12/29/09

Chris Thompson was one of the great American distance swimmers of the past decade, and one of the great stories, too. After making the Olympic team in 2000, he sought a spot in 2004 – with two fractured elbows.  In this week’s 20 Question Tuesday he talks about that painful ending, but also his exciting new career that was born out of his love and expertise of the water.

1) Where are you and what are you doing now?
Chris: I just moved to Evanston, Illinois, working with the Great Lakes Naval Base as a civilian contractor, pre-BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/Seal) Navy Seal training. There are about 15 of us coaches there in swimming, running, weightlifting and some guys who are former military. We get these guys ready for Seal training in Coronado. A lot of guys who come in aren’t real comfortable with the water. So our job is to get them as physically ready as they can be. The buds training has a Hell Week and all that, so a large part of it is psychological, but being ready physically helps the mental part.

2) I know Larsen Jensen is in Seal training, did you see or work with him?
Chris: He came out for about two weeks. Officers do a little different path than the ones we have – we work with the enlisted men. Larsen was out here for a couple of weeks. Blake Copple, who swam at the University of Texas, was with us – he came up for two or three months. He didn’t need a lot of swimming help. He made it through the training, and he’s a Petty Officer getting ready, I assume, to be deployed somewhere.

3) You coached club in Michigan – how did you end up with this exciting new job?
Chris: Great things have happened to me in life – but you have good experiences and bad experiences, and either way you just keep plugging forward. What I have now is a job – a great job, one that I am thankful for – but it’s not a career. I am still working (laughs) on the career thing. I’m going to try to get into some college athletic administration stuff at some point. It’s kind of hard to break into that.

4) How hard was it to leave the University of Michigan and move from Michigan to Illinois?
Chris: It was tough to leave Michigan. I was there for more than 10 years of my life. I knew so many great people there, not just from swimming at the University of Michigan, but also coaching at Ann Arbor Swim Club and Club Wolverine. There were some great coaches I worked with for a long time. It’s one of those things where that Navy job came up – it’s great pay and great experience – and any opportunity you have to work with the military is amazing; they are fighting for our freedom, and it’s awesome to be a small piece of the puzzle helping them out. My fiancée and I want to get back to Michigan in three or four years. But Illinois is a nice place.

5) Where are you right now, because you’re from Oregon originally, right?
Chris: Yes. I’m in Oregon right now visiting family. The parents brought us all out. I’m having a good time, and this is a good little family vacation.

6) Did you get or give anything cool for Christmas?
Chris: We do a lot of small stuff mostly because just with traveling, you don’t want to carry a bunch of stuff. We are going as a family to Mexico in January. My sister (Kathryn Thompson) just finished swimming at Arizona (last spring), so it’s nice to have her back, go on trips and do things, and not (laughs) have to find a place to practice.

7) Are you swimming at all now?
Chris: I try to swim, and would like to more. I will try to do master’s swimming sometime soon. My swim career didn’t end as I would have liked; the last two or three years were tough. I still love the sport. My fiancée Lindsey (Smith), who also was a swimmer, and my sister, say they are done and never jumping in a pool again! But we’ll see about that. We all love being in the water. I think Kathryn will be back in too, she’s just been swimming since she was about 2, so she needs a break. We all come back to it.

8) I don’t want to be negative, but I know you and the Michigan Men are agonizing over the football program – will it get turned around soon or are they just this bad?
Chris: Yeah, they are awful. You never want to say that, but it’s long overdue, after 40 plus years of success, to have a period like this. There are a lot of problems there that need to be addressed. You try to find blame and who is responsible, but there are no easy answers. It’s a multitude of little things that have come together, so we’ll just have to take our lumps for two or three years.

9) What did you think about Michigan hiring Mike Bottom to replace Bob Bowman?
Chris: I think it’s good they brought Coach Bottom in. It’s like the Michigan football team in that they changed the direction of the program, where now in swimming it is sprint based. There’s a lot of pride with what Coach Urbanchek built with the distance tradition, but now they are updating the program so they can compete a little better at the collegiate level, which is really cool. I went back last year and checked things out, and it was awesome seeing guys who were excited. Coach Bottom is doing a great job with guys, treats them all with respect, and he’s good for the program. Michigan swimming will continue to do great things.

10) Is being a “Michigan Man” something all you alums take a lot of pride in?
Chris: Oh, definitely. That goes with any university you go to, I am sure, where you spend a lot of your life. A lot of the qualities at that location are very special, very meaningful. I want to follow the results of the athletic teams, and remain a part of it. It’s cool to go around the country, and around the world, where you see guys wearing Michigan sweatshirts. There are alums everywhere – a lot in Chicago, near where I am now.

11) What’s your greatest swimming memory now that you have time looking back?
Chris: There are so many different things that have happened… the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, being in a great event with Hackett and Perkins - the greatest ever in the 1500m freestyle. Being a part of that 2000 U.S. Olympic team was amazing – of the 97 Olympic medals the U.S. won overall that year, 33 were in swimming, so the success USA Swimming had there in Australia was awesome. So, obviously, that was a great experience. I also had that 1,650 at College Station (at NCAAs) my senior year that was a highlight for me because everything was working well and going great for me. I also worked with great coaches in Ann Arbor – Dan Ohm, Josh Morgan, and Alexandra Morgan –  who I learned a lot from. And, of course, my main development coach growing up Steve Franklin, who now coaches Gator Swim Club in Missouri. He did a great job and coached me from when I was 12 to 15.

12) How hard was the disappointment of 2004?
Chris: Even the negative things, even though they sting, you look back and get a lot of good perspective from them. In 2004, it’s rough to go over those memories even now… I had my shot to go to a second Games, represent the United States, and all that goes with it, to swim for the best country in the world… it didn’t happen. But I can say I went out there, swam my best at Trials, and even with the broken elbow, I was fortunate that some guys scratched out and that allowed me to final. So I had three consecutive Olympics Trials, 1996, 2000, and 2004, and did well in different events each time. In 1996 I was one of the new guys. In 2000 I was one of the top distance guys bringing U.S. distance back to the front, and in 2004 I went from being a favorite to just barely being able to swim. Those aspects of life, where you are challenged, define you and prepare you for life through how you respond to the challenge and make the best of it. And I did my best.

13) You left it all out at Trials didn’t you – can you run down the medical part of 2004 again?
Chris: I definitely left it all out there. I had two broken elbows. My Dad is an orthopedic surgeon. It was 10 week from Trials, and he said I would need months to get better, especially if I had surgery. But he also said I couldn’t damage them any further by trying to continue. Being a distance guy, I was in a tough spot, because maybe a sprinter could take that time off, three or four weeks, and come back the final six weeks. But being a distance swimmer, 95 percent of your success is coming from your training, and not having that would have killed my chances. I talked to our (Michigan) coaches, Jon Urbanchek and Dan Schinnerer… they understood the situation. You know why I continued, or a big part of it? Because of my coaches. Because of Jon Urbanchek and what he meant – and still means – to me. That was the worst part, because he had put in so much effort and time to coach me and done such a great job. He’s such an amazing guy, and I learned so much about swimming and life from him. It still hurts a lot that I couldn’t go out like I wanted to in 2004, even though I gave it my best, because I also wanted to make it for Coach. But everything that happens to you, it becomes a part of who you are and how you’ll approach everything else in life. Listen, I’ve talked to other swimmers, and seen stories of real tragedy for swimmers – I didn’t have that. I had some elbow injuries, and I do have some discomfort still, but it’s nothing compared to the life-threatening battles other swimmers have had to fight. So keeping it all in perspective, it sure did (laughs) stink, but it was pretty minor, and I know I grew from it.

14) How and where did the injury happen, and did you know right away how serious it was?
Chris: The first two or days after I was hurt, I couldn’t even get dressed, use the restroom, or eat. You know what was most painful? Getting the X-rays because they had to straighten it out from 90 degrees to being fully extended! I kept saying, “I can’t do that, it won’t go that way.” What happened was we were doing stationary box jumps in Colorado Springs. I’m a distance guy, and I didn’t even need to be doing it, but I wanted to be with my teammates. I stumbled at the end – I’m known for being clumsy out of the water – and fell at the end of the set, caught my wrists and forearms, and had compression fractures in my left and right elbows – this would have been May 3 or May 4, 2004.

15) Larsen, Erik – man, that was a tough year to wing it, so to speak, at Trials?
Chris: I just had to get back to work. It was really stressful and I wanted to make the team. There were three of us racing for two spots. But it was weird after the injury how all the pressure was off. I realized all I could – all I could ever do – was do my best and hope that was enough to make the team.

16) What a neat time for U.S. distance swimming to come back to the top, wasn’t it?
Chris: Oh yeah, it was cool coming up and we tried – Vendt and myself, and Larsen came along shortly thereafter and did great – to really bring distance swimming back in this country. We did that for a while, though it’s fallen off a bit – but it comes and goes. It was just cool being part of it in 2000 and 2004, having good results, and putting U.S. distance swimming back on the map. It’s a tough thing for coaches – who already work very hard – to do the 10,000 yard workouts and all that goes into building a distance swimmer.

17) Why is there less interest in distance swimming as far as a lot of depth and top talent?
Chris: People find that their kids want instant gratification. But in distance, it takes years to develop that kind of swimmer. I started doing it when I was 12 years old, and it took me 15 years to get to the top of the game. You have to look long term with distance swimmers and think where they will be in five, even 10, years down the road, and realize it’s not an instant process. The return on distance swimming is not immediate – it is a slow process that takes time. It is something you build into.

18) What do you expect from Michael Phelps in 2012?
Chris: I have no idea. I assume he is going to keep swimming and doing amazing things. It depends what he wants his program to be. It seems he wants to maybe step away from his great events like the 400 IM and 200 fly, and do more sprint oriented stuff – if he goes for it he’ll do a good job. But sprinting is very different, from training and the mindset those guys have.

19) Where are you and Lindsey - wedding upcoming in August! - in 10 years?
Chris: I think in 10 years… we do want to get back to Michigan by then. Winters are cold but Lindsey loves the snow. Michigan is nice, it’s home for her – and it’s nice for me to get home out here in Oregon. The only thing about Michigan is there is not a lot of good work there right now with the economy, so it’s tough to find a position.

20) What did you get from swimming?
Chris: One thing I notice is that people always ask what it takes to be successful, or what you did to be good. There’s no one answer to those questions. So many things have to come together for you to be successful in swimming, or in life. It’s about hard work, commitment, focus, dedication, the right physical attributes to a degree, your cardiovascular system, and a little bit of luck. But if there are 50 things that equal “success,” all you need is 40 of them and you can be great. You need to find your strengths and develop those as much as you can. And find your weaknesses, make those better and limit the impact your weaknesses can have on you.  I went from little Roseburg, Oregon, to the Olympics, from a 25-yard YMCA pool, to Sydney, Australia, and three Olympic Trials in all, plus a good swimming career at the University of Michigan, one of the great universities in the world. I’m not even the only one from here – Patrick O’Neil, the great Cal swimmer (whose brother Michael swam for Stanford from 1998-2002), is from Roseburg, and my sister had a great career at Arizona and was part of the great program they’ve had the last few years. So if you want it, you can get it, no matter who you are, or where you are from. The irony of course is that so many of us – from the Olympic team, NCAA All-Americans, and so on – just got into it initially to be water safe, and that’s something USA Swimming is doing a great job of promoting nationwide with Learn to Swim programs. And that’s what meant the most to my parents: They knew even if their kids didn’t become swimmers, we’d be safe in and around water. Swimming raises the quality of your life, and through water safety can save your life and the lives of others – it's just an amazing sport.