Rush for the Gold: Mystery at the Olympics (25 page)

If Elizabeth had been next to her, she would have looked
at her and said softly, “Good luck.” She always did that with friends before climbing onto a block. But Elizabeth was miles away in lane six. Krylova had jumped onto the block as soon as the whistle had blown. Susan Carol stepped onto the block and pressed the mental button inside her head so she could hear Ed’s voice. First instruction: “Up first,
then
out on the start.” Her starts tended to be flat, so Ed wanted her to push off upward first so she would enter the water more smoothly.

“Take your mark.”

She slowly got into position, not wanting to have to stay in the starting position any longer than she had to. “BEEP!”

She arched her back to get up into the air and pushed off the block. As always, it took a few seconds to change over from sheer instinct—muscle memory got her through the start and the first few strokes—to thinking about what she was doing. In the 100, there wasn’t all that much to think about. It wasn’t an all-out sprint, but you couldn’t afford to hold much back on the first fifty or you would be swamped—literally and figuratively.

Halfway down the pool she could tell that Krylova was using the same strategy as in the Semifinal: Swim as fast as you can for as long as you can and hope you can hang on. Ed had told her to expect that and not to worry about it.

“She’s gonna die if she does that—with the adrenaline she’ll be out too fast.”

Krylova was almost a body length ahead at the turn,
which was fine. When Susan Carol picked her head out of the water, she could see she was almost dead even with Sjöström. She couldn’t tell where Elizabeth was. Right with them, she guessed.

She pushed hard off the wall, wanting to conserve as much energy as possible with a long pullout. Once she had taken her first two strokes and come up for air, she began to consciously pick up her kick. Even with thirty-five meters to go she knew she wasn’t going to die. She felt strong. But could she reel Krylova in?

The noise was so loud now that even underwater Susan Carol could hear it clearly.
Stay down!
she screamed at herself, knowing that adrenaline could cause her to come out of the water too high when she breathed and cost her time. The flags were approaching. She could see Krylova coming back to her. She was convinced she would catch her. Just before she reached the flags, she decided to take one last breath and stay down. It was the Olympics: One breath could be the difference, she knew, between first and fourth.

She put her head down and took three strokes. Her touch wasn’t absolutely perfect, but it was close. She picked her head up and could see that Krylova, Sjöström, and Elizabeth were all on the wall. The noise was beyond deafening.

She couldn’t hear Ed up above her, but she could see him clapping. Finally, she looked at the scoreboard. All four swimmers had broken the world record. Krylova
had
died and finished fourth at 56:01—out of the medals. Sjöström had finished third in 55:92—fourteen hundredths
of a second under her world record—but not quite good enough to beat the two young Americans, who had finished one-two.

Elizabeth had won the race. She had gone 55.79—four hundredths faster than Susan Carol, in 55.83. When Susan Carol realized they had finished one-two, she let out a shriek. Her first thought wasn’t to bemoan losing by the tiniest of margins, it was to celebrate: She had won an Olympic silver medal and her pal had won gold.

Krylova had her head in the gutter and was crying. Susan Carol ducked under the lane line and went through Krylova’s lane and Sjöström’s to get to lane six. Sjöström was already there, congratulating Elizabeth. When Elizabeth saw Susan Carol’s head pop out of the water, she screamed, “WE DID IT!” and the two young Americans embraced.

Sjöström, totally gracious in defeat, put her hand on Susan Carol’s head and said, “Greatest race I have ever been in.”

Elizabeth was crying. So was Susan Carol. If she had won gold instead of silver, she honestly wasn’t sure she could have been any happier.

S
tevie wasn’t sure how to feel when he saw the times go up on the board. The finish had been so close, there was no way to tell from the stands who had finished first and who had finished fourth. From where they were sitting, it almost looked as if all four swimmers touched at the same time.

Even so, he was a little bit surprised when he realized that Elizabeth Wentworth had won. She had looked like a non-factor for most of the race. At the fifty she had been half a body length behind Susan Carol and Sjöström and almost two behind Krylova.

With twenty meters to go, it still looked like a three-woman race. Stevie hadn’t been paying any attention to Elizabeth until over the din he heard Kelleher say, “Here comes Wentworth!” Sure enough, she was closing in on the three leaders—Krylova fading with every stroke,
Susan Carol and Sjöström matching strokes, and Wentworth suddenly looking faster than all of them.

The sight of Susan Carol and Elizabeth hugging and crying on each other’s shoulders choked Stevie up. Wentworth had been going just that little bit faster at the finish to touch Susan Carol out. So ridiculously close! Even so, no matter what else happened, Susan Carol was going to come home with an Olympic silver medal. That was mind-boggling.

He could see Susan Carol’s family in the stands going nuts—jumping up and down and waving flags.…

He was jolted from his reverie by the sound of Kelleher’s voice. “Come on, we need to get downstairs. The game is really on now for the 200.”

Oh, right. J. P. Scott didn’t have a gold medalist to pitch, and Brickley still needed a poster girl.

Scrambling through the stands to get downstairs for the post-race interviews, Stevie saw Elizabeth and Susan Carol being interviewed together by NBC’s Andrea Kremer. Both wore bright-as-the-sun smiles as they talked. He wondered if Susan Carol had thought about what might be coming next.

Probably not. That was the way a reporter would think. At this moment she wasn’t a reporter. She was an Olympic silver medalist. And he hoped she was soaking up every minute of it.

Sarah Sjöström had agreed to go to the mixed zone to talk to reporters. Svetlana Krylova, the media was told, would
not be there. The two Americans would come to the interview room together.

“Look, I know you want to see Susan Carol and you will,” Kelleher said to Stevie once the announcements had been made on which swimmers were showing up where. “The medal ceremony is in thirty minutes, and we’ll see that for sure because it’s cool even if you’ve seen it a hundred times.”

“Which you have.”

“At least. Still gives me chills. I miss the old Soviet anthem, though.”

“Whaa?”

“The old Soviet anthem was the best I’ve ever heard. Better than ‘Le Marseillaise’ and better than ‘O Canada,’ which is saying a lot. Sorry, rambling. Right now I want you to take a walk around here and see what you can find out.”

“Take a walk?”

“Yes. Tamara is trying to find out if there’s any way to talk to Krylova. She’s got a friend who works for FINA who might be able to help. All our players are in this building somewhere right now—J.P. for sure; Bobby Mo almost for sure; hell, Phil Knight is here somewhere. Go find them. See who they’re talking to, what they’re doing. If there’s something going on here, they’ll all be refiguring their strategies given how this race turned out.”

“But what am I supposed to ask; what would I do if I saw them?”

Kelleher gave Stevie a look.

“This your first rodeo? No. You’ve got the best reporting instincts I’ve seen in ages. Go use them.” He practically pushed Stevie out of the room. The hallway outside was teeming with people. Chockablock, he’d heard the British call it. The last event of the night, the women’s 400 freestyle, was in the water. Stevie knew that because there were TV screens on the walls everywhere, and he could see a 200 split time on the screen, meaning the women had just passed the halfway point of the race.

He walked in the direction of the mixed zone, remembering from past experiences that agents and other hangers-on could get access to it, although there was no reason for anyone he might be looking for to be there. J.P. would no doubt be attached to Susan Carol, and Krylova might be out of the building by now, for all he knew.

He turned a corner and almost bumped into Ed Brennan. If Ed was disappointed by Susan Carol’s near miss, he didn’t show it.

“Can you believe that race?” he said, once he saw it was Stevie he’d almost collided with. “Four swimmers under the world record! My God, that was great. I still can’t believe Wentworth came from so far behind to win. She is
so
strong. I think she’ll be tough to beat in the 200.”

He was talking so fast that Stevie was almost out of breath just listening. But that last comment got his attention.

“You think she’s better than Susan Carol in the 200?”

Ed shrugged. “Who knows? Susan Carol beat her in the
trials. The 200 is about being in shape and swimming a smart race, but sometimes it’s also about sheer strength at the finish. Susan Carol’s in great shape, but
that
girl is as strong as anyone I’ve seen in years.”

He looked up at the TV screen. “I need to go make sure Susan Carol got through drug-testing okay. Sometimes a hard sprint like that and all the nerves can dehydrate you. Where are you going? Interview room’s the other way.”

“I know,” Stevie said. “Bobby’s got the interview room. I’m looking for other people to talk to. Have you seen our guy J.P. or Reverend Anderson?”

Ed gave him a look as if to say, “Why would you want to see them?” Then he shook his head. “No, haven’t seen them. I’m sure the Andersons are in the stands, waiting for the medal ceremony. But I did see J.P.’s partner, Bill what’s his name, hanging around with that Brickley guy who’s been nosing around all week.”

“Robert Maurice?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Boy, he’s the worst one yet. There’s just something so … oily about him. I saw them walking into the Coke hospitality room a couple minutes ago.”

“Thanks.”

Ed shrugged. “I don’t know why you’d want to talk to those guys if you didn’t have to. Though I suspect we
won’t
have to if Susan Carol doesn’t win the 200 on Wednesday. I want her to win, but if some of these people disappeared, I’d be very happy.”

“Me too,” Stevie said.

On that note they each rushed off in opposite directions.
Stevie needed to figure out a way to get himself into the Coke hospitality room.

The various corporate hospitality rooms for the moneyed set were all at the far end of the building, and you needed a special pass to gain entry. The pool deck level—which was also the locker room, interview room, and mixed zone level—was on the ground floor. The far end of the building had three stories of rooms all with great glass walls looking out over Olympic Park.

Stevie hadn’t been in any of them but had walked past them and looked in from the outside.

As he turned the corner and began passing various signs with corporate names on them—Speedo, Nike, Adidas, Rolex, and NBC all had rooms—his mind was racing to figure a way into the room that was coming up fast on his right, the one that said
COCA-COLA
.

Maybe he could claim he was desperate for a Coke. That wouldn’t work. There was plenty of Coke in the media workroom. Walking past the NBC sign he braked to a halt. Maybe …

There were two guards on either side of the door checking passes. He knew his would be rejected, so he stopped in front of the younger of the two guards and said, “I wonder if you can help me.”

The guard eyed his media credential and said, “Are you lost? Media room is way at the other end of the building.”

“No, not lost, but searching,” Stevie said. “I’ve just now been assigned to do a feature on Andrea Kremer from NBC
that has to be written
tonight
. I can’t find any of the NBC PR people, and Andrea will be finished with her work for the night in a few minutes. I’ve
got
to find someone from NBC who can help me.”

The guard looked a little confused, so Stevie pushed on. “The people in there from NBC who are actually working all have walkie-talkies—see?” He pointed at a young woman inside the room walking by them. “If you can just get one of them to come over here and talk to me outside for a minute, I’ll bet they can help get me to the right person.” He looked at his watch as if semi-panicked. “I’m really desperate.”

He knew Susan Carol would be better suited for this job than he was. By now, the guard would have been under her spell and probably would have been personally escorting her to talk to Mark Lazarus, the president of NBC Sports.

Maybe it was the fact that he asked to talk to someone outside the room—making it clear he wasn’t trying to crash—that sold the guard. In any event, he turned to his partner and said, “Martin, cover for me for just a moment, will you?”

There wasn’t a huge crush to get into the room at that moment, so Martin nodded.

“Stand over here to the side,” his new friend said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He walked into the room. A moment later, he was back with the young woman Stevie had spotted before with a walkie-talkie.

“Sabrina McGregor,” she said, shaking hands. “And you are?”

“Steve Thomas,” he said. “I’m from the
Washington Herald
. I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but—”

“You need someone who can help you get a minute with Andrea Kremer,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“Hang on, I’ve got just the person for you.”

She suddenly bolted into the room again, leaving Stevie and the security guard standing there. No more than thirty seconds later, having melted into the crowd for an instant, she was back with a short, middle-aged man in tow.

“Jon Miller, this is …”

“Steve Thomas,” Stevie said, shaking hands with Jon Miller.

“Among other things, Mr. Miller oversees our communications division.”

“You need Andrea?” Jon Miller said, pulling out his walkie-talkie.

Now Stevie had to make his move.

“Can we talk for just one moment?” Stevie said. “I want to explain my story to you.”