to look up to. Not to mention the cavalry of long-time veterans to help lead them into battle on the international stage in a few short weeks.
Seeing these athletes, from those not even in college to those in their mid-thirties, makes you realize that the team isn’t some group of invincible super humans. They’re people. They’re the people who trained harder than anyone else when they were kids and set their minds to accomplishing something. They took their raw talent and chiseled away at it, striving for perfection day in and day out until what they saw for themselves became a reality.
They are people with the same emotions as anyone else in success or failure. Leah Smith‘s beaming smile as she made her first Olympics is the same smile as the 8-year-old summer swimmer who finishes her first 25 freestyle and waves to her parents. When you strip away all the lights and theatrics, as several of the athletes said themselves, at its bare bones it’s just another swim meet. Olympians are just people, and when you take away the finals walk out music and the pre-session light shows, the human moments of emotions at the core of the meet are what make it so special.
Nice read but you have 3 year olds finishing their first 25 now and 8 year olds who swim 400IM. Every time I go to a meet I wonder if any of them will be the great ones of the future.
I wonder if that’s good for children that young. I see the intensity here in NoVA. It’s crazy