NFL
By: Zachary Draves
Crissy Perham carries many titles. Wife, mother, advocate, and Olympic gold medal winner. She was destined for greatness since she was a young girl growing up in Yankton, South Dakota and later New London, Iowa and joined her YMCA swim program. It was at that moment she wanted nothing more than to represent her country on the world’s stage.
She was a remarkable swimmer in high school and at the University of Arizona where she helped catapult the Wildcats to an NCAA championship in swimming and diving. Under the tutelage of legendary coaches Frank Busch and Rick DeMont, Crissy got the chance to live out her dream in Barcelona in 1992.
She was an integral part of one of the most decorated US swim teams of all time as she was named team captain. In the process she captured three medals (two gold, one silver). She swam the butterfly leg of the women’s 4×100 meter medley relay and joined Jenny Thompson, Anita Nall, and Lea Loveless in setting a world record of 4:02.54. Crissy then added a gold for competing in the preliminary heats of the women’s 4×100 meter freestyle relay and concluded her Olympic journey by winning a silver medal in the 100 meter butterfly.
(Courtesy:Eric Feferberg/AFP via Getty Images)
(Courtesy: Keith Barraclough)
Since then, Crissy has still maintained a strong presence in the sport as a coach, mentor, commentator, and public speaker. She has also lent her voice to speak on prominent social issues, most notably on reproductive rights which is deeply personal to her. She also is a devoted mother and wife to her two sons Alex and Ryan, both are swimmers, and her husband Charlie, a retired Air Force engineer.
(Courtesy: Crissy Perham)
As part of NBS’s project commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Barcelona Games, Crissy shares special memories, the atmosphere of the games, and how she feels history should contextualize its overall impact.
Can you believe it has been 30 years?
Sometimes it feels like it was a really long time ago and other times I’m like “that was a decade ago.” That’s the measure we all think the 2000s was a decade ago.
What was it like to be there? What was the environment like?
I was so young. I had grown up this Olympic junkie. I can recall watching the ‘76 Olympics, I was six. I remember watching in ‘80 “Do you Believe in Miracles?” ‘84 in LA was like prime sports time for me. I was a huge Evelyn Ashford fan. I really wanted to be a track star. By the time ‘88 rolled around and I had qualified for trials, which wasn’t a big deal and I wasn’t able to make the team. So to make it was the culmination of a lifelong love affair with sports. But I was so young, I don’t know if the further I get away and my family says this to the more special we remember it to be, the more amazing an accomplishment it was. So to be there at the games is something I wanted to do. To see all the famous athletes walk in where we were eating and in the village, it was terrific. I absolutely felt like I belonged there. Totally understanding the history of Americans being in the Olympics so it was amazing.
You mentioned walking into the village and seeing all these world class athletes and being able to interact with them, were there any in particular that you were really excited to meet?
I saw Steffi Graff sitting with some friends and a couple of us asked if we could join at her table. You watch her on TV and she was so successful for long so and here she is sitting three feet away from you. She was just a regular person. That was an exciting time for me. I did get to meet a lot of people from the Dream Team. I am a huge basketball fan so that was pretty exciting. I crossed paths with some Irish boxers in the village. They were little guys. I am pretty sure that I outweighed them, I was definitely taller than them. Not necessarily famous athletes but crossing paths with those who loved their sport and excelled at their sport.
It sounds like the cafeteria was the hangout spot?
It definitely was. The village was pretty exciting. Another cool thing about the village is you had random athletes, media, people coming through the village. I got to meet Katie Couric and that was very exciting. I went bowling with Rick Barry. I took some pictures with him and that was pretty exciting. My husband is in the Air Force and decades later he was touring the United States visiting Air Force bases and I got to take a picture with him again. So the village was literally like wandering through a little town but your little town was famous athletes and fabulously fit beautiful people everywhere.
Obviously you cannot talk about Barcelona without talking about the Dream Team. Who were the players that you got to meet and also did you get to go see them play?
I did get to watch them play early rounds. A big Olympic donor and family friend named Jim Click, he is a huge fan from Tucson and he was going to the games. He was staying at the same hotel as the Dream Team. So when I was done with swimming, my family and I got invited to have dinner with them and hang out with them. We went into the lobby and Mr. Click introduced us to some people. I had already met Michael Jordan accidentally in the basement of a hotel. I got lost and he was sneaking around trying to get out. They were playing the Pacers and they were staying at a hotel and me and my dad got lost. So I had already met him. Karl Malone, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, but it was fun to meet Christian Leattner. I am not a Duke fan! I went to Arizona! He was so nice. I got to meet his sister and his mom and dad. We were just athletes hanging out at the Olympics.
What was it like to win the gold medal?
It was very emotional. I literally had dreamed of being on that. To stay in the moment and soak it in and yet not almost faint was kind of funny. Then all of sudden it was done. It’s surreal and it’s everything you ever wanted it to be. I wish I had a better way to describe it and how emotional it was. You wish it could have lasted longer.
It sounded like based on conversations we have had before that you had such a tight kit group in Barcelona.
Yeah the thing about having only fifteen girls, there were so many of us that were doing multiple events. That was nice to keep the group small. To have only fifteen of us rooming together, eating together, you get to know everybody pretty quickly. We also have kind of a weird age span. We had someone like Anita who was 16. We had some freshmen in college, freshmen and sophomores. I definitely describe myself as the surprise person that made the team at the end of my college career. Then you had someone who was a world record holder like Jenny or Janet (Evans). Dara (Torres) that was her third Olympics by then. There were alot of boxes that were checked in who we brought together. We love each other. During COVID we were on a zoom call, all fifty of us. I was laying on my bed and I was just like “are you kidding me? Look at all these people that just want to stare at a computer screen just to catch up all because we had swam back and forth that one time together.” There is alot of great people a part of USA Swimming but I do feel like we had a special squad.
What would you want Olympic enthusiasts to know about Barcelona?
If you talk specifically about swimming, we went through a lot of challenges. We wanted to represent the United States in the most honorable way. We are just human like everyone else but we wanted it just as bad as everyone else. I think people when they get caught up in the gold medal count or how that person didn’t get that world record, there is a lot of pressure we as athletes put on ourselves. We are fallible and we want it to be as successful as you do.
