well this story is very long but very nice

abstracted from a blog www.storytime.blogspot.com


The Village was publicized as a 24-hour bustling temporary city, but it was eerie how quiet it got at 3 am. This late at night it was actually chilly in Sydney. It felt like an early August morning at the lake where his family spent the summers. The dimmed lighting was downright moody, and the only people Arthur encountered were the occasional security guards and gaggles of partying Europeans. They all waved hello and offered congratulations. It was so strange he felt like giggling. He was still wearing the medal under his sweatshirt. He couldn't seem to take it off. He had worked twenty-five years for it If he took it off it would be dismissive. I got you, now go back in your box. No. He felt obligated to clutch the medal close to his heart. When no one was looking he would take a peek to see if it was still there. Damn. He couldn't be Olympic champion. Yes, said the medal, you could, and you are.He found himself entering the cavernous communications centre. He expected it to be empty, but with thousands of athletes jockeying for a few hundred computer terminals he should have known better. People should be asleep, he thought, but then he realized. No, 3 am here may be prime chatting time with their families. Their events may be over. They may not have to get any sleep. Just like me. Unti the relay in three days he would have no obligations.His wife was asleep at the room. She knew how this worked. She went through the same thing in Barcelona in 1988, but that year they couldn't share a room in the Village. He hadn't qualified for the team. Third place, they take two. He had watched from their tiny Syracuse apartment as she crushed the East Europeans. She had told him how the first night was strange, how she sat up all night staring blankly at the medal. Now she was a sprint coach and she could share it with him. When he got out of bed."I'm going out," he had said."Whatever," was all she muttered, but the way she touched his arm told him she knew why. She turned to go back to sleep, and the grin on her face, her pride was almost too much for him.When you're waking up every day at 5 to work out of prepare for 8 am heats, you don't have much time for Olympic fun. He knew about the kick ass cafeteria that somehow made the best grits he had ever tasted. He had heard about the computers. He had heard they were letting people send questions in to athletes. As he walked toward the emptiest part of the centre, a guy he recognized as a legendary Pakastani weightlifter looked up. He saw Arthur and gave him two fist pumps and a smile. His wife had gone through a media blitz after Barcelona, but it was dawning on him that it was much different than he ever imagined to be at the center of the blitz instead of watching from the sidelines.Just out of curiosity, he pulled up the official Olympic website and pulled up the results of his race. Swimming. 200 meter breaststroke. American Arthur Coddington Upsets Klim in Olympic Record. I guess it's true. I won, he thought. Of course it wasn't supposed to happen this way. Michael Klim was supposed to bring home another gold for Australia.So much was changing so fast. A wave of panic hit him. He was on display. He was a big story. In four hours he would be taping an in depth interview with Bob Costas. His agent Betty was fielding some pretty insane sponsorship offers - Speedo, Ferrari, UPS. He wouldn't get basketball rich, but he could pay off the mortgage and if he played his cards right he and Crystal would be set for life. Betty said for the next year at least he would get $30,000 - $50,000 for a speaking engagement. This wasn't supposed to happen. He wasn't even the top qualifier on the US Team. He ony beat the third place guy by two hundredths of a second. He wasn't even supposed to be an athlete at his age. Whoever heard of a 35 year old swimming champion? His hands were shaking. He took a deep breath, felt his medal under his sweatshirt, remembered little Candice sleeping back home, and it was okay.The Olympic organizers had let the public send questions to the athletes over the website. He logged on and clicked the Ask The Athlete button. One thousand fifty-three people had sent questions to him, and it looked like most of them were sent this evening. It made him feel exposed, like everyone knew who he was and everyone was looking at him. And frankly he had a good feeling about that. Five years ago he was washed up. After spending twenty years in the pool, he had an undistinguished elite swimming career. Three Olympic Trials. Zero teams made. Sixteen national championships. No titles, no records. Four NCAA meets. No titles. Then the lump appeared on his neck, and he had to take a year off to rid his body of the tumor. Then the spot appeared on his forehead, and he wasn't allowed to swim while the melanoma was being treated, and they didn't want him out in the sun training. Then Crystal got pregnant and he took a job selling commercial heating and air conditioning systems to pay the rent. He gained thirty pounds and watched a new generation of swimmers pass him by.One day he was playing with little Candice at the park and she ran toward the street. She got a thirty foot headstart on him. The light turned green, and cars converged on the spot where Candice was heading. Instinct took over. He rushed to her and wisked her off the ground just as she reached the sidewalk. As he kissed her and gently scolded her for being a renegade, he noticed that he was winded and had a pulled hamstring. A thirty foot run and he was winded. They say drug addicts won't stop until they hit bottom. It's the same for athletes. They can stay away from fitness until it gets embarrassingly bad. Arthur limped to the car, giving little Candice a piggyback ride, trying to remember where the nearest training pools were.Early the next morning he went to the YMCA for a swim. He could have walked into any college pool in the city and swum laps with their teams. He knew all the coaches. That's not what he wanted. He wanted a gentle, recreational swim. He had no ambitions of a return to competition. The pool was populated swimmers moving so slow it was more like floating than swimming. Still, he was nervous. He found a nearly empty lane and sunk down into the water. After so many years it still felt familiar, that cocoon. He pulled his goggles down and pushed off the wall. He barely made it out and back, but he noticed something. As slow as he tried to go, he went fast. His stroke was still there. He swam every day for the next week and worked himself up to a half mile swim. He became a bit of a sensation in the YMCA. The snail-paced swimmers would point and murmer as he got in and out of the pool. No one swam in his lane because no one could keep up, and he wasn't even trying to go fast. He called Bruce, his college coach who now ran an elite training program and broached the subject of returning to form. Bruce was a diplomat but even he couldn't hide his urge to laugh. He admired Arthur's ambition. He also knew that Arthur had never been a dominant swimmer, and that in the years since his illnesses the sport had become twice as competitive. He discouraged Arthur with all his fancy skills. Arthur wanted to give it a try. At a certain point, Bruce stopped resisting Arthur's pipe dream and agreed to help him out with one key ground rule. They would be training for Olympic level swimming, but Arthur should forget any ambition of making the Olympics. He had seen Arthur go off the deep end, pardon the pun, one too many times after failing at the Olympic trials. Crystal was concerned with Arthur's return to training. They had put swimming behind them. They were elder statesmen in the swimming community, and elder statemen don’t challenge the young bucks. Look what happened to Mark Spitz. It was embarrassing, and it tarnished his aura of invinceability. “Look, I’m all in favor of you getting into shape. I love that you enjoy swimming again. Just don’t get back into a rut of training.”“Don’t worry,” was all Arthur ever said.Crystal’s graphic design projects brought in more income than his salary, so cutting his hours in half didn’t hurt their finances. Arthur woke up before dawn six days a week for a year and a half, put in double practices and had his technique broken down and replaced by entirely new techniques. He lifted weights. He invested in twice weekly massages to keep his muscles fresh. Arthur’s dedication and infectious enthusiasm for swimming wore off on Bruce. Within two months Bruce said to hell with the no-Olympics ground rule. Arthur was swimming too fast to deny it. He could keep up, and he might be better than ever by the Olympic Trials. The rest was a blur of training and working and lack of sleep. It took him four tries to get an Olympic Trials qualifying time. At the Trials, he choked in the 100 Fly, not even making it out of the heats. He skated through the heats of the 200. The finals were stacked. World record holders, junior world champions. It was a gauntlet even for someone with years of uninterrupted training, and on top of that he drew a bad lane because of his slow heat times. It worked out. He swam without knowing what place he was in. He broke his personal best by six tenths of a second. He knocked the world record holder off the Olympic Team. Just another day at the office. He read a question from an Olympic fan. What would you be doing if you weren’t a swimmer? Easy question. He wasn’t a swimmer for so many years. He already lived that life. Then he got a flash of his junior swimming days. He was ten years old and on his first local swimming team. He was not the best swimmer, and they kept putting him in different races every meet. One time he’d swim freestyle, the next time breastroke. His mom drove him to a night meet at a high school pool. He had been there to see his older sister swim a varsity meet. All he could remember was the diving board, the terrible, horrible cry of the board as the divers took off. It was so loud it hurt his ears. The creaking was worse than fingernails on a blackboard. When they drove into the parking lot, it was like a phobia of that diving board sound kicked in. He refused to get out of the car. His mom was not having any of it. She didn’t drive all the way out here for nothing. He was going to swim. Fine. They got out of the car, and the memory of that diving board sound haunted him again. He ran away across the dark parking lot. He hid behind a utility shed. His mother was frantic. She was angry and frustrated and afraid. She begged him to stop hiding.At that moment, he could have ended his swimming career, but he didn’t. The pain in his mother’s voice was worse than the sound of that damn diving board. He ran back to her and apologized. He swam that night and won his first race. He won big. There wasn’t even a diving competition, so he never had to experience the sound he most feared. That meet was when his coaches started grooming him as an elite swimmer.If he wasn’t a swimmer, it would have been because he didn’t come out of hiding that night. It would have been because he refused to swim. It would have been because of his parents’ punishment. You made your choice tonight. You’re not on the swim team anymore. The coaches were talking about the Junior Olympics for you, but you should have thought of that before you pulled that stunt.He would have been without a sport, and he would have found other things to do. He would have played kickball in the street with the neighborhood kids. He would have gone for hikes in the woods around their house. He would have played Frisbee with his sister in the backyard. And one birthday, his sister would have given him a book on Frisbee for his birthday. And he would read the book over and over again, and he would decide to make Frisbee his sport.He would discover that he was not just good at swimming, he was good at sports. He was a natural athlete, and he would learn how to compete in the different Frisbee sports very quickly. There would be no training programs or local clubs to shephard him up through the ranks. He would have to do it on his own, riding his bike to the local university after school to practice throwing for distance, analyzing Frisbee magazine pictures to figure out how to do tricks. He would lobby his parents to take him to a competition, they would give in, and he would surprise them by winning the state junior championships on his first try.Arthur knew he was smart but that he had chosen swimming over studies. If he had not been a swimmer, he would have been a better student. He would have gotten into an Ivy League school, say Princeton for instance. He would have set aside Frisbee competitions to focus on his degree.After graduating, he would join a management training program. He would dress up in a suit every day and ride the New York subway to work. He would crunch numbers and jockey for promotions and buy a footlong hotdog for lunch every day. After three years he would land a lucrative job at a competing firm. He would get married but divorce within a year because his career was more important.One night he would flip through the Sunday New York Times and read an article about people being paid millions of dollars for spec screenplays in Hollywood. The dollar signs would light up in his eys, and he would sit down at the typewriter and try his hand at it. He would show his first script to trusted friends, who would praise it. He would get an offer of representation from a law firm who would ultimately flake out on him before signing papers, but that legitimate praise would be enough to make him pack up and move to California to make his fortune as a screenwriter.Los Angeles would not be friendly to him. Consulting firms were not interested in an executive with interests outside the office. He would live off his savings until he found a job as a secretary for a film executive in a studio. He would continue writing and be rejected by every production company in town. Sometimes he used his connections to get copies of the script notes on his submissions, and they were devastatingly brutal.Sometime after moving to Los Angeles, with its year-round summers, he would rediscover Frisbee. Like Arthur and swimming, he would start playing again for fun, then quickly learn that he was still competitive. He would find that there were others to play with, and he would latch onto the tricks event, freestyle, as his thing. Freestyle would relieve the stress and frustrations of his job and writing. He would find a teammate to compete with, perhaps someone who had also given the sport up and had rediscovered it within a week of him. Arthur smirked. That was a little over the top. He let his adrenalin-induced fantasy continue.Two hands on his shoulders jolted him out of his daydream. “You okay, mate? You’ve been staring into space for an hour.”It was Michael Klim, his victim in the finals tonight. Klim squeezed his shoulders in a congratulatory gesture.The pain was so obvious on Klim’s face. He was the favorite. He was supposed to win in his home country. Arthur spoiled that for him. He was up at 4 am. His eyes looked red. Was the big man crying?“You’re up pretty late,” said Arthur.“Drowning my sorrows, mate. Drowning my sorrows. You had an awesome race tonight. Congratulations.”“Thanks, man.”“What are you doing up? Get some rest. You’ve got a whole new life.”“I know. I couldn’t sleep. I was. Happy.”“Damn right. You should be. Cheers.”Arthur almost logged off, then decided to answer the email question.What would you be doing if you weren’t a swimmer?“Great question! I don’t know what else I’d do. For now I’m enjoying being a swimmer.”He decided to go back to the room for a quick nap before the interview. As he strolled the walkway and acknowledged more congratulations, he imagined more of his non-swimming life. He and his teammate would train together and lift each other into contention for world championship medals. The sport’s establishment would not be happy with how fast the newcomers were coming on. They would win regular season tournaments, but it would take them a few years to break through and win their first world championship title. After that there was no stopping them. He and his teammate would win every year and set records and create groundbreaking new directions in the sport. He would travel the world and perform at NBA halftimes and compete at the X-Games, but every time he won a competition he would wonder what it's like to win the Olympics

well it's long but nice
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