Swimmer Tara Kirk will retire, but keep fighting

Bremerton swimmer Tara Kirk says she's ready to give up competitive swimming.

But she's not giving up the resolve to keep fighting the swimming bureaucracy that many believe robbed her of a rightful place on the 2008 Beijing Olympic team after a teammate who beat her in the Olympic trials was suspended for failing a drug test.

Kirk said she'll file the papers to officially retire from competitive swimming as early as this week. But she will proceed with an arbitration hearing, set for May, to seek damages from USA Swimming, her sport's governing body, for establishing rules that appeared to have cheated her out of a spot on the Beijing squad last summer.

"This whole thing isn't about the money," she says. "It's about getting the right thing done. It would kill me if this happened again — to somebody else."

Kirk, 26, of Bremerton, was a star at Stanford and a silver medalist at the 2004 Athens Games. She looked like a solid bet to return to the Olympics last summer. But in her primary event, the 100-meter breaststroke, Kirk finished third, by one-hundredth of a second, behind Megan Jendrick of Tacoma in a final won by Jessica Hardy of Long Beach. Only the top two finishers make the Olympic team.

More than two weeks later, a urine test administered to Hardy at the swim trials turned up positive for clenbuterol, a banned stimulant. A "B" sample from the same test confirmed the prognosis the following day.

Hardy was dropped from the Olympic team and suspended for two years, although an arbitration panel offered her additional time to prove, later on, that she might have ingested the drug accidentally. But USA Swimming officials said the test result came too late to name an Olympic-squad replacement for Hardy.

Kirk filed a protest under federal amateur athletic rules. An arbitrator ruled that USA Swimming had followed its own published rules in setting the U.S. Olympic roster. But the decision left open the door for Kirk to pursue damages later by proving that those published rules might have been, at least in her case, inherently unfair.

That's the case she's pursuing now — with the same strong determination that made her a dominating force in the pool.

In the nearly six months since the Beijing Games, Kirk has seen the organization do everything it could to distance her from her sport, and essentially brand her as a sore loser.

Message? Don't mess with the system.

Kirk, a former national swim-team captain, has not blinked.

"It's like it's some test of my fortitude," she says: "Like, 'Can you stomach dealing with all this?' Yes, I can. I worked really hard for this. Everybody works really hard for it."

She wants the federation to publicly admit it erred and make course corrections to ensure no other swimmer can be unjustly denied an Olympic spot. But USA Swimming, citing the pending arbitration, has clammed up on the matter.

The Hardy case, meanwhile, remains unresolved. U.S. Anti-Doping Association officials have not explained why Hardy's arbitration has not been completed, six months later.

Ron Judd's Trail Mix column

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