Swimming

Book Review of Jeff Farrells My Olympic Story Rome 1960

By Sanford G. Thatcher, Swimming World Contributor

This book might well have been suitably called “A Profile in Courage” or “Find a Way” if those titles had not already been preempted by John F. Kennedy and Diana Nyad, respectively. For this is indeed a story of an athlete who had the “courage” to “find a way” to victory after a stunning and untimely setback that was entirely unexpected.

Leading into the Olympic Trials that were to begin on August 2, 1960, there was no faster freestyle sprinter in the world than Jeff Farrell. As he explains in the short Introduction, “In the previous year I had won 7 national and international titles in the 100-meter/yard and 200-meter/220-yard freestyle events, and in the previous 6 months I had set 11 individual national records. No swimmer was considered more likely to qualify for the 1960 American Olympic team that would go to Rome, and I was thought to be an almost certain gold medalist in the 100-meter freestyle.”

But then disaster struck. In the early morning of July 27, Farrell woke up with severe abdominal pains and collapsed in the bathroom of a hotel in Detroit, MI, where he was staying with some other swimmers who had been training with him at Yale under legendary Coach Bob Kiphuth and were getting ready for the Trials. Just twelve hours earlier Farrell had completed a good sprint workout and felt ready for the challenge of making the Olympic team.

View full post on swimmingworldmagazine

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