CARY, N.C. — A tenth of a second is barely long enough for the average blink of an eye. It is long enough to read the first word or two of this sentence. To consider how fleeting it is, start the stopwatch on your phone and attempt to stop it within that amount of time. It’s more difficult than it sounds.
If a second is one Mississippi, a tenth of a second is half of the word one. And if that’s true, then 13 one-hundredths of a second is half of the word one — plus a tiny bit more. Only a hair. It is a blink. A snap. A few grains of sand through the hourglass.
On a track or in the pool, it is enough time to divide dreams fulfilled from those deferred; elation on one side and despair on the other. Last month, at the U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials in Omaha, Nebraska, it was the margin that sent Claire Curzan to Tokyo.
Such a margin is not unusual, especially not in a race as short, relatively, as the 100-meter butterfly, which is one lap down the pool and one lap back. The fly is Curzan’s best event, the stroke she has mastered more than any other. What’s unusual is that Curzan, a Cary native and rising senior at Cardinal Gibbons High in Raleigh, qualified for the Olympics at 16.
It’s that all of this has gone according to plan, with a boost from the one thing nobody could plan for. The pandemic forced the 2020 Olympics into 2021. Curzan had an extra year to become stronger, faster. She turned a childhood fantasy into reality before even becoming an adult. Now her moment has arrived, in a sport and an event in which moments can end with cruel swiftness.
She watched the 2016 Olympics at home, an 11-year-old girl who’d only just begun to realize her talent and the possibilities that could come with it. She watched the swimming competitions then, watched Olympians like Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky glide toward gold, and Curzan was struck by the spectacle of Team USA’s dominance; the jubilation of winning.
“I just remember thinking, I kind of want to be there,” she said, and that was the start.
She spent much of the next five years, from the summer of 2016 to now, working toward that goal. Early mornings in the pool, before school, and back in it after. The state and national competitions and the workouts in between, rarely a day off. Years of work toward one moment.
Her parents, doctors who met during their residencies, soon learned the letters N-A-G stood for national age group record, because their oldest daughter, the middle of three children, kept setting them.
CURZAN COMPETES AT U.S. OLYMPIC SWIMMING TRIALS
Curzan became a force in the world of youth swimming. At trials last month, one of her idols in the sport, Dana Vollmer, became a mentor. Five years earlier, Curzan had watched Vollmer win three medals — one gold — in Rio.
Now, in Omaha, Vollmer tried to calm Curzan’s nerves during the most important meet of her life. That she was interacting at all with someone she’d long looked up to was “kind of an out-of-the-body experience,” Curzan said.
The moment arrived. The 100 fly final.
Curzan’s parents, Mark and Tracy, were up in the stands. “The most stressful time of my whole life,” Tracy said, and instead of the pool, she watched her husband for his reaction. Nearby was Jonah Turner, the swimming coach at Cardinal Gibbons, and two of his assistants, one recording on his phone. Down below was Bruce Marchionda, Curzan’s coach at the Triangle Aquatic Center, who has worked with her more than anyone.
He knew what the competitors also understood: That for a swimmer, there was no greater test anywhere; that not even the competition of an Olympics, and the glare of an international spotlight, could compare to the difficulty of the U.S. trials.
“It’s the fastest meet in the world,” Marchionda said, and “knowing that a tenth of a second or hundredth of a second could make the difference” was part of why Curzan battled herself and her nerves before jumping into the water.
She’d been on bright stages before, and won bronze at the World Junior Swimming Championships in 2019 and finished first at the U.S. Open late last year with a time of 56.61 seconds, one that left her beaming and out of breath in a post-race interview on NBC.
“I don’t know if words can describe it,” she’d said then, to the camera, and from that moment she had about seven months to prepare for trials. In some ways, there was no preparing for the pressure.
“You’ve got to do it right here, right now,” Marchionda said, reciting the reality that Curzan and her rivals faced in Omaha. “Doesn’t matter what you’ve done before.”
And then she was off, down and back in 56.43 seconds. Good enough for second place, by thirteen-hundredths of a second. Good enough to qualify for these delayed Summer Games.
A COMPETITIVE STREAK
Before a recent workout at the Triangle Aquatic Center in Cary, where Curzan has trained for the past seven years, she made the argument that she’s a fairly normal teenage kid. She looks the part, at least: long blonde hair, with a contagious smile that lights up when she talks and even during her workouts while she listens to her coach. She goes to the occasional party, she said, though not so much over the past year-and-a-half of pandemic lockdowns and Olympic trials training. She finds time for friends. She has her vices.
“I enjoy sweets so much,” she said, blue eyes widening; ice cream and cookie cakes are favorites. “I have the biggest sweet tooth ever.”
There are those days, rare as they might be, when she might not feel like training, “but I make the most of those,” Curzan said, before listing off qualities of her normalcy: “I go to school, I have homework, I stay up late, try to jam to study. ...”
“I mean, I’m just kind of like anyone,” she said, making the case for her ordinary side.
It’s just that the extraordinary is extra-extraordinary. It’s that she’s among the very best in the world at a swimming stroke that casual swimmers find the most difficult, and that she’s in the conversation for being the best of the very best.
“Just mind-boggling,” Mark Curzan, her dad, said. “It’s sort of surreal.”
“Crazy,” said Turner, the coach at Cardinal Gibbons, where Claire more or less swims for the fun of it — and for the satisfaction that comes with setting school and state high school records.
“I didn’t even know what a national age group record was,” Tracy Curzan said, before her daughter began regularly breaking them when she was about 12.
When that started happening, Mark said, he thought: “Oh my gosh, she’s got a gift that, you know, her mom passed on to her.”
He was being humble but at least partly accurate. Among the gifts Claire received were a love of the water, from her father, and a competitive streak from both of her parents, but especially from her mother.
Mark grew up along the California coast, and developed a love for the water and even for the smell of chlorine. He grew up swimming — “I was pretty OK,” he said — and his passion for the sport, and for numbers and science, inspired him to become an orthopedic surgeon. For the past 20 years, he has worked in Cary, and at times served as a doctor for area high school teams.
“I just love everything about how the body moves,” he said.
Tracy grew up on Long Island, the youngest of eight, when there were fewer opportunities and perhaps less of an acceptance for girls to play sports. Nonetheless, she excelled in soccer, so much that she made a 19-and-under national team before her parents steered her toward a focus on her academics at Harvard. There, she majored in pre-med and still managed to play on the lacrosse team. In 1990, it became Harvard’s first women’s team to win an NCAA championship.
After medical school at UCLA, Mark began a residency at Duke. After medical school at Tufts, Tracy began a residency at UNC-Chapel Hill. Mutual friends introduced them, and they celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary earlier this month, while their middle child was training in Hawaii. Due to COVID-19 restrictions in Japan, Claire’s parents will not be able to attend the Olympics in person. It will be the longest she’s been away from home, alone.
Mark and Tracy share an appreciation for healthy competition and the value of movement. They did not want to be the type of parents who pushed their kids into athletics, they said, but they wanted to expose them to sports. They figured the rest would take care of itself.
“Really just showing them to have a passion for something is the biggest thing,” Tracy said. “And when they see you, they want to kind of model you. And so I think our passion for sports has rubbed off on them. Claire in particular loves competition. I think that’s what makes Claire a little bit different than some of the other kids. She loves the competition side of sports.”
Like mother, like daughter.
SWIMMING AS A YOUNG CHILD
When the Curzans married, they moved into a Cary community in part for its neighborhood pool. Claire began swimming at 3, the same time as her brother Sean, who’s a year older.
At 4, Claire was already faster than kids a couple of years older. By 9, she was well on her way to becoming one of the best swimmers in the country in her age group, though there came time for a choice — ballet or swimming. It proved an easy decision. Already a running family joke was taking shape.
“We say she’s more of a water mammal than a land mammal,” Mark said, laughing, and he could tell stories of the family’s summer trips to the beach over the years, Claire’s love of getting into the ocean and hope that fate might allow her to swim with the dolphins.
It was always the pool, though, where she felt most at home and at ease — “buoyant and everything,” Claire said recently — and there she found peace and purpose.
During a recent workout — she was back home after trials — Curzan swam in one of the far lanes at the edge of the pool. The lanes closest to her filled and emptied and filled again, kids rotating in and out for practices while Curzan swam down one end and back, over and over, while Marchionda, her coach, paced beside her, holding notes and a stopwatch.
On the far wall of the Triangle Aquatic Center, there were large boards with the pool records, and Curzan’s name was listed 34 times. Her workout lasted two hours, which is standard, and afterward she said it was easy, compared to what she normally does.
She has spent more time here, at TAC, than anywhere, except for home, and the air was thick with the smell of chlorine, the humidity of an indoor pool and an intangible anticipation that something special was brewing.
INTERRUPTED BY THE PANDEMIC
Curzan was 16 when she qualified for the Olympics, and she’ll be 17 when she competes. Her birthday was June 30, and perhaps there’s a bit of cosmic significance that she shares that birthday with Phelps, the most accomplished Olympic swimmer ever and one of the greatest Olympians in history, regardless of sport.
Like Curzan, Phelps was but a teenager, 15, when he qualified for his first Olympics, in 2000. This will be the first Summer Olympics without him since 1996. His will be the most notable absence among Olympic swimmers who have become familiar names. On the women’s side, especially, Team USA has grown considerably younger.
Curzan is one of nine teenagers on the women’s national team. Torri Huske, 18, of Arlington, Va., is among them. She finished first in the 100 fly at trials, defeating Curzan by almost eight-tenths of a second. Among all U.S. Olympians, across all sports, only two are younger than 17, and both of them are among Curzan’s teammates: Bella Sims, 16, and Katie Grimes, 15.
The youth underscores the reality that all of this is fleeting. That Olympic careers, like the races that compose them, pass in a relative instant. That even for an icon, like Phelps, nothing is permanent; that the only guarantee is this moment, now.
Over the past year-and-a-half, the timing of a global pandemic disrupted athletes who might have otherwise been at their peak last summer. Undoubtedly, the postponement of the 2020 games meant that some who would have qualified for the Olympics last year, in any sport, did not qualify this year. In other cases, the pandemic opened a window.
When it became official that the games would be delayed, Marchionda met with Curzan and her parents. They developed a long-term plan that covered everything from nutrition to mental preparation to all of the physical work necessary to turn one of the nation’s best young swimmers into one who could make Team USA for Tokyo.
“We just quickly turned that into a huge positive,” Marchionda said of the delay brought on by COVID-19. “Saying that if there’s anyone, any swimmer in the country, that’s going to benefit from this one-year delay, it’s you.”
When Curzan swam a 56.6 at the U.S. Open in Greensboro last November, it was a pivotal moment. “We started to go, OK, well maybe,” Marchionda said. “Maybe we can do this.”
That performance came months after Curzan, like everyone, was forced to find a new routine during the height of lockdowns. She was out of the pool at TAC for more than a month. To stay in shape, she did what she could in a neighbor’s pool — designed more for backyard recreation than training an Olympic hopeful — and took up running with her mom.
“Now she swears she’s never going to run again in her life,” said Tracy, an emergency room doctor, with a laugh. “But it was a great time for her and I to connect.”
They talked a lot about life on those runs, and swimming and, yes, they talked about the Olympics.
“I would always downplay it,” Tracy said, “because I think there’s just a lot of pressure that comes with that. I would always say, ‘Well, don’t worry about it — just go and swim and see if you can swim the best time.’ I said, ‘You’ve already accomplished so much.’
“You know, if you don’t make it, it’s not the end of the world. There’s certainly other things.”
‘PHENOMENAL’ SWIMMER
Earlier this year, in the spring, Russell Mark visited TAC to see Curzan and watch her train. Mark is a coach with Team USA, its technical stroke guru whose formal title is “high-performance consultant.”
He timed Curzan’s underwater leg kick and found it to be among the fastest in the world. Her mechanics, he said, are “phenomenal,” and in the tradition of others who’ve become some of America’s best in the butterfly.
“A lot of our best butterflies have done it at a young age,” Mark said. “So whether it’s Michael Phelps or Dana Vollmer or Caeleb Dressel, they’ve been good at it from their teenage and early teenage years.”
Curzan has joined that company. She was among 14 swimmers who train at TAC who competed in trials. Another, Ashley Twichell, made Team USA in marathon swimming. And yet another TAC swimmer, about the same age as Curzan, just missed, finishing less than a full second from second place in the 200-meter fly — and a spot on the Olympic team.
That was the line: Making Team USA by less than a second meant that someone else missed it by that much. In certain events in Tokyo, it will be the difference between gold and sliver, and silver and bronze, and appearing on the medal stand or not appearing at all. Fractions of a second.
Curzan said recently that she doesn’t mind the pressure.
“I actually kind of like the attention,” she said. “Like, I love being behind the camera and so I guess it’s just something I’m kind of attracted to. But it’s definitely weird — like people like kind of staring at you, ‘cause I’m not really used to that.”
When she returned from trials, the neighborhood threw Curzan a mini-parade. People wore patriotic hats, waved little American flags, chanted “U-S-A, U-S-A,” in the cul-de-sac where the Curzans have lived now for 20 years. When Claire walked back into TAC an Olympian, little kids, not all that much younger than she is, lined the pool to give her five.
Later that week, it was much quieter during one of her workouts. She put on her swim cap and goggles and hopped into the pool and went over the plan for the day with her coach. She pushed off the wall for her first lap of the day, 50 meters to the other side.
In a typical week she swims 42,000 meters, Marchionda said, which is the equivalent of 26 miles.
Forty-two thousand meters, all to be ready for the ones that count most in Tokyo. Making Team USA was one goal, and now there’s another — a quicker time.
“Hopefully 55 seconds,” Marchionda said, and he believed it to be possible because “there’s no doubt in my mind that she can go much faster than she’d been at trials.”
It’d be a world record.
