Missy Franklin turns pro, starts plotting course to 2016 Olympics

Missy Franklin
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NEW YORK — In the last 36 hours, Missy Franklin swam her final college race, signed her first professional contract and gripped a coffee cup as Jon Hamm and “Mad Men” stars floated near her at the TODAY Show.

“It still feels like a dream,” Franklin, 19 and a five-time 2012 Olympic medalist, said at her TODAY appearance on Monday.

Franklin could be forgiven for still feeling groggy, though she didn’t look it. She said she got one hour of sleep in North Carolina on Saturday night, after winning her third NCAA individual title in as many days and helping the California Bears to their first women’s team title since 2012.

The team rented out an Italian restaurant Saturday night, she got back to her hotel close to midnight and crashed. Not for long. She flew to New York with her parents on Sunday morning and signed with an agent — Mark Ervin of WME-IMG, whose athlete group includes Lindsey Vonn but no other swimmers.

Franklin, a noted scrapbooker who liked to write journal entries every day at the NCAA Championships, has unfinished business from her college career.

She hasn’t found the time to pen her journal entry from the final day of the NCAA Championships. She hopes to on another flight, to her native Colorado, on Monday night. As luck would have it, this is California’s spring break week.

Franklin, a sophomore, will finish the semester living and training at Berkeley and then plans to scale back classes in the fall and next spring in anticipation of the Rio Olympics. But not give up school altogether.

“If all I had to do was swimming, I think I’d go a little crazy,” she said.

The classes may be online, as Franklin hasn’t decided where she will train and which coach she will train under. She could stay at Cal. Franklin’s longtime coach in Colorado, Todd Schmitz, attended NCAAs in Greensboro.

Her college coach, Teri McKeever, will definitely continue to be part of her life.

“She’s going to be such a key part in helping me with this transition,” Franklin said. “She’s done it with so many athletes before. She knows better than I do the struggles I’m going to face the next couple weeks and months.”

The struggles will likely include choosing which swim apparel company to sign with, among other endorsements, and figuring out her meet schedule before the World Championships in Kazan, Russia, in August. She has nothing set yet.

The recent stretch has been a whirlwind. Franklin reflected by looking through her scrapbook binder entries from last year’s Pac-12 and NCAA Championships, which included coach’s quotes and cards that teammates made for her.

Franklin also researched her future, looking at how Olympic teammates Natalie Coughlin, Michael Phelps, Nathan Adrian and Rebecca Soni managed pro careers. She spoke for an hour with Soni, the retired breaststroke champion.

Franklin joked that her mom, DA, may have the toughest transition. She’s been Franklin’s manager, taking on more and more as her daughter made her first national team at 15, won four Olympic gold medals at 17 and became the first woman to win six gold medals at a single World Championships at 18. Now, mom will be weened off that role, Franklin joked.

Then it’s not surprising what Franklin said when asked what her first professional splurge would be.

“Taking my parents out to dinner,” she said.

Franklin felt her NCAA Championships performance, breaking personal bests in three events, was a bit of validation following a trying 2014, when back spasms slowed her at the biggest meet of the year, the Pan Pacific Championships.

Franklin earned one bronze medal in four individual events at Pan Pacs, plus three relay medals, while clearly not 100 percent. She’s worked with physical therapist Kristy Illg at Berkeley this season, so focused on goals that she told Illg four months ago that she wanted to swim the 200-yard freestyle in 1 minute, 39 seconds.

“We’re going to get there,” Illg told her.

They did. Franklin smashed her American record Friday night.

Franklin will continue to focus on the same four individual events — the 100m and 200m backstroke and freestyles — which could set her up for seven total events (including three relays) at the 2016 Olympics. That would be the same slate as in 2012.

Franklin has said a goal is to become the most decorated female swimmer of all time. In an Olympic sense, that would mean capturing at least 13 career medals to pass Coughlin, Dara Torres and Jenny Thompson‘s shared record. That means continuing on to Tokyo 2020.

In the short term, she was given the week off from swimming by McKeever. She’s not sure she’ll heed it.

“I can’t spend this long out of the water,” Franklin said, laughing, “otherwise I’ll go insane.”

Missy Franklin ends NCAA career with another individual title

Football takes significant step in Olympic push

Flag Football
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
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Football took another step toward possible Olympic inclusion with the IOC executive board proposing that the sport’s international federation — the IFAF — be granted full IOC recognition at a meeting in October.

IOC recognition does not equate to eventual Olympic inclusion, but it is a necessary early marker if a sport is to join the Olympics down the line. The IOC gave the IFAF provisional recognition in 2013.

Specific measures are required for IOC recognition, including having an anti-doping policy compliant with the World Anti-Doping Agency and having 50 affiliated national federations from at least three continents. The IFAF has 74 national federations over five continents with almost 4.8 million registered athletes, according to the IOC.

The NFL has helped lead the push for flag football to be added for the 2028 Los Angeles Games. Flag football had medal events for men and women at last year’s World Games, a multi-sport competition including Olympic and non-Olympic sports, in Birmingham, Alabama.

Football is one of nine sports that have been reported to be in the running to be proposed by LA 2028 to the IOC to be added for the 2028 Games only. LA 2028 has not announced which, if any sports, it plans to propose.

Under rules instituted before the Tokyo Games, Olympic hosts have successfully proposed to the IOC adding sports solely for their edition of the Games.

For Tokyo, baseball-softball, karate, skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing were added. For Paris, skateboarding, sport climbing and surfing were approved again, and breaking will make its Olympic debut. Those sports were added four years out from the Games.

For 2028, the other sports reportedly in the running for proposal are baseball and softball, breaking, cricket, karate, kickboxing, lacrosse, motorsports and squash.

All of the other eight sports reportedly in the running for 2028 proposal already have a federation with full IOC recognition (if one counts the international motorcycle racing federation for motorsports).

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Helen Maroulis stars in wrestling documentary, with help from Chris Pratt

Helen Maroulis, Chris Pratt
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One of the remarkable recent Olympic comeback stories is the subject of a film that will be shown nationwide in theaters for one day only on Thursday.

“Helen | Believe” is a documentary about Helen Maroulis, the first U.S. Olympic women’s wrestling champion. It is produced by Religion of Sports, the venture founded by Gotham Chopra, Michael Strahan and Tom Brady. Showing details are here.

After taking gold at the 2016 Rio Games, Maroulis briefly retired in 2019 during a two-year stretch in which she dealt with concussions and post-traumatic stress disorder. The film focuses on that period and her successful bid to return and qualify for the Tokyo Games, where she took bronze.

In a poignant moment in the film, Maroulis described her “rock bottom” — being hospitalized for suicidal ideations.

In an interview, Maroulis said she was first approached about the project in 2018, the same year she had her first life-changing concussion that January. A wrestling partner’s mother was connected to director Dylan Mulick.

Maroulis agreed to the film in part to help spread mental health awareness in sports. Later, she cried while watching the 2020 HBO film, “The Weight of Gold,” on the mental health challenges that other Olympians faced, because it resonated with her so much.

“When you’re going through something, it sometimes gives you an anchor of hope to know that someone’s been through it before, and they’ve overcome it,” she said.

Maroulis’ comeback story hit a crossroads at the Olympic trials in April 2021, where the winner of a best-of-three finals series in each weight class made Team USA.

Maroulis won the opening match against Jenna Burkert, but then lost the second match. Statistically, a wrestler who loses the second match in a best-of-three series usually loses the third. But Maroulis pinned Burkert just 22 seconds into the rubber match to clinch the Olympic spot.

Shen then revealed that she tore an MCL two weeks earlier.

“They told me I would have to be in a brace for six weeks,” she said then. “I said, ‘I don’t have that. I have two and a half.’”

Maroulis said she later asked the director what would have happened if she didn’t make the team for Tokyo. She was told the film still have been done.

“He had mentioned this isn’t about a sports story or sports comeback story,” Maroulis said. “This is about a human story. And we’re using wrestling as the vehicle to tell this story of overcoming and healing and rediscovering oneself.”

Maroulis said she was told that, during filming, the project was pitched to the production company of actor Chris Pratt, who wrestled in high school in Washington. Pratt signed on as a producer.

“Wrestling has made an impact on his life, and so he wants to support these kinds of stories,” said Maroulis, who appeared at last month’s Santa Barbara Film Festival with Pratt.

Pratt said he knew about Maroulis before learning about the film, which he said “needed a little help to get it over the finish line,” according to a public relations company promoting the film.

The film also highlights the rest of the six-woman U.S. Olympic wrestling team in Tokyo. Four of the six won a medal, including Tamyra Mensah-Stock‘s gold.

“I was excited to be part of, not just (Maroulis’) incredible story, but also helping to further advance wrestling and, in particular, female wrestling,” Pratt said, according to responses provided by the PR company from submitted questions. “To me, the most compelling part of Helen’s story is the example of what life looks like after a person wins a gold medal. The inevitable comedown, the trauma around her injuries, the PTSD, the drive to continue that is what makes her who she is.”

Maroulis, who now trains in Arizona, hopes to qualify for this year’s world championships and next year’s Olympics.

“I try to treat every Games as my last,” she said. “Now I’m leaning toward being done [after 2024], but never say never.”

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