Three-time Olympian swimmer Erik Vendt brought his Olympic medals to Pods Swimming in East Providence for a meet and greet, and a lesson on what it takes to succeed in the pool and in life.
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Young swimmers got to enjoy an experience of Olympic proportions on Sunday afternoon, as three-time Olympian and medalist Erik Vendt visited Pods Swimming to participate in a meet and greet and talk about what it takes to succeed at the highest level.
“Swimming is a pathway, I think, to a better life for a lot of people,” he told the crowd of kids and their parents that had gathered. “It’s a blue collar sport, and by that I mean you don’t have to be incredibly talented to reach the top. You just have to work hard, you have to believe in yourself, and you have to be competitive.”
The Massachusetts native, who now lives in Rumford with his family and enrolled his daughter in the program at Pods, brought along his three Olympic medals, which he slung over the necks of smiling kids to pose for pictures while explaining the significance of each.
Vendt won silver medals in 2000 at the Sydney Olympics and the 2004 Olympics in Athens for the 400-meter individual medley. He was part of the legendary USA swim team at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, which brought home 31 total medals and 12 gold medals combined. He brought home a gold medal for being part of the 4x200-meter freestyle relay team. Additionally, during the 2000 Olympic trials, Vendt became the first American in history to finish the 1,500-meter freestyle in under 15 minutes, posting a time of 14:59.11.
Vendt’s message to the kids was inspiring in its simplicity and relatability — that even if you don’t possess the characteristics you think you need to reach your goals, you can make up for that with a championship-caliber work ethic, competitiveness, and mental toughness.
“I think being competitive is really important in the sport of swimming, but also in life. You want to succeed, you want that desire to win. To get there, you have to put in a lot of hard work,” he said. “Some of the kids here are taller than me. And that’s how it always was when I was a swimmer, too. I was known as the shortest kid on the team. And I say that because you don’t have to be the tallest, you don’t have to be the strongest…as long as you work hard and believe in yourself. I think what I was, was the hardest worker.”
Vendt shared a humorous story about the first time he realized that a fierce competitor resided inside of him, right around when he first started swimming at 5 years old while living in Saudi Arabia where his father worked. He took part in a 25-meter breaststroke race where the prize was a coveted stash of hard-to-find candy.
“I dove in and the guy next to me started getting a little farther ahead, farther ahead, farther ahead. And every stroke I took I was falling a little farther behind. So I’m like, ‘How am I going to win this candy?’ So I had this bright idea to reach underneath the lane line and grab his suit and rip it down. And that’s what I did,” he said. “So I swim to the other end of the pool and I’m thinking to myself, ‘Yes! I just won the candy!’ And my parents were mortified sitting in the stands, and I get disqualified, obviously…And that’s where I learned, I’m really competitive.”
Vendt’s journey to Rhode Island began when he started swimming for a club team in his teens, The Ocean State Squids, which trained out of a pool at Brown University. It was there he met Susan Pascale-Frechette, who now owns Pods Swimming, who was a coach for the younger students.
Vendt was coached by Joshua Stern, who told him that there was not much interest among kids in swimming the longer-distance races, so there was an opportunity for him to excel in that space, and the rest is (Olympic) history.
“He said if you want to train hard, you have a chance to reach the top. So that’s what I did,” he said. “I believed him, he believed in me, I believed in myself, and I just started working my tail off.”
Finishing up his talk with the kids, Vendt said that in addition to putting in the work required to reach your goals, just as important was possessing a strong belief that you are capable of those goals in the first place. He said he had never competed in a race that he hadn’t already visualized many times in his head prior to the starting gun, and that he had long envisioned himself breaking the 15-minute mark in the 1,500-meter freestyle, which he finally did after years of trying.
“So how do you believe in yourself? Whether you believe in yourself or not, if you start visualizing yourself doing certain things, great things, really fast things, really amazing things. You start visualizing those things and then, slowly but surely, your brain begins to believe it,” he said. “You picture yourself doing something, visualize yourself doing something enough, and eventually it will become a reality.”