Last winter, there were times that Erin Popovich cringed when her alarm clock sounded at 5 a.m.
“There were tons of days I didn’t want to work out,” said the record-breaking swimmer. “Days when you look outside your window and there’s been a foot of snow, and you have to get bundled up to go outside, scrape off the windshield to drive to the pool, and know you’re getting into a cold pool. There were many days when that did not seem very rewarding. I didn’t want to be there, but I thought, well, it’s just as cold in Germany and China, and those swimmers are probably right now at the pool, training hard. So I’d get going.”
That discipline paid off in last month’s Summer Paralympic Games in Beijing, where Popovich dominated the swimming competition so thoroughly that the media called her the Michael Phelps of the Paralympics, comparing her to the Olympic swimming champion who won eight gold medals in the Games that preceded the competitions for athletes with physical and sensory disabilities.
By the time Popovich returned to her Fort Collins apartment about two weeks ago, she’d broken two world records, set two Paralympic records, and brought back four gold medals and two silver medals. The golds were in 100-meter freestyle, 400 freestyle, 100 breaststroke and the 200 individual medley; the silver medals were in the 50-meter freestyle and 50 butterfly.
“The Beijing Games were the best yet,” said Popovich, 23, who also competed in the 2000 and 2004 Paralympics, the international competition held for athletes with disabilities.
The Beijing Paralympics marked her 10th anniversary as a competitive swimmer. Popovich saw echoes of her younger self in a fellow Paralympic swimmer, the United Kingdom’s 13-year-old Rachel Simmons, who won two gold medals. Popovich and Simmons were born with achondroplasia, a disability that restricts growth as cartilage turns into bone.
Popovich’s athletic career began astride horses at a ranch near her parents’ 80-acre spread near Silver Bow, Mont. She learned to ride when she was 5, at about the same age that physicians required her to wear hard plastic leg braces meant to discourage her legs from becoming bowed.
Her memories of the detested braces remain as vivid as the color she chose for them — hot pink. Riding provided an excuse to remove the braces that she otherwise wore four to five days at a time.
“A lot of mornings, I’d say, ‘I don’t want to put these on,’ as any rebellious 6- or 7-year-old would do. Looking back, I’m happy I did it, but of course, at that point in your life, you don’t understand why you have to put them on.”
When the braces came off, she began playing soccer on neighborhood league teams. At age 12, she discovered her knack for swimming. Her first competition was at a convention for others with achondroplasia.
“A couple of coaches were there and saw me swim, and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got potential,’ even though it was just swimming against friends and not super-serious,” Popovich said. “But you did get times and awards and stuff like that.”
When she returned to Montana, she joined a local swim team, “your normal swim team, with some good kids, some beginner kids and a mix of everything,” she said.
Popovich did so well that six months after joining the team, she was at her first national swimming competition. Two years later, she won a place on the 2000 Paralympic swim team. The qualifying trials were eye-opening.
“It was the first time I met that many people with disabilities,” said Popovich, who is 4 feet 5.
“Everyone was either on crutches, in a wheelchair or had a prosthetic. There were prosthetic legs left at the side of the pool and being carried around! And everyone was fast! It was quite an experience, going from not having any exposure, except for maybe five people in wheelchairs in Montana, to seeing what’s out there.”
Julie O’Neill, Paralympics head coach and associate director of the U.S. Olympic Committee, was impressed immediately upon seeing Popovich compete in the Sydney summer games in 2000. “She has a great work ethic, a great outlook and a great personality,” O’Neill said.
“She was a teenager in Sydney but obviously more mature than a typical teenager, which is probably true of most teenage athletes on an elite level. They’ve sacrificed other teenage-type activities to get there. For her, and with any elite athlete at the Paralympic or Olympic level, training is a full-time job, 30 to 40 hours a week.”
Now, with the Paralympics behind her and a bachelor’s degree in health and exercise science from Colorado State University in hand, Popovich is contemplating her future. She thinks she would like to go to medical school, following in the footsteps of her father, a physician.
“I’m not sure what’s next,” she said. “I kept saying, ‘After Beijing, I’ll figure it out.’ And now it’s after Beijing. It’s weird. I’ve always had school and swimming. Now school’s done, and I’m taking a break from swimming for a while — and enjoying not smelling like chlorine.”
Claire Martin: 303-954-1477 or cmartin@denverpost.com
In the swim
Erin Popovich won six medals in the Paralympics held in Beijing last month. Here’s how she trained.
The swimmer spent two to four hours daily in the pool.”I definitely looked at it as my job outside school,” said Popovich, who trained at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.
Arising by 5:30 a.m., she’d go to the pool and practice from 6 to 7:30. Depending on her schedule, she’d go to classes until noon or 1, and then practice started again at 1:30. “We’d have our dryland practice first, and then get into the pool at 2 and go until 4 p.m. Bedtime varied, depending on how on top of things I was. I tried to be in bed by 11 p.m.”
