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Editor’s notice: This story, that includes Harpeth Hall graduate Tracy Caulkins, is a part of The Tennessean’s collection honoring the 50 biggest athletes to come back from the Nashville space as voted on by a bunch of editors and reporters.
Close your eyes and rely to 9.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi. Five Mississippi. Six Mississippi. Seven Mississippi. Eight Mississippi. Nine Mississippi.
That’s how lengthy Tracy Caulkins waited for the swimmer closest behind her, Australia’s Suzie Landells, to complete the race. Long sufficient for Caulkins to show round, relaxation her again in opposition to the pool wall and cheer teammate, Susan Heon, to a fourth-place end.
She’d waited 4 years to attend these 9 seconds. Four years that appeared like a lifetime on the time.
The scene was the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games.
The date was Sunday, July 29. The occasion was the 400-meter particular person medley.
Caulkins, a Harpeth Hall graduate, completed the race in a U.S.-record time of 4 minutes, 39.24 seconds to win the primary of her three gold medals at these Olympic Games.
Caulkins mentioned later that day she was “depressed” after the U.S.’s boycott of the 1980 Games in Moscow. That she “may never take the medal off.” That she did not have phrases to explain how she felt.
“The first feeling was relief,” Caulkins informed The Tennessean in July. “It was a dream come true.”
Words cannot actually describe Caulkins’ swimming acumen, both.
NCAA championships. National data. World data. And, sure, many a dream come true.
So it needs to be no shock that Caulkins landed third on our listing of Nashville space’s 50 biggest athletes of all-time, two spots forward of one other multiple-gold medal-winning Olympic swimmer from Harpeth Hall, Gretchen Walsh.
“She would have had seven more gold medals if it weren’t for the boycott,” former longtime Harpeth Hall swim coach Polly Linden informed The Tennessean of Caulkins, whom she didn’t coach however whose profession she adopted intently.
“I didn’t understand the politics of it all,” Tracy mentioned of the boycott. “To have that taken away just didn’t seem fair.”
Which might be how her opponents felt about swimming in opposition to somebody of her caliber.
First kisses and feeding Alligators marshmallows
Tracy Caulkins drove Mark Stockwell to a grocery retailer for his or her first date.
The two had met on the 1984 Games — he a swimmer for Australia, and she or he the captain for the United States girls’s group.
He subsequently enrolled at Florida, the place she was a scholar, simply retired from swimming after the Games. Because she wasn’t coaching, a coach steered she assist Stockwell grow to be acclimated to America.
Food, she discovered, was an issue for him. He wasn’t keen on what the varsity provided. He wanted one thing more healthy.
She had a automotive, a crush and instructions to the shop.
“I helped him with that,” she mentioned of American meals. “He didn’t know any of the brands.”
Their first “real” date was at Lake Alice, an alligator asylum on campus.
There, they fed the inexperienced monsters marshmallows, giggled when the snacks grew to become caught of their enamel.
They shared their first kiss. They didn’t, nonetheless, go swimming.
The couple has been married for 34 years. They have three kids and have lived in his native nation for the whole lot of that point. They attempt to go to Lake Alice as typically as attainable throughout journeys again to the United States.
As crushing because the 1980 boycott was, Caulkins’ silver lining was Stockwell.
Had Caulkins gained seven gold medals like she’d hoped to on the 1980 Games in Moscow, she might not have even gone to the 1984 Games.
“It changed my life because I met my husband,” Caulkins mentioned. “That’s a bit of a sliding-door moment. … Maybe I wouldn’t have been motivated to go in ’84. For that, I’m grateful. It was life-changing.”
And accent-changing.
A touch of an Australian intonation is sewn into Caulkins’ phrases.
When she visits household and mates in Nashville, her “twang” returns, although.
Sometimes, one of the best of each accents comes out.
“I say, ‘G’day, y’all,’ ” mentioned Caulkins, who has duel-citizenship and stays concerned with swimming in Australia.
‘Quite a dork on land’
A world-renowned swimmer, one with Pan-Am Games golds, 16 NCAA particular person titles, numerous American data and world data, did not prefer to get water on her face?
“Kind of weird, I know,” Caulkins mentioned.
Weird, however true.
For that cause, Caulkins caught to backstroke occasions when she first started swimming.
“She was quite a dork on land,” her sister and teammate at Florida, Amy Caulkins, informed The Tennessean. “She was not good at land sports. She was not good at basketball or fighting. She was this tall, lanky thing designed for the water.”
“A dork?” Tracy mentioned with amusing. “I don’t know, maybe more like clumsy.”
Caulkins’ affinity for water was born in Nashville, the place she was a part of the Seven Hills Swim Club, which finally morphed into Nashville Aquatic Club. Her mom, Martha, was busy working in the summertime whereas father, Tom, was in graduate faculty.
“That was our babysitter,” mentioned Tracy’s older brother, Tim.
She and her siblings have been dropped off on the pool at 7 a.m., given a cooler stuffed with meals, just a few quarters and have been picked up at 6 p.m.
Amy and Tim “coerced” Tracy into the water there when she was round 8 years outdated. A relay group wanted fourth individual.
What an individual that relay group acquired.
“She was successful from the beginning,” Tracy’s mom mentioned.
By the time she was 9, Tracy was placing her ambitions on paper. Watching swimmers comparable to Mark Spitz on the 1972 Munich Games opened doorways in her creativeness.
“She knew she wanted to get to the Olympics,” Amy mentioned. “She used to write down how she was going to get there. She would conceptualize 10 years down the road. I was 11-12 years old trying to figure out what life was.”
In some ways, little sister Tracy was an inspiration to siblings Amy and Tim.
They each have been higher all-around athletes. Both of Tracy’s mother and father have been, too. Her father, who labored for the Metro Board of Education, performed basketball for Drake. Martha, a longtime artwork trainer who spent a few years at Overton, was a multi-sport athlete rising up in Iowa.
Tracy, she may swim. That was it. But she may swim higher than most all people on this planet.
She gained a number of state championships at Harpeth Hall after bursting onto the nationwide scene earlier than she turned 12.
“She just had some innate skills,” Martha mentioned.
Those 75,000 yards per week that Caulkins swam, these five-hour-per-day coaching classes, they weren’t for nothing.
She wrote it down. She needed to deliver these phrases to life.
And so she did.
“I knew she was going to be good,” Tim mentioned. “I didn’t know she was going to be that good.”
‘Doggone it if she did not do it’
Harpeth Hall did not have a swimming program when Caulkins was there.
Instead, a health club trainer named Patty Chadwell put collectively a “team” and entered these ladies in meets.
They wore warmup garments borrowed from the observe group. They gained TISCA state titles in 1978 and 1979. Three occasions Tracy gained the 100 breaststroke, twice gained the five hundred free and likewise took dwelling state titles within the 200 free and 200 medley relay. Amy was a two-time state champ within the 50 free and two-time state champ within the 100 free.
“I used to ask Tracy not to swim the 100 freestyle, because she was going to beat me,” Amy mentioned. “I needed at least one event that she wasn’t ahead of me in.”
Turns out, there wasn’t one.
One day throughout follow, Nashville Aquatic Club coach and Caulkins’ longtime private coach Paul Bergen requested for a volunteer for his regular “get-out” swim, an train throughout which he’d minimize the day brief if somebody may end a sure swim in some otherworldly time.
This explicit day, he needed somebody to swim the 100 free in beneath 52 seconds, Amy’s personal-best time, and one of many quickest occasions swum by anybody that age within the United States on the time. And they needed to do it utilizing a push-off begin off the wall, not by diving into the water.
Crickets.
Nobody raised their hand.
Except Tracy.
“We were all dead to Earth,” Amy mentioned. “She pauses, and my eyebrows go up, and everybody else’s eyebrows go up,” Amy mentioned. “That’s a nationwide customary. In follow, proper?
“Then she says, ‘I’ll do it.’ Doggone it if she did not do it.”
“I do not keep in mind that,” Tracy said.
Amy will never forget it. She also won’t forget the 1982 NCAA championships, when Tracy defeated her in the event to win first place over her sister and her NAC teammate, Joan Pennington.
“I used to be so nervous, as a result of it was my sister and my good buddy,” Tracy said. “I did not like swimming in opposition to them.”
Amy knows the feeling.
When she was trying to convince her sister to join her at Florida, some people asked her why.
The answer was simple.
“Because I did not need to need to swim in opposition to her,” Amy said. “She may pull issues out of (her) tail every time she needed to.”
And every time she needed to.
Tracy Caulkins file
Hometown: Nashville
High school: Harpeth Hall
College: Florida
Sport: Swimming
Achievements: Won six individual state titles, two team state titles in high school. … Three-time gold medalist at 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles (200 medley, 400 medley, 4×100 medley). … Won five gold medals (200 butterfly, 200 medley, 400 medley, 4×100 freestyle, 4×100 medley) and silver (100 breaststroke) at 1978 long course world championships in Berlin. … Set six world records (200 butterfly, 200 IM 3x, 400 IM, 4×100 free relay). … Six-time Pan American Games gold medalist, three-time PAG silver medalist. … Led Florida to 1982 NCAA national championship. … Won 16 individual NCAA national championships, 12 individual SEC titles, 21-time All-American. … SEC Female Athlete of the Year (1984). … International Swimming Hall of Famer. … Tennessee Sports Hall of Fame. … Florida Sports Hall of Fame. … University of Florida Athletic Hall of Fame. … Captain of the 1984 U.S. women’s Olympic team. … Set five world records, 63 U.S. records during career.
The scoop: In 1978, Caulkins won AAU James E. Sullivan Award, which recognizes the most outstanding amateur athlete in the United States each year.
Did you know? Considered one of the greatest swimmers of all time, the American-Australian dual citizen was awarded Medal of the Order of Australia by the country’s government “For service to sport as an administrator and proponent of sporting alternatives for girls.”
Paul Skrbina is a sports enterprise reporter covering the Predators, Titans, Nashville SC, local colleges and local sports for The Tennessean. Reach him at [email protected] and on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) @paulskrbina.
This web page was created programmatically, to learn the article in its authentic location you may go to the hyperlink bellow:
https://www.tennessean.com/story/sports/high-school/2025/08/08/tracy-caulkins-harpeth-hall-olympic-swimmer/84344617007/
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