Swimming | Don't count out Jendrick, once-bold U.S. phenom

It's easy to be a big shot when you're winning all the time. It gets a little stickier when you lose. In fact, sometimes you really don't get a true glimpse into an athlete's character until she fails.

Which is why, after a lot of years, I feel like I now know something solid about Megan Jendrick.

Eight years ago, I started covering her rise to stardom as a 16-year-old Puyallup kid named Megan Quann. Back then, she had all the trappings of stunning success — or monumental failure. She was absolutely self-assured in her potential; quick to predict her victories.

In 2000, Megan was the fastest 100-meter breaststroker in America, and one of the fastest in the world. This was not by accident. She was a training freak.

At the 2000 Olympic trials, Quann — who had barely bothered to taper her routine, and was still swimming 15,000 meters the previous week — hit the water in the Indianapolis Natatorium and set an American record, 1 minute, 7.12 seconds, in the semifinals.

Her coach, Rick Benner, ushering his prize pupil through the maze of bodies in the storied Indiana Natatorium, could only shrug.

"She wants to go faster," he said.

The next night, she swam 1:07.26 to qualify first for the Olympic team, and immediately turned her gaze upon South Africa's Penny Heyns, then the world-record holder at 1:06.52.

"I think she's going down," Quann said, describing her expectations for Sydney. "I'm going to be there, I'm going to race my heart out, and I'm going to win that gold."

A month later, in an Australian pool surrounded by 17,000 of the world's greatest swim fans, Heyns could not touch her. Nor could anyone else.

The world record did not fall. But Quann, swimming 1:07.05, beat Heyns and all comers, claiming what would be the first of two gold medals. She had called her own shot, and hit it out. On the biggest sports stage in the world, the kid was fearless.

I'll never forget the way she beamed at a few of us on her way into the post-race news conference, clasping that medal, with a look that said both: "Told you so!" and "Can you believe this?"

Her second gold came in the 400-meter medley relay, where Quann swam the breaststroke leg in a blazing 1:06.29. She was the youngest swimmer on that world-record relay team — it included Jenny Thompson, Dara Torres and B.J. Bedford — by 11 years. For a swimmer, this was rarified air.

She vowed to spend the next year chasing the world record and posting the 100 breaststroke time she'd always dreamed of — 1:05.49. It was a result she read off her personal stopwatch after she swam that elusive perfect 100 breaststroke — in her head, lying in bed one night. It's what she did every night. That's how intertwined she was with her sport.

She never swam that race in the pool. Life intervened. Quann got older, her interests broadened. She matured. But the competitive fire still burned. By the time the 2004 Olympic trials rolled around, Quann was engaged to high-school boyfriend Nathan Jendrick. She was still cockily optimistic, and still seemingly on top of her game.

But none of that, she will now tell you, is enough to guarantee a spot on a U.S. Olympic team. In swimming, it won't even get you a good lane.

In the 100-meter breaststroke final at the 2004 trials, Quann trailed at 50 meters and put on a furious final push, but finished in that excruciating third-place spot. She was 11 hundredths of a second behind Bremerton swimmer Tara Kirk, who had finished a finger's touch behind Amanda Beard. There's no third place on the Olympic swim team. Quann, whose entire identity had become wrapped up in being an Olympian, must have been crushed. She didn't show it.

Some athletes in this situation wither on the vine. They go through the five stages of grief about every 10 minutes. They question their very existence, ponder retirement, replay the race in their heads, fall apart. Answering all those 4 a.m. training wake-up calls requires a certain amount of obsession. Obsession dies hard.

Often, after such a crushing, near-miss defeat, an athlete will simply slink off into the sunset.

Not Quann. Moments after her dreams went poof that night, she walked, still dripping wet, straight over to face reporters. She joked about a fingernail trim she'd made a couple days earlier, and how, given the close finish, that might not have been such a good idea.

A couple of days later, she was eliminated from Olympic contention by finishing out of the running in her other event, the 200. And the very next day, she kept an appointment for lunch to talk about what went wrong that week — and what she hoped would go right in the future.

It's called facing the music, and she never blinked. I didn't fully appreciate it until seeing how athletes in similar positions went to pieces.

"I made it a point to come back and talk to the media," she explained recently from Palo Alto, Calif., where the newly crowned 2008 Olympic team is in training camp. "I felt like I needed to. I was the champion in the 100 breast, not being able to defend my title. And I felt like a lot of the media had written very nice things about me beforehand."

Still, the headlines cut deep and leave scars: "Quann fails to qualify." She remembers them all. She was the third-fastest breaststroker in the country, fourth-fastest in the world. And, to a casual observer, potentially washed up at 20.

Truthfully, I thought it might be the last we ever saw of her in an Olympic-caliber event. She got married, became Megan Jendrick, and briefly retired. But she was lured slowly back into the pool and, with training help from her husband, relit that old passion.

About a year ago, she was swimming times that she believed put her in position to pounce and reclaim a spot on the Olympic team. She swam a handful of major events, trying to "stay below the radar," as she put it.

I watched her times online and wondered how fast she could go. When the Beijing trials approached, I told some friends: Watch for Megan. She'll be in there. I wouldn't bet against her. Not a cent.

And sure enough, Jendrick powered through a blistering second half of the 100 meters to finish second and make the team. If not for the freakishly superhuman exploits of 41-year-old Dara Torres, Megan Jendrick would be the big comeback swim story for the Beijing Games. As it is, she's more than happy just to be back, where she feels she belongs. She's sort of under the radar, still, but within periscope depth for that 100-meter final.

"I'm definitely more relaxed this time," she said. "More laid-back."

Same confidence, less bravado. Don't expect any pronouncements about Leisel Jones, now the world-record holder at an eye-popping 1:05.09, "going down."

Jendrick's fastest times at the trials were more than two seconds slower than that. A medal of any color would be a monumental accomplishment.

But she's not your ordinary kind of person. Megan Quann Jendrick has risen from the mat as graciously as anyone I've ever seen.

Can she win another medal in Beijing? The odds aren't great.

Would I bet against her? No way. Not a cent.

Ron Judd: rjudd@seattletimes.com