The Wet Look

The former method for keeping up with the Joneses (and Beards) of the swimming world used to be charmingly old-school, flipping through swimming magazines and using the world rankings as a barometer of current form.

Current form?

Turn away from the sports magazines, move over to the newsstand section featuring titles of “men’s interest” -- mags such as FHM, Maxim and Stuff -- and meet your 2004 U.S. Olympians.

There you will find swimmers Kaitlin Sandeno and Lindsay Benko and members of the U.S. women’s water polo team, posing provocatively in Victoria’s Secret-meets-the-Sports-Illustrated-swimsuit-issue fashion. Featured most prominently will be Amanda Beard, who is expected to land on the next cover of FHM.

“It’s different,” Beard says. “Very risque.”

“Smoldering,” reports her agent, Evan Morgenstein.

He could have been talking about Beard’s performance earlier this month in Long Beach, in a different kind of swimsuit, at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials. Beard, 22, made her third Olympic team, qualifying in three individual events and setting the world record in the 200-meter breaststroke at 2 minutes 22.44 seconds.

Her other two individual events in Athens will be the 100 breaststroke and the 200 individual medley. With the medley relay, Beard could come away from Greece with four more Olympic medals. She already has three medals from 1996 (two silver, one gold) and a bronze in 2000.

Beard’s chief competition in the breaststroke races will come from teenager Leisel Jones of Australia, the world-record holder in the 100 who took Beard’s world mark in the 200 away for a few days before Beard reclaimed it during the Olympic trials. Their match-up in the 200 breaststroke is already being circled as one of the marquee races in Athens.

“That’s fine. That’s not going to bother me,” Beard said in Long Beach, the day after her world-record swim. “Just do the same thing I did here. Hopefully, I’ll bring something great to the table and she’ll bring something great to the table. I always love it when there’s a race. Nothing else pushes me harder and makes me better.

“In 2000, I had one event. Now I have three, four, I have a full plate. And it’s fun. It’s great for me because I’m older, I can handle that kind of workload more. In 2000, I don’t know if I would have been able to. One event was enough for me.”

That was when Beard-back-from-oblivion stories were the obligatory pieces heading into Sydney. The much-chronicled transition from the teddy-bear toting 14-year-old from Irvine in 1996 to high school student to college student at Arizona had its periods of angst and self-examination. She quit for a few months in 1997 and rediscovered her love for the sport in Tucson before turning pro in 2001 after two years in college.

Her coach, Frank Busch, said she was able to weather the storm during the “tough years” after 1996. “I think at this point swimming becomes less stressful for her,” Busch said. “If you ask me how, I can’t tell you how.”

Beard has some ideas.

“During high school, it’s always difficult dealing with other social things,” Beard said. “Going into college and a new atmosphere, new coaches, new everything, it was a fresh start for me. And just slowly it started getting a little better.

“I started to go to workouts not to be first, not to win, just because I love swimming and being in the water.”

She always had the support of Busch and her former coach, Dave Salo of the Irvine Novaquatics, who worked with her for about five years in the ‘90s, a period including the 1996 Olympics.

“She’s a young athlete with so much perspective,” Salo said. “People don’t realize how young she is and she’s on her third Olympic team. Those are the kind of stories we talked about back in ‘96, this woman, this little girl could make four Olympic teams. There’s some reality to it now.

“Freestylers can hang in there for a long time. Stroke women are here and gone, and she’s broken that. She’s one of those who can be at that high elite level into their fourth Olympics.”

Increased longevity in the sport is possible, in part, because of the marketplace. Elite swimmers don’t have to search for jobs after college and quit the sport because there’s too little time to train. Beard has an expanding portfolio, including an array of deals with Gateway, Red Bull, Oroweat, Speedo and Thermasilk.

Beard retains undisclosed goals and times in her individual races. Salo says breaking the 2:20 barrier in the 200 breaststroke is in the offing within a few years.

“My times I have set in my head are quite fast,” Beard said. “They almost seem ridiculous. But why not? I’m going to set my sights really high and hope to get somewhere close to them.”

Beard takes her sport seriously. But with the deals, the modeling and the world records, she doesn’t take herself too seriously, staying well out of diva territory. After all, she celebrated the recent world record by surfing the next day.

Reality is not a soft lens. Beard joked about the provocative pictures in the magazines, saying: “Air-brushing. I look at the pictures and say, ‘I wonder what they did to me?’ ”

For her, it’s almost like viewing another person.

“It’s almost like you put on a different face,” she said. “I’m going to be this type of girl and pose. It’s not like normal-me walking around. I’m athletic and more muscular. Not like a skinny little model girl.

“I think it’s good for some of the younger girls that you can still be very beautiful in a healthy, physical, going out running every day kind of way.

“It’s fun. As long as I keep my head very level. I don’t get caught up in the whole industry of it.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Doing Swimmingly

Recent progression of the women’s 200-meter breaststroke world record:

*--* TIME SWIMMER COUNTRY DATE PLACE 2:23.64 Penny Heyns South Africa 8/27/99 Sydney 2:22.99 Hui Qi China 4/13/01 Hangzhou, China 2:22.99 Amanda Beard U.S. 7/25/03 Barcelona, Spain 2:22.96 Leisel Jones Australia 7/10/04 Brisbane, Australia 2:22.44 Amanda Beard U.S. 7/12/04 Long Beach

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