Matt Biondi

Biondi won the first of his eight Olympic gold medals as an eighteen-year-old novice on the United States' 4×100 meter freestyle relay team at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Two years later, he was dominating the collegiate swimming world—with five NCAA championships—and exploding onto the international stage. In Madrid, Spain, in 1986, Biondi became the first swimmer ever to win seven medals at the World Championships. This unprecedented accomplishment would create intense pressure at the 1988 Olympics, however, where Biondi was expected to match the seven gold medals claimed by legendary U.S. swimmer Mark Spitz sixteen years earlier.

Biondi alluded to the pressure—and tried to temper expectations—in a journal he kept for Sports Illustrated during the '88 Olympiad. "Everyone will be counting the medals and the times and the world records, and making this big judgment: Is Matt a success or a failure?" Biondi wrote. "It seems there's so much emphasis put on that stuff and so little on how a person grows as he works his way toward the Olympics. To me, it's the path getting there that counts, not the cheese at the end of the maze…. People don't seem to realize that I'm coming here with only one world record, in the 100 free. Spitz had world records in all of his individual events going into the 1972 Olympics. And mostly he was swimming against just Americans. Nowadays you've got East and West Germans, Swedes, Australians, Soviets—and they're all great. Times have changed."