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minutes away from where we lived, in Towson, Maryland, I usually wouldn’t make it home again until it was dark again. Bob would take me from practice to school, or to breakfast and then to school, and then in the afternoon we would go back to the pool. Mom would come get me at maybe seven at night.
    I would always be the last one out of the pool. She was alwaysworking so late; I remember it seemed like I was always the last one to leave. Unless I’d been kicked out of practice early by Bob, for not doing what he wanted the way he wanted it done or when he wanted it done; in that case, I had to sit there and wait for her, anyway.
    All of this driving around, the back and forth on the roads around her job, required enormous dedication and sacrifice on my mom’s part. At the same time, it was a total reflection of who she is. And that’s something I am forever grateful for.
    She made it abundantly clear that we—she, my sisters, me—came first, even as she insisted that we have a passion for life itself and for something, or some variety of things.
    We had to have goals, drive, and determination. We would work for whatever we were going to get. We were going to strive for excellence, and to reach excellence you have to work at it and for it.
    Mom calls this common sense. She grew up in a blue-collar area of western Maryland. Her father was a carpenter. Her mother’s father was a miner. Neither of my mom’s parents went to college. They had four children—Mom was the second of the four—and all four are college graduates; Mom went on to earn a master’s degree.
    My dad, Fred, used to take me fishing when I was a little boy. He would take me to Baltimore Orioles games. He taught me to look people in the eye when I was meeting them and to shake hands like I meant it. He was a good athlete himself—a small-college football player—and, unquestionably, I inherited my competitive athletic drive from him. If I was playing sports, no matter what it was, my father’s direction was simple: Go hard and, remember, good guys finish second. That didn’t mean that you were supposed to be a jerk, but it did mean that you were there to compete as hard as you could. The time to be friends was after the race; during it, the idea was to win.
    My mother and father were high-school sweethearts in a milltown in western Maryland. Dad played football at Fairmont (West Virginia) State College; Mom followed him there. After they were married, they moved to the Baltimore area. My father moved out of the house when I was seven. As time went on, we spent less and less time together. Eventually, I stopped trying to include him in my activities and he, in turn, stopped trying to involve himself in mine.
    The last time I saw my father was at Whitney’s wedding, in October 2005. He and I didn’t talk at the wedding; there just hasn’t been anything to say for a while. Maybe there will be later.
    Having said that, I feel I have everything and everyone that anyone could ever ask for. I have the greatest people in the world around me and supporting me.
    My mom is an educator, now a school principal, and her passion in life is changing the lives of children. When she recognized a passion in her children for swimming, she was all in to help each of us.
    At the same time, things were going to be done in our house, and done a certain way, because that’s the way it was. Homework was going to get done. Clothes were going to get picked up off the floor. Kids were going to get taken to practice. We were all in it together.
    Not only that: Our house was always the home where any kid was welcome. If there was a kid who needed to stay over to make swim practice the next morning, we had a sleeping bag and a pillow.
    That work ethic, and that sense of teamwork, was always in our home. All of that went to the pool with me, from a very early age.
    It’s why, when I won my first Olympic gold medal,