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She’s ready to exhale

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Special to The Times

BEIJING -- She sat in the ready room and could not take a breath to relax herself. The 400-meter individual medley scared the living daylights out of her, and yet here was Katie Hoff, baby of the U.S. team, about to begin her Olympic career by swimming the race at the 2004 Athens Games.

It had all happened so fast. She was in the Olympics with the fastest time of the year in the 400 IM when five weeks earlier, Hoff, barely 15, was hoping only to get a place on the team. All the attention that followed her victories in the 200 and 400 IMs at the trials, all the focus on the sport’s newest ingenue, drained her emotional energy. She felt overwhelmed.

It had happened so fast that her coach, Paul Yetter, had no accreditation to be with Hoff on the Olympic pool deck, and, at that stage of her career, she relied on Yetter to boost her confidence. Now she had no coach and no confidence, enough to make anyone hold her breath figuratively. Hoff did it literally, though, getting more tightly wound each second before her preliminary heat.

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Hoff dived into the pool and was so nervous she came unstrung. She cramped up and hurt in a way she never experienced while swimming. It made her so nauseated that after the race she threw up. She was 17th-fastest in the prelims, and out of the final.

And then the story took a painful turn.

Her hometown paper, the Baltimore Sun, noted that Hoff was believed to be the only U.S. swimmer in Athens without a parent present. The Sun had reported a week before the Olympics that John and Jeanne Hoff were not coming for reasons that included the independence they long had fostered in Katie, but now it seemed different. Now it seemed they had forsaken the baby in her moment of distress.

“It was so exaggerated, so blown out of proportion,” Katie said. “I came on so quickly, there was no time for any of us to prepare for it, to spend the money for the trip to Athens. I had my teammates, and I talked to my parents on the phone every day, but the story sounded like I was all alone, and it almost turned people against my parents, when they had done nothing wrong.”

The Hoffs were wounded by the perception they were uncaring. Since Katie was 9, they often stayed home while she went to meets with her team.

“It was very hurtful to us,” Jeanne Hoff said. “It made it seem like we had abandoned our child. A lot of people misunderstood.”

It will be different this time. Hoff’s parents and brother Christian, 15, have had plenty of time to prepare for a trip to Beijing, because Katie recovered from what she called her “huge disaster” in Athens to become the leading female swimmer on the U.S. team, a stature made clear when she won five events at last month’s Olympic trials.

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“There weren’t a lot of positives about the last Olympics for Katie, except it being part of a maturing process for her,” Jeanne Hoff said. “It was very traumatic.”

The trauma ended for good a year after Athens. At the 2005 world championships in Montreal, where the 200 IM was her opening event, Hoff took the first of the four individual world titles she has won.

The “2005 worlds was crucial,” Hoff said. “My confidence was pretty down after the Olympics, and I wanted to prove to myself and the world I wasn’t a one-hit wonder. It was a turning point in my career.”

Yetter was not surprised.

“By the 2004 Olympics, I had coached her about 740 days, and one day out of those 740, she wasn’t herself,” Yetter said of Hoff’s Olympic debut. “I had no doubt she was going to do real well in her next big meet. Katie is a stud.”

Calling a young woman a “stud” would sound odd, were the coach saying it anywhere else but the Baltimore pool where Michael Phelps had trained to win six golds and two bronzes at Athens. Yetter, 32, merely is comparing Hoff to the pedigree of excellence in multi-event swimming that Phelps bred at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club before moving.

“Michael cleared the way for swimmers to do multiple events at major international meets,” Hoff said. “Five or six years ago, it would have seemed ridiculous to try it.”

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The temptation is to see Hoff as the female version of Phelps, who is four years older and cannot resist teasing her the way a brother does a little sister. Phelps won no medal in his first Olympics and headed into his second, the one that made him a star, at 19; Hoff won no medal in her first Olympics and heads to her second, the one expected to make her a star, at 19.

But even a cursory analysis of their records makes it clear why Hoff, 2008 model, is not Phelps, 2004 model.

Phelps went to Athens as the utterly dominant world-record holder in three events, both individual medleys and the 200-meter butterfly and a close second in a fourth, the 100 butterfly. He won those four and added a bronze medal in a fifth, the 200 freestyle, where that was the most anyone expected of him.

Hoff goes to Beijing as the world-record holder in one event, the 400 IM (that record, set at the U.S. Olympic trials, bettered the one Australia’s Stephanie Rice set in March by less than four-tenths of a second) and the world’s second-fastest swimmer this season in four others -- the 200, 400 and 800 freestyles and the 200 IM.

And, thank goodness, Hoff has nothing to do with the greasy spoon in a blue-collar Baltimore neighborhood where Phelps would take visiting journalists for breakfast.

Hoff instead steers her BMW toward the fancy Roland Park area, where she favors a considerably more upscale place called Miss Shirley’s Cafe, which means there will be no need for antacids.

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Like Phelps four years ago, Hoff is expected to gorge herself on Olympic success. The headline of a March 3 story on SwimNews.com: “Step Aside Phelps, Hoff Might Get to 7 Golds First.”

“I read that, and I just rolled my eyes,” Hoff said, ticking into a hearty repast of scrambled eggs and French toast at the cafe.

“For me, it is a cool thing not to think about gold, but just think about medals, about being able to say, ‘I got this many medals at the Olympics.’ In my mind, I don’t have to think about winning, winning, winning, just getting on the medal stand.”

She should make that climb seven times, as long as U.S. coaches use her on both freestyle relays, and neither relay botches a start.

In the individual medleys, her principal rival is Rice, who finished behind Hoff in both at the 2007 world championships but has set world records in both this season.

In the 200 and 400 freestyles, her primary competitors are France’s Laure Manaudou, reigning world champion in both, and Italy’s Federica Pellegrini, world-record holder at 400 and former world-record holder at 200. Even with the advantage Hoff had from the new high-tech racing suits, which neither Manaudou nor Pellegrini wore for their best swims, she never has been as fast as they are at either freestyle distance.

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While all Hoff’s world titles have come in the individual medleys, freestyle has become an equally featured part of her repertoire in the last year, playing perfectly into Yetter’s plan to channel Hoff’s fierce competitiveness by devising unexpected challenges in her 10 weekly training sessions.

“I had a problem where I needed to prove myself every day, so we would do [training] sets for time, and I was obsessed with it,” Hoff said. “Now I am confident enough in my training I don’t need to get a best time every day.”

Yetter first noticed Hoff when, at age 14, she produced a stunning workout of 200-yard interval repeats, averaging 1:55 for 20 of them. That was not long after her family had moved to Maryland, partly so her father, who sells tax strategy seminars, could be closer to his main sales area and partly to give her a better swimming environment.

Her parents met at Stanford, where her mother, now an insurance administrator, was a star basketball player. Those genes apparently were not passed down, however.

“I took to the water right away,” Katie said, “but I’m not very coordinated on land.”

It’s the water that counts here, though, and again she will open her Olympics with the 400 IM.

“I still get ultra-nervous about the 400 IM,” she said. “It has taken me a long time to learn how to deal with those nerves.”

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Now that she has, Katie Hoff’s swimming is breathtaking.

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