Off to the 1960 Olympics
FITNESS FRONT
by Karen Robiscoe
Ms Robiscoe is a certified fitness trainer through the National Academy of Sports Medicine, and conventionally published author of short fictions, essays, and poetry. Her chapbook: Word Mosaics, is available online at Fowlpox Press. E mail Karen at chickenscratch@cox.net, or visit http://charronschatter.com
Going for the Gold
C
lose your eyes. Now picture an Olympic athlete, and I’ll bet the athlete you’re imagining is a cross between a sportsman at the top of his game, and an athletic superstar. I know that’s what I see when conjuring such an image, but not every athlete is at the peak of their game when the trials for the games come around. Some Olympians conquer such odds, defying challenges to qualify and participate so much so that their performance borders on the superhero, and teaches us a lesson in mental fortitude, along with the rewards of top physical conditioning. Take longtime Montecito resident Jeff Farrell, for example. Born in 1937, and raised in Wichita, Kansas, he was hailed as the fastest swimmer in the entire world in 1960, but there’s more to his story than just logging laps. Let’s backstroke a bit, and take an in-depth look at this Olympic gold-medalist.
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“I wasn’t very good at baseball, football, or basketball,” Jeff confides as we begin our conversation. “And only fair at tennis and golf,” he continues, “but I really enjoyed swimming.” He explains that his first real meet was when he was 12 years old. “I can’t remember exactly how I performed,” he says, laughing, “just that the fifty-meter pool looked like a lake to me.” He notes that there were few pools in Wichita of competitive size. He received his first serious instruction at Camp Chikopi at a swim camp run by Matt Mann, a one-time Olympic coach, and former coach at the University of Michigan. Jeff was good enough to have attended the University of Oklahoma on a full swim scholarship. After placing third several times in NCAA competitions conducted during his time there, Jeff says he concluded that he wasn’t a gold medal swim-
Jeff Farrell, a multi-gold-medalist in the 1960 Olympics is a longtime real estate agent with Coldwell Banker in Montecito
mer. “I really thought my competitive days were behind me, once I finished my education and went into the Navy,” he says. Turns out, he was dead wrong. Invited by the Navy to train at Yale for the Pan American games in 1959, he went on to break national and world freestyle records and was considered a favorite to win multi gold medals in the individual 100-meter freestyle and relays at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. Forget the trials; consensus had already elevated him front row center on the podium. But fate had another trip planned for the six-time national champion. That trip was to Henry Ford Hospital, where he underwent an emergency appendectomy. On July 26, 1960 – six days before the U.S. Olympic trials were to begin and a month before the games proper – the 23-year-old who’d won the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) 100-meter and 200-meter freestyle national championship not a week before, was literally floored by a badly inflamed appendix before being rushed to the hospital by Yale swimming coach Bob Kiphuth. Jeff is matter-of-fact as he deconstructs the incident: “I woke up in great abdominal pain around three or four in the morning,” he recounts, “and the pain was so bad I passed out on the bathroom floor. At the hospital, before going under anesthesia, I asked the surgeon how long it would be before I could swim again, and when he told me six weeks, I was tremendously disappointed.” Jeff was “disappointed.” Most mortals would have been crushed.
• The Voice of the Village •
Lucky for Jeff, Coach Kiphuth’s background in kinesiology was extensive. Urging the surgeon to cut the muscle fibers parallel rather than across, the coach’s directions to the medical professional insured that Jeff’s appendix would be removed without incurring damage to any major muscle. The legendary coach wasn’t done yet, and with his guidance, neither was Jeff. Encouraged by Kiphuth, Jeff began prone strengthening exercises the next day, and graduated to mild workouts in the small physical therapy room the hospital afforded. “I walked as much as I could,” he recalls, “and the third day after the operation, I was back in the water, at the pool located in the basement of the Nurse’s Education Building next to the hospital.” Unabashedly dubbing his initial attempt at swimming an “awkward dog paddle,” Jeff says nevertheless, “There was this unspoken agreement between me and the coach that maybe I would compete in the trials.” In the ensuing days, the paddle became a stroke, an ever more fluid stroke, until our athlete took his place among fellow contenders at the Olympic trials. Heavily bandaged, and under the hawk eyes of attending doctors, Jeff swam the 100-meter preliminaries in the second fastest qualifying time the trials had yet recorded, the semi-finals in the fastest, but came up short in the finals, nixed from individual competition by a 10th of a second. His subsequent cumulative fourthplace finish in the relay 200-meter trials was enough, however, to earn him a spot on the Olympic relay team. Swimming freestyle, Jeff anchored the 4x100 medley, and 4x200 freestyle events, a position that helped the U.S. team take home the gold for both distances. Our 79-year-old superhero underwent open-heart surgery in 2006, and while he didn’t enter any world-class competitions six days later, he didn’t let the triple bypass sideline him. Competing in Masters swim events up until a few years ago, Jeff has been inducted into both the International Swimming Hall of Fame, and the International Masters Swimming Hall of Fame: the dual recognition being something of a record in itself. A real estate broker for Coldwell Banker, and board member of Semana Nautica and Cornerstone House, these days Jeff swims three to four times a week at the Montecito YMCA – and though the laps he swims are to and fro, he’s really swimming full circle, as his first swim lessons were at a YWCA some 74 years ago. Now that’s what I call a real-life •MJ superhero. 14 – 21 July 2016