Olympics ramp up the excitement among athletes

METRO DETROIT — The Olympics are fun to watch but for the athletes it’s an exciting, nerve-wracking and stressful time competing against the world’s greatest athletes.

Carly Ryan, a Grosse Pointe native known as Carly Piper during her Olympic run, said being in the Olympics was a dream come true. The swimmer competed in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece.

“Kind of very surreal,” Ryan said. “Just being around teammates and everyone from different countries and just seeing how things happen at the Olympics. It was a really surreal, dream-come-true experience.”

Ryan has been swimming competitively since she was 8 years old and she swam in college at the University of Wisconsin. She said she was also a part of the Pan American Games before her Olympic run in 2004.

She made the cut for a couple of her events at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials in 2000, but she said she placed low.

“I think I got second to last in one of my events,” Ryan said. “And so just working towards getting better every single year, every single race. Obviously, being in college and then just kind of working towards staying up at the top.”

Her mother and her older sister were also involved in swimming when she was a kid. Ryan said they were always at the pool during the summer. As she got older, she saw the opportunities swimming could lend her.

For the 2004 Olympics, the trials pool was built in a parking lot in Los Angeles. Ryan said they held a practice meet a month before the trials. Though not everyone who was going to be at trials was there, she placed relatively high. Her coaches didn’t outright say she would make it to the Olympics, but they did say she had a chance.

“Just kind of saying, you know, ‘If you stay on the same path, if you keep doing what you’re doing, if you race like you did during this race, you could have a shot,’” Ryan said. “So I just kind of kept that in the back of my mind and tried to race as fast as I could.”

Competing at the Olympics was different than anything she’s ever done in the past. She saw athletes from different sports and different countries.

“When you’re sitting kind of in the cafeteria getting lunch and everything you can just look (and) everybody’s wearing different flags on their shirts and it’s a whole different thing,” Ryan said. “The best in the world coming together to compete. It’s awesome.”

Ryan described herself as a lucky distance swimmer that could compete in the shorter events. In 2004, the 4x200-meter freestyle women’s relay team won a gold medal. She said receiving the medal felt like a dream. She was nervous, but she allowed that to fuel her during the race.

“The race was just under two minutes but it literally felt like seconds just cause stuff goes by so fast,” Ryan said. “So I was just trying to take it all in.

Rachel Baugh, a Warren native known as Rachel Komisarz during her 2004 Olympic run, didn’t first start off in swimming. Before a back injury, Baugh was in gymnastics.

“Basically the only sport I was going to be allowed to do at the time was swimming,” Baugh said.

She went on to say that she wasn’t thrilled about this fact. Baugh said she didn’t like the water and was even a little afraid of it.

“But (I was a) very competitive person and just really wanted to be able to do something so swimming it was,” Baugh said.

Baugh started swimming when she was around 15 years old and she said she made the conscious decision to go for the Olympics around 1996.

“The training was probably very rigorous starting in ’96 til the Olympics and really just focused on getting ready for that,” Baugh said.

She called the Olympics one of the most stressful and exciting times of someone’s life.

“There’s so much that goes into it and you work basically your whole life for this one moment,” Baugh said. “And then it’s time to step up and perform. And the world is watching you.”

She went on to say it’s an adrenaline rush.

“I don’t know if people sometimes realize how much stress the athletes are under but it’s pretty significant,” Baugh said.

In college she mostly competed in distance events, Baugh said, but she focused on the 200-meter freestyle and the 100-meter butterfly for the games.

“I really focused on the 200 (meter) freestyle the most just knowing they would pick four to six swimmers for the relay, so I thought that was going (to) probably be my best chance,” Baugh said.

She qualified for the Olympic team in the 100-meter butterfly and a relay with the 200-meter freestyle.

Baugh was also on the 4x200-meter freestyle relay team with Ryan. The other members of the team were Lindsay Benko, Kaitlin Sandeno, Dana Vollmer, Natalie Coughlin and Rhi Jeffery. Their time was 7:53.420. The People’s Republic of China won silver and Germany won bronze.

Baugh said the Olympic trials is one of the most competitive swim meets a swimmer will experience.

“The depth of the United States and the quality of swimming in the United States is unreal,” Baugh said. “I would say that the Olympic trials are almost as stressful if not even more stressful than the Olympics.”

She said this is due to swimming against others who are extremely close to her time and have also trained hard.

Ryan said the Olympics have grown since she competed, especially the trials.

“More publicity, more of a following and it’s amazing to see just the excitement around swimming,” Ryan said. “It’s just gotten bigger and bigger.”

Baugh said there’s a lot more glam to the Olympics and social media has had an influence.

“The publicity that the athletes have,” Baugh said. “Which can be good but it also can be bad because I think there’s also a lot of criticism that the athletes face and a lot of critique that they face from just the general public that have no idea what they are going through or the pressure that is on them.”

She said a lot of the fans are encouraging and supportive.

“I do think that the media and social media has opened the ability to connect with the athletes a little bit more,” Baugh said.

Baugh said they were trained to block out negative comments from the public, but that athletes are human. She recalled a gymnast from the Olympic trials this year who said they thought the world was going to hate them because they fell.

“Nobody is going to hate you just because you fell,” Baugh said. “But that’s a lot of the pressures and we want to compete, we want to do well, we want to represent our country and we don’t want to let anybody down. And when it’s so in your face all the time, you know, the press and the media, it’s really hard to block it out.”

Baugh said seeing the up-and-coming swimmers excel has been amazing and that the swimmers’ times have gotten faster.

“The sport has really advanced over the last few years,” Baugh said. “I mean, we saw some world records being broken at the Olympic trials this year so it’s really kind of setting the United States up for a great performance at the Olympics in Paris.”

Baugh also said she is thankful for her upbringing in Warren, at her high school Warren Mott and the support she received from the community.

“I’m very appreciative that people do still remember me and the support that I’ve received throughout the years has been pretty tremendous, and I just want to thank everybody for that,” Baugh said.

Baugh said that though most swimmers now were born after her Olympic run, she does do some motivational speaking. She hopes she can motivate the people she meets not just as swimmers, but as people.

“My message to the students that I work with now is just dream big, go for it,” Baugh said. “See what you can achieve. And, you know, if you can believe in yourself you can do remarkable things.”

Ryan said swimming is hard work, but if someone is enjoying the sport then they should pursue it.

“Anything is possible if you do the work, if you’re listening to your coaches, if you’re enjoying yourself. If it’s something you see yourself doing in the future, you know, reach for the stars,” Ryan said. “Go for your dreams.”