shirley babashoff and leroy, fountain valley, calif. 8.21.08
Written on October 5, 2008
i’ll be honest, i couldn’t care less about sports. never did. never had any interest in watching sports or participating in them. i certainly never had any particular aptitude for any sport, though i did waste practically my entire freshman year of college playing ping pong, and was pretty good at it there for a while. i’ve been to one basketball game in my life, and three dodgers games. i can’t remember a single thing that happened during any of those events, save for the following:
1) the first dodger game i went to i spent mostly watching the crowd and ignoring the game. for the brief period of time i actually looked at what was going on on the field i saw two players run for a fly ball, slam into each other and fall down. i thought, ‘hey, baseball might not suck after all’.
2) at the last dodger game i went to my buddy alex managed to squirt mustard all over the ankles of the woman sitting in the row in front of us. her very large boyfriend was not pleased, and all of poor alex’s friends (myself including) immediately abandoned any shred of loyalty by pointing to him as the culprit. nobody was ultimately hurt.
3) at some point during the only basketball game i went to as a young kid – i think it might have been at madison square garden (do they play basketball there?) – i managed to get an earache and spent the rest of the time crying.
still. . .i have a soft spot for the summer olympic games. i’ll watch nearly anything during the summer games, though this year i was a little disappointed that i could never seem to find televised ping pong, and there was way too much volleyball which is really boring. gymnastics, though, is my favorite. this is mostly because i believe that gold medal athletes should be able to do things that aren’t even in the realm of possibility for normal humans. olympic level gymnastics are about as close as humans get to actually being spider man. that shit is amazing.
everybody knows, though, that this year the olympics were dominated by swimming, mostly because of michael phelps. so in the middle of all this olympic swimming fervor i got an assignment to photograph shirley babashoff.
shirley has won eight olympic medals in women’s swimming – two gold, six silver, in the 1972 and 1976 games. unfortunately, though, shirley is remembered mostly for something else that happened at the ’76 montreal games. as she tells it, her and her teammates went into the locker room and were startled to hear what appeared to be men’s voices. investigating the noise she found that it was coming from the east german women’s swim team. when the east germans went on to dominate the games, shirley called them out for doping. this charge turned out to be accurate, but before that shirley was lambasted by the press as being a sore loser and was nicknamed “surly shirley”.
now shirley lives in fountain valley, with her son and her dog, leroy. leroy is a brussells griffon, and shirley said she got him after seeing a similar dog in the movie “as good as it gets”. these days shirley is a letter carrier with the post office, and doesn’t really swim anymore. she says she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about her olympic career, being that it’s been about thirty years since she swam competitively. she seemed proud of her tomato garden, and even gave me a bag full of really delicious plum tomatoes to take home.
my thanks to mindy benham at orange coast magazine, and to the always talented kevin miyazaki for the referral.
(my thanks to joey gu for noticing a typo above, which has now been fixed.)
She was my favorite swimmer when I was a kid. I remembered when I first read about her in a book called “Women In Sports: Swimming”, in 4th grade. I had to do a 2 paragraph book report on her. I got a 100 (A+) on the assignment!!
I think she was awesome! I can understand her attitudes towards the German athletes in ’76, because truly, they really were being doped up and had highly more technological advances in training than we did at that time. It surely wasn’t fair!! At least she was the only one to stand up and tell the truth about it…YOU GO GIRL, SHIRLEY!!!
This is the first time I’ve seen her in over 20 years. She still looks great. I love the short hairstyle too. These were the first pics of her I’ve seen since the 1980′s. Thanks for the story…
Love, Peace, & God bless,
Leana Jo H.
I was catatonic, unable to function at the ’74 nationals in Concord Ca., so great was my crush on Shirley. She was, is and will ALWAYS be a GREAT CHAMPION.
She was RIGHT when she spoke out at Montreal.
God bless you Shirley.
Grant Wilson
Shirley- I don’t know if you will read this, but I admire your courage. You paid a high price for alerting the world of the cheating by the East German women. All true sportsmen and sportswomen admire your excellence and honesty. You are a champion.
Shirley Babashoff was everything you like in a swimmer. She was good, commited, intelligent, and a very sweet person. I was a reporter for the French daily newspaper L’Equipe when I met and interviewed her between 1973 and 1976, and she was allways ready to answer very obligingly. I remember, too, that she was a gracious and a very beautiful young person. She had this face, eyes and smile, and a tremendoux body. Not only fit, but also beautiful. Queston of genetics? As a swimmer, she had a prodigious arm movement, hers legs trailing behind with a slow move. She was, like Shane Gould, an “arm” swimmer. The East German girls were doped to their bones, and even with that, Shirley and some other girls managed to fight; Shirley, with her tremendous courage and talent. I think personnaly that she lost her races on the 400m and 800 freestyle at the Montreal Olytmpic Games because, as many “arms” swimmers, she lacked the leg strenght to make a perfectly operative turn when pushing from the wall and kicking, and Petra Thuemer took her at each turn perhaps one yard. Shirley, with her incredible heart, closed the gap… until the next turn, same story. For me, it was very difficult to see, because i knew that Shirley was THE swimmer of the Montreal Games and the East German the cheaters. Without her steroïds, I am sure that Thuemer could not stay with Babashoff… I never knew that the USA media bashed Shirley when she complained about the East German doping system. Perhaps I should have seen some friends of the American media and told them was happening. Perhaps because being Européen, I knew quite well what the GDR did, as I wrote in 1973 what is probably the first report on their dirty games. It is obvious that if we reconsider the Olympic Games, Shirley Babashoff is one of the best swimmers, and even perhaps the best, of the past century.
Eric LAHMY
Shirley Babashoff was everything you like in a swimmer. She was good, commited, intelligent, and a very sweet person. I was a reporter for the French daily newspaper L’Equipe when I met and interviewed her between 1973 and 1976, and she was allways ready to answer very obligingly. I remember, too, that she was a gracious and a very beautiful young person. She had this face, eyes and smile, and a tremendoux body. Not only fit, but also beautiful. Queston of genetics? As a swimmer, she had a prodigious arm movement, hers legs trailing behind with a slow move. She was, like Shane Gould, an “arm” swimmer. The East German girls were doped to their bones, and even with that, Shirley and some other girls managed to fight; Shirley, with her tremendous courage and talent. I think personnaly that she lost her races on the 400m and 800 freestyle at the Montreal Olytmpic Games because, as many “arms” swimmers, she lacked the leg strenght to make a perfectly operative turn when pushing from the wall and kicking, and Petra Thuemer took her at each turn perhaps one yard. Shirley, with her incredible heart, closed the gap… until the next turn, same story. For me, it was very difficult to see, because i knew that Shirley was THE swimmer of the Montreal Games and the East German the cheaters. Without her steroïds, I am sure that Thuemer could not stay with Babashoff… I never knew that the USA media bashed Shirley when she complained about the East German doping system. Perhaps I should have seen some friends of the American media and told them was happening. Perhaps because being Européen, I knew quite well what the GDR did, as I wrote in 1973 what is probably the first report on their dirty games. It is obvious that if we reconsider the Olympic Games under this light, Shirley Babashoff must be considerd as one of the very best swimmers, and even perhaps the best one, of the past century.
Eric LAHMY
Shirley was on the Arcadia High School swim team. I was on the Rosemead High team. Last swim meet of my senior year – 2 of our team members wouldn’t swim their final 800 against Shirley thinking they couldn’t win – so our leader put me in even though I’d finished all my races. I was good at 400, but not the 800. I swam my best – Shirley finished at my 4th lap. I finished the race though. When I got to the side of the pool, I was so tired I couldn’t move. Then, I saw a hand come down to me to help me out of the pool – It was Shirley. I’ll never forget how wonderful she was. She even told me “good race”. I watched every olympics she was in and enjoyed every moment of it. Too bad I wasn’t on her postal route. That would have been too cool. Thanks Shirley for waiting up for me.