The University of Arizona Alumnus / Summer 2008
ua 2008 olympic connection
by Carolyn Niethammerphotos by Jacob Chinn
When thousands of athletes from hundreds of countries gather in Beijing this summer, to compete in dozens of sports, a significant number of those people will walk through the Olympic Village and perhaps bump into somebody they used to see walking across the University of Arizona campus.
The UA will be well-represented at the 2008 Olympics, from head coaches James Li, Mike Candrea, and Frank Busch, to the UA alumni and student-athletes listed below.
Some athletes, like softball's Caitlin Lowe, Lovi Jung, and Jennie Finch, and swimming's Lacey Nymeyer are favored to win Olympic medals. While others, including track and field's Abdi Abdirahman and swimming's Albert Subirats (representing his native Venezuela) might be long-shots. But they all will undoubtedly create Olympic fever for Wildcat fans and do the UA proud.
In this Olympic section of Alumnus, sportswriter Tom Danehy features swimmer Lacey Nymeyer, softball player Lovieanne Jung, and distance runner Abdi Abdirahman.
Listed below are the UA alumni, coaches, and student-athletes participating in the 2008 Olympic Games, including the country they represent.
Water Below, Sky Above
Lacey Nymeyer's perfect place
It has been said that the only people who know absolutely everything are God and an eighth-grader. Why then would Lacey Nymeyer — the UA's top-female swimmer and one of several Wildcat athletes, past and present, to have a good shot at winning an Olympic medal in Beijing this summer — want to work with middle-schoolers someday?
"I like a challenge," says the physical education major in the College of Education, with a twinkle in her eye and her ever-present smile.
To be sure, Nymeyer has plenty to smile about. For one thing, a rare combination of being a part of an NCAA championship team and winning an Olympic medal in the same year is a very real possibility. She's already halfway there, after leading the 'Cats to the first swimming national championship in the school's history in March.
The 2007 Pac-10 Women's Swimmer of the Year, Nymeyer was a seven-time first-team All-America honoree her junior season. She and her Wildcats teammates led at the Nationals after two days, but then watched Auburn zoom by on the final day. Arizona had to settle for second. But that was last year. In 2008, the 'Cats held a slim lead after the first day, widened it on the second, and then blew it out of the water on the third day to win the national crown by a whopping 136-point margin over Auburn.
Nymeyer played a huge role in the 'Cats' success. She won the 100-meter freestyle, took second in the 200-free, and was part of four national championship relay teams, including three in which she and her teammates set new NCAA, meet, American, and U.S. Open records.
"It's great winning an individual championship, a relay championship, and a team national championship on the same day," she says.
Now she can add Olympian to her résumé. Competing at the Olympic Trials in Omaha on the Fourth of July, she swam the fastest 100 meters of her life (54.02 seconds) to finish third behind swimming legends Dara Torres and Natalie Coughlin. After Torres opted to drop out of the 100m freestyle in Beijing, Nymeyer moved into her spot. She will now swim in the 100m free and be part of the 4x100 relay team that has a great shot at winning a gold medal. Nymeyer had an outstanding week in Omaha, just missing the finals of the 200 free and then posting three consecutive personal bests in the 100 to make the team.
"It's such a great honor to represent my country in the Olympics," says Nymeyer, who has represented the U.S. in other international competitions and is an American record holder as part of a 400 freestyle relay team. "The Olympics are the ultimate."
Her athletic and Wildcat roots run deep. Her grandfather, Ed Nymeyer, was the leading scorer on three consecutive Wildcat basketball teams in the late 1950s and is still among the top 25 career scorers in Arizona hoop history. Born and raised in Tucson, Lacey swam for Marana's Mountain View High School, where she still holds six school records (and will probably continue to do so for quite some time). She won the state championship in the 50-free all four years that she was in high school and won the state title in the 100-free three straight years. She also graduated with a perfect 4.0 GPA.
Nymeyer also is a good student at the UA and plans to graduate next year. She wants to work with middle-school students for a specific reason. "With elementary-school students, it's pretty easy to get them motivated and moving, but their skill levels are still pretty low, so any activities will be pretty basic. High-school kids have more developed abilities, but except for those who are participating in interscholastic athletics, the motivation just isn't there.
"In middle school," she goes on, "you've got a chance to do some real work with kids. They've got more advanced skills, and you're also able to motivate them to develop exercise habits that will stay with them throughout their lives."
Nymeyer has some well-developed workout habits of her own, including never missing a day of swimming.
"I just love being in the water. I want to swim every day and I never dread having to work out. There's just something about being in the water that's calming and energizing at the same time. When you're swimming and you've got the water below and the sky above, you're in a perfect place."
She understands that people might think that swimming workouts would get maddeningly repetitive after so many years, but she counters that repetition only serves to help her find consistency. (Speaking of consistency, when researching this piece, I found that her aforementioned grandfather played three years of varsity basketball for the 'Cats, each with 26 games, and scored 407, 410, and 408 points, respectively, averaging 15.7 points per game each year. Now that's consistency.)
His granddaughter attains the swimmer's version of a runner's high, that point where there is no pain, no passage of time, just the sensation of motion, smooth and strong, effortless yet precise.
"There's really no way to describe it. It's not like you're one with the water, because you're aware of the water. It's just that you're skimming along the top of it like it's frictionless. It's almost like the sensation of flying."
As Nymeyer looks ahead to what could be the most exciting months of her life, she tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy. She went to class this spring, does her workouts, and talks to friends. One thing she doesn't do is hang out on Facebook. "That's something I just don't understand. If I want to talk to my friends, I'll talk to my friends. I don't like texting, either. I like talking to people, face to face or on the phone. I just don't get Facebook. I don't need every single person I've ever met knowing what I'm doing at all times."
She understands, however, that if her Olympic dreams come to pass this August, there will be a few billion people who'll know exactly what she's doing.
Putting on the Game Face Is Lovieanne Jung Team USA's most serious hitter?
In 1912, a man named Wilbur Scoville developed a scale to measure the hotness of peppers. The mighty jalapeño tops out at 8,000 Scoville units. That might sound impressive until you learn that there are peppers grown in India that are at the million mark on the scale, and that pure capsaicin is at 16 million units.
If they had a similar scale for game faces, "mean" would be at the pepperoncini level, "intense" would be around the habanero, while Lovieanne Jung's game-face would be around refined and concentrated capsaicin.
Even at her most upbeat, when Jung plays softball, the look on her face makes you think somebody took the last biscuit right before the plate got to her. And that's after a win.
"It's simple, really," she explains by phone during one of the stops in Team USA's 46-stop whup-a-thon leading up to the Summer Olympics in Beijing. (It began with a 16-0 shellacking of defending national champion Arizona at Hillenbrand Stadium in February and has hit only one bump — when Team USA was no-hit by Angela Tincher of Virginia Tech.) "When I was starting out, I wasn't the best player. I wasn't heavily recruited to college. It sounds like a cliché, but I had to out-work and out-hustle everybody else, and for me, that starts with mental preparation."
Jung, a 2003 UA grad, wears industrial-strength earphones on the bus heading to games, not to listen to her own music, but rather to drown out the sounds of other's people's music and conversations. "I like it quiet."
She certainly doesn't play a quiet game. Playing second base with great range and a fearlessness that appears to welcome collisions around the bag, she also is one of the best hitters on the team. She has batted in the .400 range several times in her career, this in a sport where a .250 average accords one Ty Cobb status.
Jung is one of three former Arizona Wildcats on the squad, along with über-celebrity pitcher Jennie Finch and 2007 grad Caitlin Lowe. Former 'Cat pitcher Alicia Hollowell is a reserve on the squad, which also features hard-hitting Tairia Mims
Flowers, who grew up in Tucson, but then lost her way and ended up at — boo! — UCLA. The team is coached by UA legend Mike Candrea, who led the USA squad to a perfect 9-0 mark in the 2004 Games.
If such a thing is possible, Jung is facing the upcoming Olympic Games with a heightened sense of urgency. The reason is two-fold. For one, it will mark the end of her softball career. And the second is that, barring any sudden onset of common sense on the part of the Olympic Committee, this will be the last time softball is a part of the Games. America's dominance in the sport makes it a target for the haters, who plot to replace it with ballroom dancing. (I couldn't make that up if I tried!)
"Obviously, I disagree with the Olympics getting rid of softball. The Olympics are supposed to be about excelling in sports, and then when a team excels, they want to do away with the entire sport? That makes no sense," says Jung.
Jung realizes that while her team is favored in the Olympics, it is by no means a sure thing. In the 2000 Sydney Games, the U.S. team lost preliminary-round games to China, Japan, and host Australia. The Americans battled back to win five straight games (including extra-inning battles with China and Japan) to win the gold. The 2004 team in Athens (of which Jung was a part) stormed through the competition, but that doesn't guarantee a repeat.
"There are several teams out there that are very good. We play the Japanese team a lot and when we beat them, they're devastated. They compete very hard. And if they beat us, they celebrate a lot." She pauses, then adds, "A lot."
There also is the matter of the host team wanting to beat the USA in what many believe to be quintessential American sports — the men in basketball and the women in softball. Wins in those sports would probably deflect attention away from some of the negative media attention that China has received in the run-up to the Games. "The Chinese will be a tough team to beat also. They'll be playing at home and they'll want to beat us at our game," says Jung.
During the interview, I tried to get her to smile, an event so unique, it probably would have shown up over the phone. I asked her if she and Candrea switched spots right now, who would do the better job — he as a player or she as a coach?
She gave it some thought, then said, "Coach has always been careful in talking about his playing days. He says he was OK, but not great. And since his playing days were a few years ago (Candrea is in his 50s), and since I've been able to learn so much from him all these years that I've played for him, I would say that I would do the better job. I know I'd try."
When the Games end in late August, Jung will return home to Southern California and embark on the next stage of her life. "I want to be a firefighter in Los Angeles," she says. "I've already gone through the preliminary steps and I'm looking forward to taking all the tests and getting hired. I think it'll be great."
But, first things first, and that means putting on her game face. You've been warned.
Running for His Dream Abdi Abdirahman will give back to the country that has given him so much.
In this era of hip-hop self-promotion, former UA distance runner Abdi Abdirahman's self-given moniker — The Black Cactus — stands out. It's clever, funny, and self-deprecating.
When Abdirahman is not out training for his specialty, the 10,000-meter run, he's probably at home, watching ESPN on his big-screen TV and chowing down on his training-table staples of red meat and Gatorade. The two-time defending national champion in the event, Abdirahman has a laser-like focus on winning Olympic gold in the 10,000 meters in Beijing this August.
That focus became a necessity after his dreams of pulling off a rare Olympic double were dashed in November 2007. After training for months in high altitude in Flagstaff, he ran in the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials in New York City. A relative newcomer to the event, Abdirahman figured that his work ethic and talent, and the grueling training at high altitude would be enough for him to emerge from the field over the tough, hilly course.
It turned out to be a bleak day for Abdirahman (who dropped out at the 18-mile mark with a painful hip flexor) and virtually everybody else. Not only did Abdirahman fail to finish the event, a pall was cast over the entire proceeding by the death of competitor Ryan Shay, who died of a heart attack about five miles into the race. Shay also had spent considerable time in Flagstaff preparing for the Trials, and his death was hard on everyone.
Abdirahman returned to training for the 10,000 meters and won his second consecutive national championship in the event in April and then the Olympic Trials in Eugene, Ore., in July. He faces a stiff challenge at Beijing, however. At press time, 15 runners had posted faster times this year in the event.
He returned to the altitude training in July hoping that it would help him in the polluted air of Beijing. "You really can't worry about the conditions. We're all going to be breathing in the same air."
He says that he has to come up with a race strategy that will give him the chance to medal. While he usually is a frontrunner, he is developing a late kick that comes from "chasing (training partner and) world champion Bernard Lagat around the track."
That he is in this position in the first place is something of a fairy tale. He was born Abdihakim Abdirahman on January 1, 1977, in Somalia.
Mention Mogadishu or Somalia to most Americans and scenes from the movie Black Hawk Down spring to mind. It took a while for the country to fall into ruin. Somalia was granted independence by Britain and Italy in 1960 and fell into a military dictatorship when the president of the country was assassinated in 1969. The year that Abdirahman was born, Somalia found itself on the losing side of a war between neighboring Ethiopia and a band of rebels. Ethiopia dispatched the rebels and the entire Somali army in an eight-month war.
Things deteriorated from there and when the titular leader of the country fled in January of 1991, any semblance of order dissolved. Somalia descended into clan-based guerrilla warfare. This, coupled with Africa's worst drought of the century, plunged the country into a severe famine that killed 300,000. (The U.S. troops in the aforementioned movie were there to help United Nations forces with food delivery and distribution.)
Abdirahman's family fled to Kenya well before things fell apart, eventually making it to the United States. He attended Tucson High and then Pima Community College. He didn't run seriously until he arrived at Pima, and then, as legend has it, in his first race, he ran in boots and long pants because he didn't have the proper attire and equipment. He finished second.
Things got better in a hurry. He won two Arizona JUCO championships before moving on to the UA. As a Wildcat, he finished second in the country in the cross-country championships and won both the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races at the Pac-10 championships. Shortly after he graduated in 1999 with a degree in consumer studies, he finished third in the U.S. Outdoor Championships, but was later disqualified because he wasn't yet a U.S. citizen. He rectified that situation the next year and made the U.S. Olympic teams in both 2000 and 2004 in the 10,000 meters, finishing 10th and 15th, respectively.
He realizes that, at 31, he's getting into a tricky time and he sees this year as his best chance to medal at the Games. At the Trials, coached by former longtime UA coach Dave Murray, Abdirahman played to his strength, which basically amounts to running people into the ground. He took the lead at the beginning of the race and held it for 25 grueling laps, rebuffing several challenges from a hometown favorite from the University of Oregon and winning the crowd over in the process. When he was done, he took a spread-eagled dip in the water jump that's used for the steeplechase.
The Black Cactus would like to win one for his new country and his hometown. As he tells it, with his ever-present smile and lilting voice, "I can't put into words how much I love being an American. This country has given me so much opportunity." And while he trains in different spots, he says he'll be a Tucsonan for life. "I love Arizona. After a week away, I miss it and think about the weather. It's meant for me. I will never trade anything for Arizona."
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