OMAHA — He could’ve strangled the swimming judge. Or at the least unleash a four-letter tirade that the crowd at the NCAA swimming championships could hear. Unplug the pool?
No one would have blamed him.
Instead, Georgia’s Mark Dylla of Littleton calmly grabbed a towel and walked off the pool deck after the most devastating race of his life. After finishing second in the NCAA’s 200 butterfly the previous two years, he won by half a length in 2010. He received congratulations from his competitors. He got out of the pool and heard his name over the loudspeaker … that he’d been disqualified.
A judge claimed he touched the wall on his first turn with one hand instead of two.
“Something like that,” Dylla said, “will fuel the fire for a long time.”
Sitting in his hotel lobby here this week, Dylla is an inferno. The Heritage High grad bounced back in 2011 with an upset win in the 200 fly for that elusive NCAA title. He enters Wednesday’s 200 butterfly in these U.S. Olympic trials with the seventh-best time, a puncher’s chance to make the Olympic team.
When last we left Dylla four years ago, he had just won the Southeastern Conference championship as a freshman, breaking Ryan Lochte’s record, and hoped to make the 200 fly final in the trials. He did. Today, he’s one of swimming’s sympathetic characters, a victim of a bad call that has become swimming’s equivalent of Jim Joyce’s blown safe call at first to ruin Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga’s perfect game. But that was one game.
This was one year.
“I’ll go on record,” said Georgia’s iconic 33-year coach, Jack Bauerle. “It was a bad call. He never touches only one hand. Even at practices at 5:30 in the morning. He’s perfection. To be able to come back as a senior was the most pressurized swim in the NCAAs of my career.”
Looking back, Dylla seems more shocked than angry. He describes the bizarre scene with a wry smile, as if it was all a punch line of a practical joke he finally understood.
He said the momentum a butterflier carries into the first turn is so great it’s almost impossible to turn off the wall with only one hand. Maybe the turbulent water hid his hand. Maybe he was too fast.
Or maybe it was a horrible call.
“Everybody brought video,” Dylla said. “They probably had eight teams’ videos and they wouldn’t look at any of them.”
ESPN offered Bauerle all the video it had. USA Swimming officials were angry. For a week, Dylla’s cell wouldn’t stop vibrating. The winner, defending-champion Shaune Frazier of Florida, sent him a text reading, “I don’t take pride in this title. I didn’t win that race. You won that race.”
However, Dylla slowly transformed himself from swimming’s Galarraga to LeBron James. Think James had incentive to win the NBA crown? Who knew he had so much in common with a swimmer from Littleton?
“You fail in a lot of things in life, whether it’s sports or life or school,” Dylla said. “The biggest thing is how you come back. That’s what makes certain people successful is can they come back, because everybody fails.”
Dylla treated 2011 like his own personal victory podium. He won his fourth consecutive SEC title, was named an academic All-American for the fourth straight year and entered the Leonard Scholars program awarded to his school’s top 30 business students.
After he upset California’s Tom Shields for last year’s NCAA title — when Dylla practically hit each turn with both fists — people came up to him and said, “Congrats to a two-time NCAA champion.” Texas’ entire team gave him the Hook ’em Horns sign.
For all he went through, Dylla now has perspective. “Things happen for a reason,” he said. “You’ve got to trust in that. It made last year 10 times better.”
And yet it would all feel like an all-comers meet if he finishes in the top two here. This past year has been different. After graduating the year before with a 3.53 grade-point average, he went full time for his second degree while training on his own in the Georgia pool. Last summer, when U.S. swimmers established their best times, he had an off meet in the World University Games in Shenzhen, China.
He also has another problem if he makes Thursday’s final. There really is only one open Olympic berth. Thursday is basically a formality for one Michael Phelps, the two-time Olympic 200 fly champ who hasn’t lost a final in that event in 10 years.
“I’m just in a time period where the greatest swimmer of all time is swimming,” said Dylla, who will also swim the 100 fly Saturday. It likely will be his last race. Whether he leaves a mark in London, he has left a mark in American swimming circles.
Two years ago, when he calmly returned to the pool deck after his DQ to cheer on Georgia’s relay, the crowd gave him a standing ovation.
“He changed our program for the better,” Bauerle said. “I’ll be forever thankful. … By the time I finish coaching, he’ll be the mayor of Denver.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299, or jhenderson@denverpost.com
