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Olympic Boycotts Make Casualties of Sacrifice: Scott Soshnick

April 15 (Bloomberg) -- The next time some politician or activist suggests an Olympic boycott I want you to think of Craig Beardsley. And then tell me that countries suddenly outraged at China's record on human rights shouldn't send their athletes to Beijing.

You probably don't recognize the name Craig Beardsley. Unlike swimmers Mark Spitz or Michael Phelps, Beardsley never got his Olympic chance to win hearts and minds.

``I was really breaking through,'' Beardsley said during a recent hour-long telephone conversation. ``The timing was right in 1980.''

Physically, yes. Geopolitically, no.

The Russians were in Afghanistan, prompting the U.S. to pull out of competition. Beardsley remembers having pizza with friends when told of President Jimmy Carter's decision to boycott the Summer Games in Moscow.

``Even then, we were thinking, `what good does a boycott really do?'' he said.

Sports fans should know what the Beardsley family sacrificed for a chance to represent the U.S.

Beardsley at age 4 learned to swim at the 92nd Street Y on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He attended the United Nations International School, where one of his classmates was an Afghani prince.

``It was like a mini U.N.,'' Beardsley said. ``At a very early age we recognized we're not just one little island on this planet.''

Last Out

Diplomacy runs in the Beardsley family. His grandfather was consul-general for the Republic of China to Peru in the 1950s. His mother fled Shanghai during the Communist takeover of 1949.

``One of the last boats out,'' he says.

Beardsley's grade-school days began with a 45-minute commute (90 minutes with traffic) from home in Harrington Park, New Jersey, to Manhattan, where his father worked. First learning. Then swimming. Then back to dad's office. Then home by 6 p.m. Maybe. Then more swimming. Friends were scarce.

``No time,'' Beardsley says.

Mom and dad forced Beardsley to join the local swim team. There, his first coach, a former U.S. Marine, affixed some sort of bands around Craig's ankles to keep his feet together. By age 11 Beardsley was being recruited by area swim clubs.

Serious training started at age 12. All-swimming, all-the- time. No basketball. Not anymore.

Beardsley remembers his father waking him up at 4:15 a.m. for morning workouts. At 14, Craig, an accomplished cellist (his mother was a concert pianist), was accepted to the Manhattan School of Music. A wasted application.

Pool Time

``I was spending all of my time in the pool,'' he says.

So much, in fact, that his classmates used to ask why he dyed his hair blonde. It was the chlorine.

Beardsley's father had taken him to the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. They sat in the rafters, cheering for the American swimmers. He was mesmerized. He dreamed.

``Maybe it was a great big plan of my dad's,'' he said. ``But I always kept the Olympics in the back of my mind.''

College brought Beardsley to the University of Florida, where no-pain, no-gain is taken seriously.

``My life was going to class and swimming,'' he said.

Here's the schedule: Rise before sunrise for 2 1/2 hours of swimming. Then class. Then a 4 1/2-mile run -- in the afternoon heat, no less. Then another two hours of swimming before a 2 1/2-mile run home.

Passing Revelers

And that doesn't even take into account what Beardsley called ``incredibly insane training,'' which included swimming with sneakers. Or the dry land drill where the swimmers, kneeling on some contraption, pulled themselves up the ramps of the football stadium.

``We'd be all bloody, even though our hands were taped up,'' Beardsley said.

Oh, and then there was the against-the-current swims up the Ichetucknee River. As Beardsley made his way up, he'd try to ignore the fun being had by revelers in inner tubes laughing-it- up with their coolers of beer.

Beardsley eventually broke the world record in the 200- meter butterfly, qualifying for the Olympics that would go on without him. He kept training for another four years, hoping to, in Beardsley's words, repay his family for the sacrifices they made.

``The last person I felt like I owed was me,'' he said. ``It's about all the families. A big chunk of my parents' lives went into helping me do what I wanted to do.''

Beardsley missed the '84 team by a gut-wrenching 0.36 of a second. The dream was dead.

Make no mistake: Beardsley condemns China's position on human-rights issues. And he hopes for an end to the bloodshed in Darfur. But boycotts, he says, aren't the answer.

``You resolve conflict, and I know this from my divorce, by communication,'' Beardsley says. ``You don't resolve things with barriers.''

Think about Craig Beardsley the next time some politician or activist uses the word boycott. Think about the 4-year-old's commute. Think about bloody hands and up-river swims.

Think about 0.36 of a second.

(Scott Soshnick is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Scott Soshnick in New York at ssoshnick@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: April 15, 2008 00:04 EDT