Swimmer inspires local girls at Athletic Roundtable

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

At 14, she swam from Seal Beach to Catalina Island. At 15, she crossed the English Channel in record time. Six years ago, she swam a mile in freezing Antarctic waters.
Yesterday, her stories served as inspiration for hundreds of local girls.
Lynne Cox, a UC Santa Barbara graduate and famed open water swimmer, spoke to a room filled with more than 500 female athletes at the Athletic Roundtable's National Girls and Women in Sports Day luncheon.

Accomplishing great things is all about believing you can do it, she said as she recounted a training session for another Catalina Channel swim at age 17.
Out in the early morning hours at Seal Beach, Cox had been swimming for about an hour and was wrapping up her workout when she felt the water seem to hollow out below her.
“There is nothing like the feeling of something very big swimming under you in pitch-black water,” she said to gasps from the audience.
She immediately turned toward a pier where an old fisherman named Steve kept watch over her during her morning swims and started heading that way. Looking up, she could see Steve waving at her wildly. Okay, so it’s a shark, she told herself, and started swimming for shore as fast as she could. But after glancing back at the fisherman, who seemed to be waving her back out, she stopped.
“He says, you have a baby gray whale,” Cox said. “He’s lost his mother and he’s following you.”
Going to shore surely meant death for the 17-foot whale, so she headed back out into the open water, searching for its mother. While she didn’t give away the ending, she said after five hours of swimming, it was a happy one.
Although she’s had numerous record-breaking performances, including a 1971 crossing of the English Channel in 9 hours and 57 minutes that broke both men’s and women’s records, perhaps her most memorable accomplishment came in 1987.
Although it took her 11 years, she finally received permission from the Soviet government to swim across the Bering Strait, opening the U.S.-Soviet border for the first time in 48 years.
She set off in the frigid water, which ranged between 42 and 38 degrees Fahrenheit, to bridge the gap between Little Diomede and Big Diomede islands on a foggy day with visibility reduced to 50 feet.
“My fingers were gray because they were so cold,” Cox said.
As she neared the island, a group of Soviets in a boat, after welcoming her, asked Cox to swim another half mile down the coastline to where the welcoming committee had gathered. When she finally reached the shore, she couldn’t climb out of the water.
Two Soviet soldiers reached down and hauled her out. As she stood there, barefoot in the freezing air, she was bombarded with intricate questions that had to be translated from Russian to English and back again.
Will her swim help diminish tensions between the two nations? What impact will it have on the potential signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty?
“I’m like, I’m just an athlete,” Cox said.
But later that year, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met in Washington, D.C., to sign the INF treaty, with Gorbachev toasting to a daring woman named Lynne Cox who brought two nations to mutual peace.
“Once you do something big, it affects people in a big way,” Cox said.
UCSB’s head swimming coach Gregg Wilson, who introduced the long-distance swimmer to the crowd at Earl Warren Showgrounds yesterday, said Cox had that effect even back in 1975, when he coached her at UCSB.
“The first time I saw Lynne in the pool, I said who is that?” Wilson said. “She doesn’t look like the typical swimmer.”
But her ability to cut through the water seemingly without effort drew more than just Wilson’s attention. A world-renowned physiologist at UCSB would come down from his office and lay on the pool deck to watch Cox swim, Wilson said.
Researchers truly started taking note after her Bering Strait swim in just a Speedo, swim cap and goggles. Most humans exposed to those temperatures would experience muscle failure and die within minutes.
When she swam 1.22 miles in 32-degree water off the coast of Antarctica in 2002, she garnered widespread media attention, appearing on 60 Minutes and in New Yorker magazine. Footage shows penguins diving from the ice to join her in the water — her new teammates, she said.
“My team sees this every year and they have nothing to complain about,” Wilson said.
Now a motivational speaker on a tour promoting her books “Grayson” — about her experience with the baby gray whale — and “Swimming to Antarctica,” Cox delivered a simple message of perseverance and hard work to the girls in attendance.
“Sometimes you have to believe in impossible dreams.”
At yesterday’s Athletic Roundtable, officials also handed out News-Press Athlete of the Week honors and the Body Electric Scholarship.
Westmont College’s Andrew Schmalbach, a sophomore guard for the basketball team, took male athlete of the week honors after leading the team to an upset win over No. 18 Cal Baptist.
Dos Pueblos High School’s Sami Hill, a sophomore goalie for the girl’s waterpolo team, was named female athlete of the week.
Her teammate, senior Helen Zukin, received the Body Electric Scholarship, given each year to a high school senior who will be attending a 2-year or 4-year university to encourage local girls to participate in sports and physical activity. Zukin, a Junior Olympic gold medalist and co-captain of the waterpolo team, also holds a 4.75 GPA and said she will use the $1,000 scholarship to continue her hard work in college.