Carvin’s Saga Getting Better

If Chad Carvin makes the U.S. Olympic swim team, his mother, Judy, is afraid that the nation will soon be bored with her son’s story. “I’ve told my friends to watch out. You know those features they tell over and over until you feel like screaming ‘Shut up’? That’s going to be Chad.”

Judy Carvin is probably right. Chad Carvin, from Laguna Niguel and the Mission Viejo Nadadores, is in Athens, Greece, this weekend at the World Short Course Championships. It is Carvin’s first big race of this Olympic year and on Friday he won the 400-meter freestyle and was part of the world record-setting U.S. 800-meter relay team. Cash prizes of $15,000 are being awarded to world record-setters but Carvin isn’t racing to make money. Chad Carvin is racing because he loves it.

He is only 25 years old and already has survived a bad heart and a bad back. Carvin was considered an Olympic sure thing in 1996. But during his training he kept getting slower and slower. It turned out that somehow he had acquired cardiomyopathy. A virus had attacked his heart and made it big and flabby and made Carvin exhausted when he walked up stairs.

“A lot of doctors told Chad he’d never swim again,” Judy says. “One told Chad he wouldn’t swim in Atlanta but not to rule anything else out.” That one doctor was correct. By 1998, Carvin was strong and healthy and swimming again.

And then his back went out. The diagnosis was a bulging disk. Rest, Carvin was told, and don’t count on swimming again. Carvin almost gave up this time. “It was discouraging,” Carvin says, “and I was bummed. I had worked so hard and to have something like that knock me down again, it was even more devastating than the heart thing.”

So now Carvin is healthy again. For good? “I don’t think about that at all,” Carvin says. The Nadadores coach, Bill Rose, says Carvin has suffered mentally as well as physically.

“He has given up on himself,” Rose says, “but never for good. The kid can’t sit still. And he loves swimming too much to quit. You know, with the back, Chad went on the Internet and researched himself. He found the exercises and medications that have worked for him.”

His back healed without surgery and with the help Carvin found on the Internet. Last season, he broke the U.S. record in the 400 freestyle and finished the year ranked No. 1 in both the 400 and 1,500 in the U.S.

“It’s really rewarding,” Carvin says, “because after the back, I had gotten pretty fed up with swimming. I didn’t think the Olympics was ever meant to be for me. But then I started to miss swimming a lot and I knew I could never forgive myself if I gave up.”

Carvin used the help of sports psychologists and his family and pretty soon, he said, “I knew I wanted to give every ounce of effort I had to swimming.”

It was during the 1984 Olympics, the ones in Los Angeles, that Carvin caught Olympic fever. He and his dad, Joe, went to some of the preliminary swimming races. “That was it,” Carvin says. “Seeing those Olympics, I knew I wanted to swim in them. I had started swimming but I wasn’t especially good. I was an average age-group swimmer, nothing more, not much better than anybody else. But after experiencing the Olympics I think I really put my heart and soul into swimming.”

Certainly Carvin will be favored to make the 2000 Olympic team in the 400 and 1,500. But he won’t speak of being a favorite and he won’t agree that this year will hold a pool full of pressure for him.

“I have to look at this year as just another year,” Carvin says. “It is not an Olympic year. It is a season not too different from any other season. Everything has been going great for me. I’m training well, I feel strong, nothing hurts, knock on wood.”

But if Carvin won’t talk about the Olympic trials, he will talk about what will happen after the Olympics. “I want to surf down in Indonesia and then take a boat trip to Bali and swim in the South Pacific,” Carvin says.

He and his older brother, J.J., do a lot of surfing in San Clemente and he has always thought that “it would be cool” to be a professional surfer. But Carvin is a swimmer. Through thick and thin. Sickness and health. And health better be here to stay. Carvin figures he has endured more than enough sickness.

*

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com