Ya think? I think this guy is a hero and he's old and competitive but..............
RIO DE JANEIRO – The life of Anthony Ervin, the unlikeliest gold medalist of the Rio Games, has gone something like this. Wild kid. Tossed in a pool to learn discipline. Excels. Learns he has Tourette’s. Starts on tranquilizers. Gets full ride to Cal anyway. Booze. Weed. Hallucinogens. Still faster than everyone. Olympic gold at 19. More drinking. More drugs. Tries to kill himself with tranquilizers. Lives. Drops out of school. Quits swimming. Moves to New York. Discovers himself. Goes back to Berkeley. Starts swimming again. Battles depression. Overcomes. Perseveres. Wins.
In that time it took to read that paragraph, Anthony Ervin won Olympic gold Friday. For 21.40 seconds – the most manic, violent 21.40 seconds possible in a pool – Ervin’s arms thrashed and his legs churned and he won the 50-meter freestyle sprint at Olympic Aquatics Stadium. He did so by .01 seconds over the defending Olympic champion, and he did so at 35 years old, by far the oldest individual male gold-medal swimmer of all time, and he did so 16 years after his first gold in the 50 free, in which his prodigious talent overcome his even more voluminous appetite for chaos.
So understand, the words that poured out of Ervin’s mouth in the aftermath of his victory Friday weren’t those of a teenage prodigy not yet worldly enough to comprehend the meaning of what he or she did, and they were not the hollow, robotic bleating of a corporate robot the Olympic machine churns out. They were raw and they were real and they were beautiful.
Ervin had a daughter six weeks ago. He still hasn’t met her. She came when he was at the Olympic Trials, and the run-up to Rio took him away, and for whatever reason he felt compelled to talk about her after his race.
“She hasn’t met her father yet because I was busy doing this,” Ervin said. “I want to tell her that the American Dream is for anybody, without exception, whether you’re a boy or a girl, no matter the shade of your skin or the shape of your eye, with no regard to who you love nor the beliefs you hold that give you peace. And, for that matter, where you come from. If you want to pursue the American Dream, the strength of those people will always overcome those who would attempt to limit or destroy it.”
Anthony Ervin, Methuselah by swimming standards, Jewish on one side of his family and black on the other, an identity crisis for so many years, is the American Dream not because he won a gold medal on Friday. It’s because after years of searching, he found who he is, who he wants to be, what best serves him. The American Dream isn’t as much in achievement as it is finding peace.
What Ervin realized is he wanted to swim. He had forsaken the sport, sold his gold medal for $17,000 and then donated the money to tsunami relief in 2004. He was trailed by a cloud of weed and cigarette smoke, like Pig-Pen and his dust, for years. Once he dedicated himself, Ervin found all of the lost time had given him perspective but not sucked away any talent. He made the 2012 Olympic team and finished fifth with a time better than his gold medal-winning race a dozen years earlier. And then Friday happened.
“Who does that, winning 16 years apart?” said American star Katie Ledecky, who was 3 years old when Ervin won his first gold. “That’s like me swimming in London and not winning an individual gold medal until … I can’t even do the math … 2028? That’s insane to think about. I’ll be happy if I’m even still swimming at that point.”
Ervin might not be done, either. He was asked whether this was his last Olympics, and he said, “I don’t know,” and with a gold medal around his neck and a baby to go see, that was about the right answer. Ervin doesn’t know where he’ll be four minutes from now, let alone four years.
For a moment, though, he allowed himself to appreciate the splendor of it all. “One one-hundredth,” he said. “One one-hundredth over the defending Olympic champ.” His first gold didn’t have the benefit of that .01; he tied with Gary Hall Jr. This time Ervin had come off the blocks slower than all but two of the eight racers, and in a 50-meter sprint, fractions of a second can be eternities. His finger touched at 21.40, and Florent Manaudou’s did at 21.41, and the clock in swimming is the ultimate adjudicator.
Ervin was an Olympic gold medalist again, and his race’s purpose – his daughter – proved plenty motivational. “I tried to send a message to her with my race,” he said, and before he knows it she’ll be with him at the pool and asking to watch videos and wondering why he looks so young in 2000 and so old and tatted up in 2016. He’ll tell her he’s a new person now, that those two versions had the same bones but different lives.
“The good things, the bad things, the typical things, the easy things, the highs, the lows,” Ervin said. “It all stacks into building me to who I am now and will continue to be that way.”
Anthony Ervin is a lot of things. He is an open book and a closed circuit, a body fueled by a brain, an old man with a young soul. He is the American Dream. He is, once again, improbably, an Olympic champion.
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