40 Years On: Why Shirley Babashoff’s Making Waves Is The SwimVortex Book Of 2016

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Updated: July 30, 2016

When the International Olympic Committee failed to impose a blanket ban on Russia for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, it drove another stake into the hearts of victims of doping through the ages. The IOC decision came 40 years after the 1976 Olympic Games and the dominance of the DDR. The Oral Turinabol and those who supplied and injected it into tens of thousands of athletes won the day but ultimately there were no winners and the Olympic Movement now finds itself on shifting sands.

Today we turn to Shirley Babashoff’s biography Making Waves to remind ourselves what the IOC’s lack of clarity, lack of due process, and lack of detemination to set things right down the years means for clean athletes and what it could mean for the autonomy of sport in the face of inaction from Olympic bosses all the way down through international and national federations.

Context, from words written in our preview of the women’s 200 to 800m freestyle events and where Katie Ledecky might fit in a history of Debbie Meyer, Shane Gould, Janet Evans and Co: “And then there was Shirley Babashoff, who, but for the GDR and State Plan 14:25 at Montreal 1976, might have won the 200, 400 and 800m freestyle, and shared gold in the 4x100m medley. With the gold she did claim with teammates in the 4x100m freestyle, Babashoff has a plinth in the pantheon alongside the greats of women’s freestyle swimming.

“She might have repeated the 200, 400, 800 triple that Meyer launched in 1968. We will never know, for Babashoff was robbed of that right by state-sponsored systematic doping.”

The foreword in Making Waves is penned by Donna de Varona, Olympic champion, broadcaster, ISHOF leader and keen one of the keenest minds you may meet in the pool.

De Varona’s contribution runs to a couple of pages but includes one of the most poignant and to-the-point references in the work: “It was frustrating to see how little support both the U.S. swimming and USOC executives provided to our brave athletes when they finally began to point fingers at the East German team…

“The cost of these leaders’ inaction cannot be measured on any level; their failure to protect the sport created generations of cheats both outside and inside the U.S. It also allowed the East German government to continue to abuse its own athletes, many of whom suffered lifetimes of depression, guilt and health problems. Even after it was proven that the East Germans used performance-enhancing drugs, neither FINA not the IOC provided any sort of remedy for those whose Olympic medals were stolen from them.”

De Varona concludes with the words “It is a cautionary tale, and one every athlete, coach, administrator, and parent should read.”

Making Wakes – Shirley Babashoff Making Waves – Shiley Babashoff with Chris Epting Preface by Mark Spitz Forward by Donna de Varona Santa Monica Press

It transcends being a book of the year, to be perfectly frank but in Making Waves, Shirley Babashoff has hit just about every nail there is to hit when it comes to understanding what it’s like to work hard for all you have only to find yourself, mugged, violated and robbed while your guardians stand by, do nothing, say nothing and let that go on for 40 years, the best part of which has seen the evidence and extent of your victimisation posted in criminal convictions and on every billboard that every screamed the truth out to the world.

Breath out and please don’t comment the length of sentences. Stick to the point, namely “My journey winning Olympic gold and defeating the East German Doping Program“.

Perhaps there is a God of clean sport after all, for while no-one in right or sound mind would have wished Babashoff the longest wait for justice in world sport, the timing is perfect. Babashoff even gets to fit in the events of 2015, a request for a quote from Karen Crouse, the New York Times reporter who understands the context of those 40 years, just as the first WADA report into Russian doping, a year after ARD’s revelations, was published.

Babashoff writes:

“There we were, in 2015, facing another state-sponsored doping program. Wow. Here was more of the same mysterious and dishonest manipulation. I thought about all the clean Russian athletes and what it must have been like for them the day the report was released … There are still plenty of lessons to be learned from the story of the 1976 Games.”

Indeed there are.

Last Gold is out there and I haven’t seen it so I can’t say great or otherwise. I can and will say great that it’s there and I have written that the whole project has too much airbrush in it when it comes to leaving out the head women’s coach to the USA in 1976, Jack Nelson, regardless of where that may lead (the man is dead but that story is far from over …).

Jack Nelson and the USA Olympic women’s team he led in 1976, with Jill Sterkel (back row, first left), Shirley Babashoff (mid-row, fourth left) and Wendy Boglioli (bottom row, first left) – courtesy International Swimming Hall of Fame

Babashoff manages to tackle the painful issue of abuse in her book, both personal and as seen from the standpoint of a ; the makes of Last Gold should have done that, too, and could have done that, too without it taking up all the oxygen in the room. To leave him out of ‘Last Gold’ is just as bad as deliberately avoiding the hit head, the blood in the water and the HIV when we consider the great career of diver Greg Louganis (and, surely, only FINA could think they could get away with that).

I’m also inclined to be critical of the subtitle: as USA Swimming put it when adveritising The Last Gold airing on night-swimming broadcaster NBC next Monday, the film is “Considered one of the greatest untold stories in Olympic Swimming history”.

I look forward to learning something I didn’t know – and no, that doesn’t mean new quotes and insights from the girls.

The thing is, this tale needs no spin. The story has been out there for 40 years in part and for 20 years in full. By 1996, when Michelle Smith was muscling in on three golds at the Atlanta Olympics on her way to the exit door marked ‘good riddance’ come 1998, we knew, not guessed, not speculated but knew, that the East German teams of 1973 to 1989 in the pool were joined at the hip with State Plan 14:25. It took three more years for criminal convictions in Germany to nail the judgment to the end wall.

So what did the IOC do? Nothing. FINA? Nothing. Did USA Swimming successful press for action? No. And during the past 20 years of us knowing, how could it be that the USA Swimming federation supports, votes for and listens yet to the same FINA blazers who were there at the top table 1984 to this very day and did … nothing about the past, not even when it comes to what would have been the simplest of acts: remove the silver pin from Dr Lothar Kipke‘s blazer and send a message to the world of swimming and beyond: we do not condone doping; we will not tolerate doping; we will call to account and punish those who abuse young swimmers and bring our sport into disrepute.

Hard to listen to quotes promoting Last Gold from any American swimming officials who have enjoyed their round of golf with Cornel Marculescu (FINA Director: “You can’t condem the stars for a minor doping …

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