Alex Meyer still cannot mask his anger.
A lot has happened in the 19 months since his close friend and open water swimming teammate Fran Crippen drowned while competing in unsafe conditions.
Meyer, 23, won the 10K at the 2011 USA Swimming Open Water National Championships. He placed fourth in the same distance at the 2011 World Championships. And he qualified for the London Games, making him the United States’ best shot for a medal in the relatively new Olympic event.
But it’s what hasn’t happened since Crippen’s death that infuriates Meyer.
He believes FINA, the international federation that oversees swimming competitions, has done little to improve safety practices since Crippen drowned. Races are still being held in unsafe conditions and athletes are still being put at risk, he says.
“It’s ridiculous,” Meyer says. “We’re not going to put up with this.”
Meyer, a Harvard graduate from Ithaca, N.Y., met Crippen in 2009 when he transitioned from long-distance pool swimming to the more unpredictable open water competitions. The pair became roommates and instant friends, with the older Crippen helping his new teammate navigate the sports’ choppy waters both literally and figuratively.
In a sport where competitors bump and draft off each other like aggressive NASCAR drivers, it helped to have an ally in the water.
When the two were competing at the 2010 Pan Pacific championships, for example, Meyer felt sick during the 10K and began to trail the competition. Crippen, who came from a family of prominent swimmers in suburban Philadelphia, reversed course, going from the front of the pack to the back to make sure his pal was OK.
They swam together for a while, before Crippen left to rejoin the leaders. He finished second, while Meyer eventually withdrew.
“It was a very selfless thing for him to do,” Meyer says. “It really shows the kind of person he was.”
Two months later, Meyer and Crippen traveled to Fujairah, United Arab Emirates, for a World Cup race. Meyer, who had undergone an emergency appendectomy a week earlier, had hoped to race but settled for being Crippen’s support system.
It was a hot October day, even by UAE standards. As the beating sun sent the air temperature hovering around 97 degrees, the water temperature simmered to about 89 degrees.
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After spending the first part of the race in an air-conditioned boathouse, Meyer made his way to a rock near the finish line and prepared to videotape Crippen as he crossed. About 20 minutes after leaders finished and his friend was nowhere in sight, he began to worry. He raised alarms about Crippen’s whereabouts and went out on a jet ski to look for him.
Divers eventually found Crippen, 26, just before the last buoy on the 2-kilometer triangular course. An autopsy report later attributed his death to drowning and heat exhaustion. An independent task force ruled that water temperatures were not recorded in accordance with FINA regulations and that circumstantial evidence suggested the actual temperature was much higher than the 84.2 degrees claimed by race officials.
Several witnesses, including Meyer and swimmers from Belgium and Germany, estimated the water temperature to be about 89 degrees during the race, according to the panel’s report.
“I think it made FINA look bad because, let’s be honest, it’s their fault,” Meyer says. “It was a freak event that happened, that shouldn’t have happened, because of a lack of safety.”
In the wake of Crippen’s death, FINA issued a series of recommendations that includes canceling events when the water temperature rises above 87.8 degrees. However, it is not a firm ceiling. U.S Swimming set the maximum at 85 degrees for its events and established sanctions for those who violate the threshold.
Meyer made two promises to his friend’s memory after the Grand Prix tragedy. First, he would push to make their sport safer. Second, he would realize their shared dream of making the Olympics and swim for both of them in London.
Both pledges came to a head last summer in Shanghai, where his fourth-place finish in the 10K earned him an Olympic berth and he publicly protested the 25K, the event in which he was the reigning world champion.
At 5:30 a.m. on the morning of the longer race, water temperatures had already hit 86.9 degrees and would only go higher as the sun rose over Jinshan City Beach. Meyer says swimmers and coaches were promised organizers would cancel the race if the water temperatures hit the recommended threshold.
When they announced plans to go through with the competition anyway, Meyer withdrew. He had hoped all the participants would withdraw, but he says some athletes found the opportunity to medal in a weakened field too tempting to walk away.
Meyer called Crippen’s sister, Maddy, from China to tell her about the water temperature. Maddy Crippen, a former pool swimmer who competed at the 2000 Olympics, understood his reasons for withdrawing, but felt horrible that his protest would deny him the chance to repeat as world champion and win much-needed prize money. She was also furious the event organizers would behave so recklessly less than a year after her brother’s death.
“I was upset that they held the race in those conditions and put the athletes in a position where they had to worry about their own safety. It was like they hadn’t learned anything.” Maddy Crippen said. “I am not saying that they should cancel the world championships, but certainly there are other places in China at the time of the year where you could hold the race and not have to worry about the water temperatures.”
In the end, only 19 of the 35 men entered in the race completed the course, Meyer says. The rest either withdrew ahead of time or physically could not finish.
“It seems like we’re heading in the right direction and then FINA does something like holding a 25K in the same conditions that Fran died in,” Meyer says, still shaking his head at the decision nearly a year later. “Only this time, it’s 2.5 times the length of the race that Fran couldn’t finish. Fran, who was the best of the best. That gives me pause. I don’t know if safety has really improved at the international level.”
Yet Meyer — who has a degree in human evolutionary biology from Harvard — sticks with the sport, mostly because he loves racing and testing his body’s endurance limits. He certainly doesn’t do it to get rich. With no sponsors and little available prize money, he lives off the $3,000 stipend he receives each month from USA Swimming and by sharing his Cambridge, Mass., apartment with a roommate.
He practices on the Walden Pond in Concord, Mass., the famous kettle hole that inspired transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau’s book “Walden.” It’s the ideal training spot for the London Games, where Meyer will swim a curving six-lap course in Hyde Park’s Serpentine.
Like Walden, the Serpentine is cold, flat and fresh water. Water temperatures should be in the mid-60s, well below the recommended ceiling.
Meyer will be the only U.S. man competing in the event, but he insists he won’t be by himself. He is taking his friend’s memory with him.
“I’m not going to London alone,” he said after qualifying for the Games. “Fran’s going with me, and we’re going to represent our country, our schools, our family and friends, and we are going to give it our best.”
The sentiment touches the Crippen family, which has started the Fran Crippen Elevation Foundation to advocate for athlete safety and provide financial assistance to college graduates who are pursuing competitive swimming careers. Meyer has been involved in the foundation from its inception and has helped raise money for it by selling T-shirts on his website.
“It means a lot to us that he wants to keep Fran’s legacy alive,” Maddy Crippen said. “But we’re happy that he’s going to London not because of Fran’s memory but because he means a lot to our family. We’re happy for him because he’s our friend.”
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