What They Don’t Tell You About Competitive Swimming

Kim Fairley

Editor’s Note: Kim Fairley is a former elite swimmer from Cincinnati, Ohio, who writes about wrestling with secrets, healing from grief, and her experience as a competitive swimmer during the early years of Title IX. She has written three books. Her latest, Swimming for My Life, was an International Book Award Finalist, a National Indie Book Award Finalist, and a Chanticleer International Book Award Finalist. Kim has had articles featured in Huffington Post, Salon, MSN, International Alliance for Youth Sports, SwimSwam, and Ann Arbor Family, among others.

Competitive swimming for children has long been considered a positive activity. What parent can’t relate to the joy of discovering the shift in behavior when a young child succeeds in a fun sport? It improves motor and cognitive skills and can instill a lifelong healthy approach to physical exercise. Swimming teaches kids to interact with other kids and helps them develop an understanding of teamwork.

But what happens when a swimmer reaches the elite level, competing against the top 1% of swimmers around the world?

As kids advance to compete against stronger and more successful competitors, there is the satisfaction of the sacrifice and effort paying off, and the thrill in moments of great accomplishment. There also is the toughness and self-discipline—skills that can be utilized in many other areas of life. However, reaching the elite level presents a host of new challenges which for some can have a long-term impact.

As a former elite swimmer, I’ve seen the best and worst of how swimming can alter a young person’s life and continue to play a part in adulthood. Here are seven characteristics that stand out to me as both helping and hurting:

The Fill-In Family

Many parents are surprised to hear that swimmers in their teens can spend six or more hours a day working out at the pool. Weekend meets can last from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., swallowing up twelve to twenty weekends per year. Coaches easily become replacement parents.

By the time I began to compete at the national level, my authoritarian coach decided what strokes I would swim, events I would enter, and meets I would attend. His rigid approach provided a structure I needed; his attention made me think he cared. I wanted to please him and sometimes that was difficult. When any of us didn’t perform as well as he expected, he threw kickboards or pull buoys, which I assumed was meant to scare us into swimming faster. He would shout and deliver insults, creating feelings of isolation and shame.

And most parents said nothing about it because they liked seeing us win.

It feels good to be a member of a winning team and patted on the back by parents in the broader community. But the abusive behavior, which in many sports is excused as a part of the culture, can leave deep scars.

Following the rules

Elite swimmers give up a helluva lot. I swam through the holidays and missed family vacations. When I had the opportunity to attend a sleepover, party, or fun school event, I almost always had to decline the invitation— “I’d love to, but I have swimming practice.”

Photo by Peter Dernier, Kim Fairley (shown partially) seated furthest left on the bleachers, excerpted from Swimming For My Life, P. 104: Several mothers knitted at the edge of the balcony, monitoring practice, fully aware of what was going on. Some had the guts to complain to Paul Bergen about his bullying and obsessive focus on our weight, but most seemed reticent. “If you don’t approve of my coaching style,” he said, “quit!” There was no negotiation, no compromise. Even the Keating girls, whose father had contributed the most financially to the Marlins, were made the objects of his seething temper. Decades later I would come to realize that his brand of equal-opportunity abuse was dangerous, and would scar many of us for life. But at the time it didn’t seem personal, and for that reason somehow more tolerable. As to the parents, I imagine it was difficult to criticize too much when we were breaking more records and swimming faster than we’d ever imagined possible.

This extreme focus builds emotional strength. I learned how to psyche up for events, cope with angry adults, and survive extreme physical stress on my body in pressured situations. I also developed a hypervigilance to cope with a tyrannical coach. I learned how to be sharply aware of my surroundings and to fake confidence to protect myself. By keeping quiet, I avoided conflict.

But I also became an actor in my own life.

The emotional strength required of swimmers can leave gaps in their functioning in the real world. To this day, whenever I arrive at a new place, I scan the area for threats. Is there anything here that can get me? I remind myself to walk with a sense of purpose, to fake that I know where I’m going. I rarely speak out or voice my opinion except to close friends. This level of anxiety and insecurity can take years of therapy to overcome and often lasts a lifetime.

Focus on the Body

Building physical strength can add weight and bulk, positively transforming a swimmer’s physical appearance. But in a sport such as swimming, where the body is exposed and every change is scrutinized by others, the impact can be devastating.

Beginning at age eleven, both girls and boys were forced by my coach to stand before him with his clipboard, and weigh-in every day in our bathing suits. If several of us had gained weight, the coach would punish the entire team with a deadly workout.

**Kim on deck, far right, with her father in white. More than swimming; a need to meet the expectations of coaches and parents. Photo by Peter Dernier.**

I became so focused on my weight that, in my early teens, I found myself counting calories, spitting up my meals, and developing a bad case of bulimia.

When teams allow room for this kind of abuse, they veer dangerously close to treating swimmers as products. It is common for swimmers to struggle forty or fifty years later with body dysmorphia or an obsession with weight due to an environment that focused on their appearance.

Health Demands

Although I no longer consider myself an athlete, I feel grateful to swimming for my physical strength. I can carry half my weight, and I can easily run, swim, or bike long distances without any trouble. Swimming provided a springboard that set me up for a lifetime of good health.

But overtraining young swimmers also can be detrimental. As an elite swimmer matures, the stress on the body increases exponentially. With arduous daily workouts that include anywhere from eight to eleven miles of strenuous swimming, and a rigorous program of weightlifting or dryland exercises, it is sometimes difficult for swimmers to consume enough of the vitamins and minerals their bodies need.

With limited sleep and extreme dieting, I experienced times at school when I staggered from class to class barely able to function. For female athletes, one unfortunate side effect of overtraining can be the development of amenorrhea (absence of menstrual periods).

Many of my female teammates and I suffered with the condition from age twelve to eighteen. Research has shown that amenorrhea can result in a higher risk for cardiovascular disease and can seriously threaten bone health.

Swimmers also experience torn ligaments, tendons, or cartilage, especially in their shoulders and knees that can lead to lifelong battles with osteoarthritis and other problems. When I was seventeen and the team was timed in a mile of hard breaststroke, I pushed off the wall and felt a pop in my knee. The damage to my knee resulted in surgery that still causes me occasional pain. Concussions are another problem. I lost count of how many times I crashed into other swimmers head on. The increased risk of concussion can lead to permanent sleep and memory problems, as well as diseases such as Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.

Missing Moments

By winning races and setting records, athletes are able to show others—and themselves—that something in their life is working. The supportive cheers and recognition during and after events, as well as team camaraderie, provide tangible evidence that people care, which builds self-esteem. Swimming also provides opportunities for travel, to experience other people and places.

***The USC women’s swim team, 1978. Kim Fairley is second from the top, left side. Photo by Dan Avila.***

In many cases, though, the narrow focus of swimming can weaken a swimmer’s readiness to navigate the rest of the world. I entered college never having held a job, purchased clothing for myself, or learned how to handle a tip in a restaurant.

With little time for social interaction, I entered adulthood lacking maturity and significantly unprepared for simple daily tasks.

Even today, friends will mention a popular film or television program that aired during my swimming years and I cringe as I realize the missing pieces of my childhood.

College Opportunity

Swimming gives young men and women opportunities to make money and earn college scholarships. Coming from Ohio, I never could have imagined an opportunity to attend the University of Southern California. For me, swimming led to a scholarship, which led to job opportunities, which led to my ability to overcome my parents’ financial difficulties.

For scholarship athletes, there may be additional expectations to attend fundraisers or perform swimming exhibition events to raise money.

Most athletes feel pressure to maintain a high GPA and complete the athletic season without injury in order to keep the scholarship and stay in school.

In my case, I needed to choose courses that were easy and less time-consuming if I wanted to complete my graduation requirements.

Setting Boundaries

I discovered as a swimmer that if I gave my greatest effort in every workout, by the end of the season, at Nationals, when it counted the most, all the hard work would pay off. This core belief in hard work has carried me through the pain of losing my husband before I was thirty. Years later, it helped me get through the loss of my parents and has helped me through the ups and downs of my relationships with other people.

Yet, I am periodically shocked by my own obsessive and compulsive behavior, my narrow focus, and inability to push away from my desk or switch gears at the end of a day.

When I think of this struggle, I can draw a direct line back to my years as an elite competitive swimmer.

***A childhood swimming photo of Kim Fairley. Photo by Peter Dernier.***

On my best days, I remind myself to stop, to listen to my body, and to not ask too much of myself. I try to remember that there are endless important and interesting opportunities to feed and nourish me beyond the narrow activity of the moment. I don’t have to go “all out” with the gardening. Or the house renovation. Or the family. I believe a balanced life is a happier life, and striving for that balance is something I must work at each and every day.

Editor’s Note: To address whether abuses in competitive swimming have been addressed-and-repaired issues of the past, Kim Fairley urges you to read noted investigative sports journalist Irvin Muchnick’s article, Perspective: Drowning in Abuse, published August 11, 2024, in The Denver Gazette. Click on Perspective: Drowning in Abuse.