Aguagirl's Last Lap

Orange County native and Playboy covergirl Amanda Beard hopes to cap her storied swimming career at the Summer Olympics in Beijing. As always, it's a race against the clock.

By Martin J. Dugard • Photography by John Russo

Amanda Beard is angry with me.

I don’t think she knows I’ve endured considerable wrath on her behalf, foolishly taking up a defense of her nude Playboy layout in a fiery debate with my wife when it came out last summer. I argued that the photos were the symbol of an athlete at the height of her beauty, empowering herself by showing the world how years of hard work and perseverance can optimally enhance the human form.

Seriously. I said that. Out loud.

My wife, on the other hand, said the photos were a demeaning and futile attempt by an athlete in the waning days of her career to make a few bucks and get a whole lot of media attention before the gravy train derailed once and for all.

After the outrage settled into a quiet clamor (the disgusted, pursed lip stare that signaled the exact opposite of foreplay), I stopped talking about Amanda Beard around the dinner table, or even broaching the subject of body-as-art or athlete-on-the-cusp-of-retirement in even remotely abstract terms. But in my head, I never stopped thinking that Amanda Beard had done what was best for her.

If I were a three-time Olympian with a body like steel, I’d want a few snaps to show the grandkids, too. So, hey, I get it.

But now, thanks to something else I did, Amanda is mad at me. And in a very vinegary way that makes me fear our upcoming interview. I had to reschedule an earlier session at the last minute (Good Friday, L.A. traffic, son’s high-school lacrosse game) and received a scathing e-mail from her detailing how I had screwed up her very tight schedule. To Amanda Beard, it seems, the schedule is everything.

This is understandable. Consider the blink of an eye. Research shows that this most common of all visible bodily functions is accomplished in roughly one-tenth of a second. Now consider that the difference between third and fourth place in the Olympic Games—the gap between winning a medal and going home with nothing—is often half that.

Time is everything in swimming. Young swimmers are on the clock from the instant they join their first team. Stopwatches and digital timing displays are as much a part of the culture as black lines on the bottom of the pool. Rigid time standards, measured down to the hundredth of an electronic-timed second, are posted for all events and age-group levels, allowing a swimmer to chart personal advancement. Meeting these standards is mandatory for moving up to a higher class of competition, a fact that holds true all the way up to the Olympic level. Pure competition is never enough—unless victory is accompanied by a specific time, it’s as if it doesn’t matter.

A large clock with an oversized orange second hand defines the deck of every competitive pool, visible to all swimmers during their workout intervals, showing them instantly whether they are too fast, too slow, or just right. A good friend—a man who has lived a life filled with wealth, fast cars, and adventure—can still recall instantaneously the time standard he needed to swim to qualify for the 1980 U.S. Olympic Trials. And the hundredth of a second by which he missed.

So it makes sense that Beard is a slave to schedule. I understand her anger, though to a less punctilious individual such as myself, it still seems unjust. I’m on her side. Can’t she sense our solidarity?

And beyond that, she is now as well known for the Playboy gig as for those seven Olympic medals. How does one go about asking an enraged woman about the emotions and ramifications of what her dad, who lives in Newport Beach, thought about her posing starkers, because that is a question that must be asked.

“Really,” I say, starting things off. “I feel terrible about last week.”

“It’s no big deal,” she laughs.

And just like that, everything is cool between Amanda and me. Still, the schedule dictates that I have just 30 minutes in which to conduct this interview. The clock is ticking as the conversation begins to flow. She is broad-shouldered without being muscular, and more introverted than her sometimes outrageous persona would suggest. As we talk, I am reminded that she is an athlete first and foremost—albeit an athlete who knows she is just months away from ending the competitive phase of her life. She has qualified to swim the 100- and 200-meter breaststroke at this summer’s U.S. Olympic Trials in Omaha.

Barely.

She currently is the 22nd fastest American in the 100 and a more respectable seventh in the 200. Only the top three finishers in each event will go on to the Beijing Olympics in August, and it’s possible she’ll find a way to pull herself up. It’s also quite possible her illustrious career, which began in an Irvine pool at the age of 9 and then saw her rocket into America’s consciousness with a gold medal at 14, will end on the Fourth of July, at the conclusion of the women’s 200 final.

“I’m not in the same shape as I was four years ago,” she admits right off the bat. “2004 was all about swimming, but now my focus is on building a career after swimming. Let’s put it this way: 25 percent of my focus is on business, and 75 percent is on swimming. I’m not even sure what dates the Trials will be held.”

Though that seems farfetched, I believe her, but sense it’s more a case of denial than carelessness. She says she will never be far from a pool, and that she needs the water for fitness and therapy. She says she didn’t quit after 2004 because “I wasn’t ready for that to be my last swim meet.” But the finality with which she says the words, coming down hard on “last swim meet,” suggests that she has pondered such a moment many times in the last four, and maybe the last eight years.

Pondering it and putting it on the schedule are two different things. To say goodbye to the pool after a childhood of age-group racing, a vaunted career at Irvine High School, college competition at the University of Arizona, and a lifetime of getting up at the crack of dawn and diving into cold, chlorinated water is to say goodbye to a means of self-definition. She is Peter Pan, she is Mowgli, she is Ariel—that youthful savant who knows that the time to transition must finally be placed on the schedule, for it cannot be delayed any longer.

That transition will take place on Beard’s terms. Though she makes it sound as if she is resigned to not making the Olympic team, her schedule reads like a woman on a mission: up each morning at 6:15 to feed her four dogs and drive from her Venice home to USC for a two-hour swim workout, followed immediately by an hour of dry-land training (stretching, core conditioning, weights); and then from noon to 1:30 p.m. with a personal trainer. Early afternoon is for e-mails and phone calls at home, and then it’s back to USC for two more hours of swimming under the watchful eye of coach Dave Salo. She’s home by 8, spends most nights watching movies with boyfriend Sacha Brown, and gets up each dawn from Monday through Friday to begin the cycle all over again.

“That doesn’t really correspond with this wild image you’ve cultivated,” I tell her. In the words of a sign that one anonymous high-school classmate flashed back at the 1996 Olympic Trials, “Amanda Beard is Cool.” Not much has changed. Back then “cool” meant being comfortable enough in her own skin to clutch her teddy bear while standing atop the Olympic medal platform. Now it means that, in addition to Playboy, there have been revealing photo shoots in Maxim, FHM, and Sports Illustrated. She and Brown have his-and-hers Harleys. Several tattoos adorn her body, including four stars, the astrological symbol for Scorpio, and “Ray” on one leg—the middle name she shares with her father and grandfather.

“People think that I’m much more outgoing and crazy than I really am, but I’d really rather have people come over to the house than to go out and party,” she admits.

Not that she wants the world to know. In her dozen years in the limelight, Beard has spent more hours than she can count in corporate boardrooms, listening as CEOs and marketing types from her various sponsors devised and pitched ad campaigns. She has used that insight to carefully craft a brand image and forge a seven-figure income. This means she pretends to be rebellious like her childhood idol Dennis Rodman, when she truly is independent and very much her own person. She is controlled but likes to appear out of control. She is an athlete who barely discusses her athleticism, but whose driving motivation is to leave her sport at the top of her game. As she swims those four long hours in the pool each day, her mind is on her technique and the next interval, but it is also on paying off the mortgages on her two homes, building a television career, and exploiting her entrepreneurial side by establishing a clothing boutique and high-end fitness chain.

“Let’s put it this way,” Jim Garfield of Red Bull, one of Beard’s sponsors, tells me, “Amanda is not stupid.”

No, she’s not. And she’s also on a schedule, whether that schedule is leaving the swim world, making it to the next workout on time, or simply fitting an interview into her day. The schedule always hovers over Beard, separating the compartments of her life, and her various personas and ambitions into neat nuggets of time; even when, in the case of the Olympic Trials, she pretends some vital piece of her master plan is not already calendared on her omnipresent Blackberry.

I have five minutes left. “How did you feel about the reaction to the Playboy pictorial?” She’s honest. “I’ve worked hard to get my body like this. People’s reactions showed their true colors. Some people thought it was despicable, and some people loved it. I actually like that it created a stir and that it pissed people off.”

“What about your dad? What did he think of it?”

“He got a lot of comments from his friends, but he was pretty cool about it.”

And then my half-hour is up. The time has come for Amanda Beard to head off for another workout. Just like that we are done, and she is away, the schedule guiding her slowly and inexorably to her last swim meet.

—Martin J. Dugard is an Orange Coast contributing writer and the author of seven books, including “The Training Ground: Grant, Lee, Davis, and Sherman in the Mexican War,” which Little, Brown & Co. released in May.