Tracy Caulkins was the queen of short-distance and mid-distance swimming in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
She first gained notoriety in 1977, when she set American records at the U.S. Short-Course Championships to in the 200-yard and 400-yard individual medley events, demonstrating her abilities with every conceivable swimstroke. And no foreigner will ever be able to best those records, simply because they're in yards and not meters. 😁
At the 1978 World Championships in Berlin - where metric measurement are used and where a meter is a little more than a yard - Ms. Caulkins won the gold medal in the following races: the 200-meter butterfly, the 200-meter medley and 400m medley races, and two medleys - the 4×100-meter freestyle and the 4×100-meter medley. She also found to time to a win a medal for the 100-meter breaststroke - an uncharacteristic silver. At the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, she won gold in the 200-meter and 400-meter medleys and the 4×100-meter freestyle and medleys.
Ms. Caulkins was considered a guaranteed Olympic champion for the 1980 Moscow Games, and she would have indeed made it there if the Kremlin hadn't decided that Afghan leader Hafizullah Amin was a bad apple and had to go. The subsequent Soviet invasion of Afghanistan led to U.S. led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and Tracy Calkins had to wait until 1984 in Los Angeles to fulfill her ambition to become an Olympian.
Be that as it may, she ended up wining three gold medals at the 1984 Olympics in medley races, the 200-meter and 400-meter races and the 4x100-mter relay. As the Soviet bloc boycotted LA in retaliation for Moscow, Ms. Caulkins didn't get to compete against the East Germans in the Games.
Nor would she compete with anyone else after that. Ms. Caulkins announced her retirement soon after. Her coach Randy Reese would call her "the greatest swimmer that has ever been so far, men or women." With five world records and sixty-three American records to her credit, that assessment of Tracy Caulkins was very much true.
Until a new generation came along. 😉
Today, Tracy Caulkins is now Tracy Caulkins Stockwell, having married Australian sprinter Mark Stockwell and moved to Brisbane, where she had five children. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of Swimming Australia.
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