Olympic Swimming Champ Shirley Babashoff Making Waves With New Autobiography

As posted in 2015, Montreal provided my first taste of the Olympics during my third year.

The 1976 Games' famous U.S. decathlete is my earliest connection to an iconic champion.

The second gold medalist in my personal Olympic lexicon? 

That would be swimming superstar Shirley Babashoff. 

Somewhere in the Wolaver archive there are mid-1970s photos of my sister and I in patriotic swimwear our mom stitched together with fabric inspired by Babashoff's and Team USA's Spirit of '76 uniforms. 

We pretended to be Olympic swimmers "like the ones on TV" in our plastic kiddie pool under the blazing Oklahoma summer sun.

It was fun to share this memory on a recent call with Babashoff, who just finished her first Olympic biography with Chris Epting. 

Titled "Making Waves: My Journey to Winning Olympic Gold and Defeating the East German Doping Program" (Santa Monica Press, $24,95), the eight-time Olympic medalist of 1972 and 1976 scribed about 250 pages of career stories and life observations.

Babashoff proved to be as frank by phone as in the book, sharing her own memories with little held back. While much of "Making Waves" delves into the two-time Olympian's first-hand frustration with organized doping -- now even more relevant in light of the Russian Olympic doping scandal of 2016 -- she also reveals the longtime family secret that her father molested her many times as a young girl. 

"The perception of media at the time was that we had this All-American family," said Babashoff during our call. "I wanted to put everything out there."

It doesn't get more matter-of-fact than the fifth page of Chapter One, which is titled "Growing Up."

I don't know why my mom didn't hear me cry. When I was five years old, I said to her, 'Daddy comes into my room at night and touches me.' My father was right -- she called me a liar and told me to never say that again. Then she got the bible out and made me read the fifth commandment: Obey your mother and father.

More on this revelatory chapter later. 

Sharing our one-hour call from her home in Fountain Valley, Calif., Babashoff said a book was on her mind all of the 40 years since Montreal, but a chance meeting with Epting 10 years ago was the tipping point to get it started. 

Even after a positive introduction, they only really got going on the project in 2014.

"Writing a book had been rattling around in my head for awhile," she said, adding that "getting it on paper" was the biggest hurdle. 

For many years, raising her son was also a factor as was her post-swimming career with the U.S. Postal Service. 

"I was approached by authors and directors wanting to tell my story in a book on on film, but the timing never felt right."

Production of the recently released documentary film "Last Gold" also nudged the book project to completion. 

For Babashoff, the No. 1 reason to write "Making Waves" was to continue to shine a light on East Germany's athlete doping program, for which she was a vocal critic in 1976, garnering an unfortunate reputation and nickname among sports reporters of the era. 

"I should have been more gracious," said Babashoff, who explained in the book and by phone that for the 1972 and 1976 Olympics, athletes did not receive media training they way they do now. In fact, her hunch (with which I concur) is that Olympian media training is common U.S.O.C. practice now because of Babashoff.

On the written page, Babashoff' vividly describes her first-person Munich and Montreal Olympic experiences, from her interactions with famous teammates to pin trading to a day or night with friends in the Olympic Village. 

In a section detailing her initial medal-winning event at Olympia Schwimmhalle (her 100-meter freestyle silver), I smiled at her description of youthful innocence and curiosity. 

"I was taken into that little room, [where] they directed me to a small refrigerator and told me to find something to drink. Inside there were a few cans of soda and a couple of bottles of beer."

For her first doping urine sample, 14-year-old Babashoff knocked back some Bavarian suds (priceless!).

This set-up puts into context the author's observations that at Munich there was a relaxed stance on doping for its absence of obvious side-effects among the competitors.

Readers later learn of the arrestive transformation East Germany's female swimmers endured on the road to Montreal.

On her first locker room visit to test the waters of the Olympic pool in Canada, Babashoff and other disrobed teammates were distraught to hear "men talking in another language just on the other side of our lockers!"

Of course, the masculine-sounding conversation was among their female competitors for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik.

After shaking off the locker room encounter, Babashoff and teammates went on to earn a frustrating batch of silver medals, eventually regrouping and achieving redemption with a relay gold in the Games' final women's swimming event (this video includes the play-by-play by Donna de Varona, who wrote the book's foreword). 

Babashoff explained the main goal of the book was to bring attention to the doping issues which resonate as much today as they did 40 years ago. She would like to see even more change to make sports clean. In her open letter to IOC President Thomas Bach, a fellow Montreal Olympian, Babashoff also presents a case for updating the medal records for 1976 Olympic swimming. 

"I'm not asking that the East Germans be stripped of their medals," Babashoff wrote. "Those girls were tools of their country ... they never knew what was happening to them ... and they themselves were cheated by their own government." 

"So, simply slide everyone up" on the medals record, she suggests. "Give those swimmers the medals they deserve, and let the East Germans keep theirs."

The book was released on July 12 -- no word from Bach so far, said Babashoff. My plan is to ask him about it in Rio if given the opportunity.

For this reader, the early chapter revelations about Babashoff's parental abuse jumped off the page. I was taken aback that an Olympic champion previously known for perseverance over a blinding media spotlight did so -- at two Olympiads -- during and after enduring sexual abuse from her father and emotional abuse from her mother, who is portrayed in the book as a woman who was her husband's main enabler. 

Babashoff's descriptions of her father's arrests and how media (and society) seemed to turn an intentionally blind eye to the dark side of the Babashoff household are gripping. Both parents and her siblings -- including a brother who won silver in Montreal -- are noticeably absent from the author's acknowledgements. The Olympic champion said she has not spoken with her older brother in 25 years, and it's been 14 years since connecting with her younger brother; she also mentioned her younger sister, and swimming pool contemporary of Janet Evans, is a Facebook contact.

Babashoff said many women who read the book commented on the descriptions of abuse and relate directly to these passages. I asked Babashoff if becoming an advocate for victims' rights was in the works, and she responded that was not her intent but she remained open to that possibility.

"I hope the book helps people," said Babashoff.

In the days since our phone conversation, I've often reflected on her perseverance on a new level only brought to light through the book. "Making Waves" is a good read for any swim fan, Olympic historian or person looking for inspiration, and it quickly joined the ranks of my favorite Olympic-related biographies.

Photos via Yahoo and Santa Monica Press.

Taking In The Telfair Museum

One cause for recent pause in blog posts was some personal travel. For Mother's Day, I brought mom to Georgia for her first holiday in the Heart of the South and four days of sightseeing. We split the mini-vacation into two days in Atlanta and an overnight trek to Savannah -- always a nice break from the big city.

In Savannah, we took in some popular favorites: Wading in the surf at Tybee Island, dining at a local dive with a delicious crab boil on the menu, and a trolley tour that picked us up just after a fantastic breakfast at Huey's on the historic waterfront. We also passed the Savannah Marriott and got a reminder of the city's role as host of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games sailing competition.

With thanks to the responsive team at the Telfair Museum of Art, during a stop from the trolley tour, we experienced Telfair's Jepson Center for the Arts, a beautiful modern building on Savannah's historic Telfair Square.

According to the Telfair website, this modern expansion of the museum is designed by Moshe Safdie -- if you've been near the 1976 Montreal Olympic Stadium and complex, you've likely seen Safdie's nearby creations tied to Expo 67 (according to the archives on the website for Safdie's architecture firm, several of his other designs were built in Vancouver and will be visible during the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games -- also learned today that Safdie has the commission for the planned National Health Museum near Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta).

We found the Safdie building for Telfair to be intriguing and bright. Since my mom is a specialty seamstress, we also found it curious and cool that a professional photographer was snapping photos of a model in the grand atrium at Telfair during our visit (see photos -- the gown donned by the presumed Savannah College of Art student is made of recycled Walmart and Target plastic shopping bags (disclosure: Walmart is a client of Edelman, the firm where I work).

Our visit coincided with the final days of a Telfair exhibit titled "Robert Colescott: Troubled Goods." Must admit it was not my cup of tea, but I do look forward, and hope to return, to see more of the Telfair Museum of Art's permanent collection and upcoming events.

Beautiful Winners

Now back in Atlanta from the Chicago volunteer gig and weekend in arctic Milwaukee, I've been busy in training classes while defrosting.

Perhaps it is just quirky Canadian coincidence, but within a couple of hours today at least three references to the Great White North arrived via e-mail or NPR broadcasts.

First, one of our recent Edelman client contacts at the Province of British Columbia sent a couple of fun updates on how things are going in Vancouver. Then there was an update on the U.S. curling team in the Rocky Mountain News (OK, technically this was not Canadian, but the sport of curling always will remind me first of the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics).

And tonight, driving to dinner, Terry Gross of NPR's "Fresh Air" was talking with someone (I did not catch the name) about an article in this week's New Yorker, so upon arriving home and turning the pages of the magazine I found some words scribed by Canadian poet Leonard Cohen.

Man, I think it would be really cool (though unlikely) for Cohen to pop up in Olympic circles in Vancouver next February. A brief Internet search yielded only one Cohen and Olympic connection (a brief reference to the Los Angeles street, Olympic Blvd., which apparently was near his home/studio during the 1990s).

I thought for sure Leonard the Great must have been engaged somehow with the 1976 Summer Olympic Games of Montreal, Cohen's home town -- VANOC has a golden opportunity to bring this Grammy winner to the Olympic stage this time next year.

If the 2010 Cultural Olympiad folks are reading, consider this my vote for Cohen to do a dramatic oratory from "Beautiful Losers" or to sing us a song at the Opening Ceremony -- or better yet, he could sing "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye" at the Closing Ceremony, methinks. A duet with fellow Canadian crooner Joni Mitchell would be tops, too (imagine Cohen and Mitchell remarking on how they've "Seen the Olympics ... from Both Sides Now ...").

Until then, here's another link to one of my favorite Leonard Cohen tunes. And one from Joni for good measure (this tune could be the most appropriate for a five-ringed festival).