“Nobody wanted biceps before Michelle Obama made them cool,” Coughlin says, here with fellow Olympic swimmer Nathan Adrian, one of her training partners.
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2016 issue of SELF.
Natalie Coughlin is early. We are scheduled to meet for lunch at one of her favorite restaurants in Berkeley, California, at 1 P.M., but when I arrive at 12:50 she is already seated at a table by the window. Because her livelihood is measured in seconds, she is perhaps more aware of time than the average human. “I’m in a sport where hundredths of a second are the difference between gold and silver,” she explains.
Coughlin is smaller in person than what you would expect an Olympic swimmer to be—so compact, in fact, that when she stands to greet me, she seems to be little more than huge blue eyes framed by long dark lashes. But when I catch a glimpse of her shoulder muscles poking through her T-shirt, I remember I’m dining with a woman who can swim backward faster than I can run forward. “Michelle Obama has done so much for arms,” Coughlin says, laughing as she looks down at her impressive biceps. “Nobody ever wanted these before she made them cool!”
This summer in Rio de Janeiro, Coughlin hopes to swim in her fourth Olympics; at age 33, she has nearly a decade on most of her twentysomething competitors. “I don’t feel old,” she says. “I’m stronger than I’ve ever been.” Depending on how the U.S. trials go at the end of June, she may compete in the 100-meter freestyle, the 100-meter backstroke and perhaps a few relays as well. And if she medals in any of those events, Coughlin will become the most decorated American female Olympian in history, a situation she calls “totally crazy.”
It’s been eight years since Coughlin won a medal in an individual event, but she’s been recording times that have her among the top 10 in the world and just a few 10ths of a second from the podium. I ask her what it’s like to be able to swim so fast. “You know how when you’re a kid, people ask you ‘If you could have any superpower, what would it be?’ And you say you want to fly?” she says. “That’s how it feels. Weightless.”
Coughlin’s ascent to swimming’s loftiest heights has a comparatively modest beginning: lessons at her local YMCA when she was 10 months old. Her father, Jim, was a police officer in their hometown of Vallejo, California; her mother, Zennie, works as a paralegal. Though neither pushed her or her younger sister, Megan, to become athletes, she took to the water immediately. By age six, she was racing against other kids. “It was fun because I was good at it,” Coughlin says matter-of-factly.
Being good is one thing. Being the best in the world is another. By the time Coughlin entered high school, she was one of the fastest teenage swimmers in the country. At 19, she became the first woman in history to swim the 100-meter backstroke in less than one minute. At 21, she earned two gold medals, two silvers and a bronze in Athens. Four years ago in London, she won her 12th Olympic medal. Her explanation for why she turned her childhood hobby into a meteoric career is simple: “I love the competitiveness and the training. I love to push my body to be faster and stronger. I love the feeling of racing against the best swimmers in the world.”
And being compact can have its advantages. At 5 feet 8 and a skosh over 140 pounds (her “fighting weight,” she says), she is one of the smallest in her sport. (Many of her competitors, like her teammate, 21-year-old wunderkind Missy Franklin, are over six feet tall.) Competitive swimming demands that athletes be able to contort their bodies. In the water, speed equals power minus drag, where drag is defined as any physical or mental wrinkle that slows a swimmer down. “My suit is so tight, it feels like Spanx times 100,” Coughlin jokes, and she’s only sort of kidding. To get where she is now, she’s had to develop a deep awareness of what every muscle in her body is doing at all times; a slight hip over rotation could be the difference between a gold medal and a 10th-place finish. Forget to keep your belly button pulled in tight when you inhale, and you might not even qualify for the event.
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