A 5-year-old girl was walking with her parents in a Jamaican market when her childlike wonder in absorbing a new country was abruptly interrupted by some older kids grabbing her arm. “Can you get your dad to sign this?” one asked, handing her a piece of paper.

“It scared me,” Kira Davis-Quarrie, now a senior at USC, says of this early memory. “They ran up to me and they were a little aggressive. People recognized him like he was a celebrity.”

On that day, Davis-Quarrie was introduced to the two sides of her father. In the United States, Don Quarrie ’74 is a normal guy. People who pass him on the street have no idea he was once the world’s fastest man. In Jamaica, however, he is a living legend, the winner of four medals – a gold, two silvers and a bronze – while competing for the Caribbean country in four Olympic Games from 1972 to 1984.

Quarrie is one of 385 Trojans who have competed in the Olympic Games since 1904. Together, they have earned 257 Olympic medals – the richest Olympic tradition of any institution of higher education. Trojan athletes do particularly well at the Summer Olympics, thanks to USC’s long history of strong programs in water sports and track. In fact, Trojans have taken home at least one gold medal from every Summer Olympics since 1912. This past summer in Beijing, the tally totaled 21 medals, Troy’s second highest behind the 24 medals from the 1984 games in Los Angeles.

The university’s overall medal count is 121 gold, 76 silver and 60 bronze.

Having made it to the rarified reaches of the Olympics, and then capping it off by winning medals, many of these athletic heroes continue to live extraordinary lives after stepping down from the podium.

One of the most educated gold-medal winning Olympians of all time is Dallas Long ’62, DDS ’66 who won the bronze medal in the shot put in 1960 and the gold medal in 1964. “The zenith of a track-and-field career in those days was to have your picture on a Wheaties box,” he says. “There was really no incentive to think I was going to stay in sports and make a living.” Instead, he turned down an offer to try out with the Los Angeles Rams and earned a dentistry degree from USC. He then went on to become a physician.

The four athletes profiled here were chosen from the hundreds of USC Olympians who have carried their drive for success into their lives, or who have overcome tremendous obstacles to achieve their dreams. These are their stories.

WET SUIT
Lenny Krayzelburg
USC’99

Backstroker Lenny Krayzelburg was drawn to USC from a different part of the world. He spent the first 13 years of his life in the Soviet Union, now Ukraine. He arrived in Los Angeles with his parents in 1989, with the intention of permanently transplanting here. He became a U.S. citizen in 1995 and won his four gold medals for the red, white and blue in 2000 and 2004.

“I don’t want to say I had no choice, because I could have had the opportunity to represent Ukraine,” he says. “But I felt my best opportunity was for the United States. I was fortunate to be good enough to represent the best country, and it was an honor to do so.”

He had hoped for one more crack at the Olympics in Beijing. But when he realized that shoulder injuries would prevent him from competing at his usual level, he moved on to a new career that brings different rewards.

Krayzelburg, 33, is focusing his efforts on a swim school to teach the sport he loves, and a foundation to help introduce swimming to inner-city children.

His first step was to donate $115,000 to refurbish and re-open the pool at the Westside Jewish Community Center in Los Angeles in 2005. The pool, where he trained four to five days a week after his family moved to the city, had been closed for three years.

Then he started a swim school at the community center that teaches anyone – from 3-month-old babies to teenagers hoping to make their high school team, to adults who never learned to swim. Krayzelburg supervises the program and hires instructors to do the training.

The swim school is a for-profit venture, Krayzelburg explains. “But what we’re doing is impacting lives in many ways, from a safety standpoint to having kids learn something new and persevere to get better.”

The plan is that the school will help support Krayzelburg’s passion, the LK Foundation. He began the foundation in 2003 but put it on the back burner while he focused on his swimming career. A grant from LA84 and USA Swimming helped him kick-start the program early in 2008. Working with the Los Angeles Unified School District, he has started free swim clinics at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex high school near USC and Bethune Middle School in South Los Angeles. The focus of the clinics is to introduce children to swimming and, even more important, to teach water safety.

“Drowning is a pretty big deal in the inner-city community,” he says, because more children there don’t know how to swim and are at greater risk. A recent study by USA Swimming found that 58 percent of black children and 56 percent of Hispanic children could not swim safely.

Krayzelburg, who with his wife, Irina, is the father of 3-year-old twin girls Alexa and Daniella, says: “We’re slowly taking baby steps and have some good partnerships going. Hopefully, with my name, I can give something back so that these kids can be fully water safe.”

USC swim coach Dave Salo, who was Krayzelburg’s personal coach, is helping with the foundation. Salo brought his athletes training for the Olympic trials to Miguel Contreras for two months to expose the school and community to swimmers of that caliber.

“The kids were really excited to watch them practice,” Miguel Contreras swim coach Geovanni Luna says. “And the kids learned a lot during the clinic. This area is not typically known for swimming, but I think after that we got a little more interest.”

Perhaps 10 years down the road, an Olympic swimmer will come out of the inner city and thank Krayzelburg for introducing him or her to swimming.

“There’s no question that would be very gratifying,” he says. “You never start with the intent of reaching the Olympics. You start because you enjoy doing the sport. If these kids choose to fall in love with the sport and take it to the next level, more power to them.”

FOUR-PEAT
Lisa Leslie
USC’94

The difficulty that a supreme athlete like Lenny Krayzelburg has in competing at peak form in more than one Olympics makes Lisa Leslie’s accomplishment all the more astonishing.

She won her first gold medal with the U.S. women’s basketball team in 1996 in Atlanta, two years after graduating from USC. She added another in 2000 in Sydney, a third in 2004 in Athens and one more in Beijing. She is the first basketball player – male or female – to win gold medals in four consecutive Olympic Games.

Leslie wore all four around her neck in the post-game celebration in Beijing, completing her time on the U.S. team with a 33-0 Olympic record. She announced before the games that they would be the last for the 36-year-old, who wants to focus her time on 1-year-old daughter Lauren.

“I’d like to get her involved in gymnastics and attend sports with my daughter,” Leslie says. “I want to be one of those moms. If I dedicated another three to four years to Olympic basketball, I’d be taking away from my daughter.”

Leslie married commercial pilot Michael Lockwood, a former collegiate basketball player, in 2005 and added two teenaged stepdaughters to her family.

In Beijing, Leslie didn’t let her younger teammates carry her to her last medal. She started at forward and averaged 10.2 points, 6.7 rebounds and 1.3 blocks in eight games.

It was the first Olympics in which she didn’t lead the team in scoring, but her leadership on and off the court made an obvious impact.

When Leslie missed the International Basketball Federation 2006 World Championship because of her pregnancy, the U.S. team was upset by Russia in the semifinals. With her back on the court, the United States dominated the Olympics by an average of nearly 38 points per game.

“When we struggled at the world championships, a big reason was not having Lisa in the hole,” U.S. coach Anne Donovan told the Chicago Tribune. “Her influence on the court, you can’t put it into words. Off the court, she sets the standard for sure.”

When Lisa Leslie began her Olympic run in 1996, women’s basketball was much different than it is today.

Leslie, who was inducted into the USC Athletic Hall of Fame in 2005, had finished her collegiate career in 1994 as the Pacific-10 Conference’s all-time leader in points scored and rebounds. But at the time of her first Olympics, she was not sure she had a future in basketball.

There was no Women’s National Basketball Association, and she was considering a career in modeling. But when the WNBA played its inaugural season in 1997, Leslie was one of its original players. She stayed in Los Angeles with the Sparks and won two championships and two most valuable player awards.

Leslie, who still plays professionally for the Sparks, is confident she is leaving the U.S. Olympic team in good hands.

One special memory she will carry from all her Olympic outings is connecting with other Trojan athletes at the opening ceremonies.

“People would always come up and say, ‘Hey, we’re from USC – Fight On!’ ” she says. “Whether they were from volleyball or swimming or water polo, in our minds and hearts, we’re always Trojans and we remember that even when we’re representing the USA.”

CARDIAC KID
Rebecca Soni
USC’09

USC senior Rebecca Soni has a long way to go before deciding what to do when she can no longer swim at an Olympic level. Still a student, Soni could put her name among those of the greatest Trojan athletes before her career is over. She already has three medals – one gold and two silvers – from her first Olympics in Beijing. (Murray Rose ’62 holds the record for most medals won by a USC athlete, with six as a swimmer for Australia in 1956 and 1960.)

Although she was overshadowed in swimming story lines by Michael Phelps’ race for eight gold medals, Natalie Coughlin’s six medals and Dana Torres’ competing at age 40, Soni’s victory over Australia’s Leisel Jones in the 200-meter breaststroke had to go down as the biggest upset in the pool at Beijing.

“I think the general sense when you watched the Olympic Games was that all the attention was on Phelps for swimming, which was appropriate,” says Dave Salo, Soni’s coach at USC. “But if you talk to anyone who has knowledge of swimming and ask them to pick the two or three amazing swims, it would be Jason Lezak in his anchor leg of the 400-freestyle relay, and then a lot of people would point to Rebecca’s 200 as the women’s swim of the meet. Jones had set such a benchmark and seemed so far out there that it didn’t seem anyone could catch her.”

Soni not only beat Jones but crushed her by nearly two seconds, shaving .32 seconds off the world record with a time of 2 minutes, 20.02 seconds. Before the race, Jones was the only woman ever to break 2:22. Soni’s previous best time was 2:22.60 in the Olympic trials.

“I knew I would eventually be able to challenge her, but I didn’t know if I was ready yet,” Soni says. “I wanted to do my best. It seemed impossible [to take the gold] at the time, but it happened.”

Making Soni’s performance more impressive was the fact that it came two years after she underwent heart surgery. Since she was a child, Soni had a condition called atrioventricular nodal reentrant tachycardia that would cause her heartbeat to race up to 200 times per minute on occasion. The attacks could occur when she pushed herself physically, which was basically every practice, and were more likely if she was feeling fatigued or stressed or had had caffeine. It wasn’t life-threatening – a normal person could live with the condition – but it was troublesome for an athlete.

Soni describes an attack: “My heart would beat really fast and I could feel all the blood leaving my arms and legs. It kind of felt like I couldn’t move, like it was really difficult to move. I would stop what I was doing and float to the edge, then just sit there for a good five minutes. I could usually still feel it the next day. It would take a day to fully recover.”

Soni dealt with the condition throughout high school and her freshman year at USC, and it didn’t seem to be hindering her success. Then, during her sophomore year and at the summer events that followed, the attacks began occurring more often. It got to the point where it was happening a few times a week and making it difficult for her to train.

“Probably every workout she would get some fluttering of the heart, then sometimes it would be more significant where her heart would be jumping out of her chest and she couldn’t do anything,” Salo says. “Knowing the circumstances, I might keep an extra eye on her just in case. It’s easy to downplay but there could have been serious consequences.”

When Soni had an attack during a race at a summer meet, she knew she couldn’t disregard the problem any longer.

“I couldn’t succeed at the Olympics if I kept going like that,” she says.

In July 2006, she underwent a procedure called cardiac ablation that uses radiofrequency energy to destroy tissue around the heart. When she was born, the procedure would have required a full frontal chest opening. Thanks to modern medical advances, however, doctors were able to use catheters to reach the heart. She was back in the pool in two weeks and hasn’t had an attack since.

Two days after returning from Beijing, Soni began her senior year as a communications major at USC. She’s trying to be a normal student, although not many students throw out the ceremonial first pitch at a Dodgers game as she did in September. She’s not yet thinking about the 2012 Olympics in London, focused as she is on winning the NCAA title in the 200-meter breaststroke for the fourth consecutive year.

“It was kind of hard getting used to everything at first,” Soni says of returning to college and her normal routine. “It was fun to see everyone but also hard with school work and interviews on top of it. I’m still taking a full class schedule. It’s hard to balance everything. Thankfully, I can now have caffeinated coffee.”

DASHING FIGURE
Don Quarrie
USC’74

Don Quarrie may be the most famous of USC’s Olympians, at least in Jamaica. The others don’t yet have a high school named after them, a statue outside their country’s largest stadium and multiple reggae songs composed in their honor.

In Jamaica, Quarrie has become part of the country’s lexicon, as in the common phrase, “I was running so fast, not even Don Quarrie could have caught me.”

His celebrity is explained by track and field’s popularity in Jamaica, where prep meets can draw more than 30,000 spectators. It was Quarrie who paved the way for Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell, Veronica Campbell-Brown and Jamaica’s dominance of short sprints today.

Quarrie played a key role in Jamaica’s success at the Beijing Olympics by serving as head coach for the country’s track team, which swept gold medals in the men’s and women’s short sprints in the loudest exclamation of the country’s sprint superiority.

Bolt, who set world records in the 100 and 200 meters to become the first athlete to hold both records simultaneously since Quarrie in 1976, calls Quarrie his idol.

Don Quarrie first came to the United States when he got a scholarship to run track at the University of Nebraska.

After a year in the Midwest, he decided the cold weather wasn’t for him and transferred to USC at the urging of the late Lennox Miller ’69, DDS ’73, another Jamaican transplant and Olympic medalist (silver in the 100 meters in 1968 and bronze in 1972, also in the 100) who had just graduated from the university.

When Quarrie competed, Jamaica didn’t have the dominant sprint team it does today. Only one of his four medals – a silver in 1984 – came from a relay. In fact, he might have been able to double his medal total if he had competed for the United States. But then he wouldn’t be the beloved figure he is in Jamaica today.

He stayed in Southern California after graduating and now lives in San Dimas, though he visits Jamaica about once a month for his role with the track program.

Prior to working with the Jamaican team, he coached track at St. Lucy’s Priory High School in Glendora for eight years and managed runner Inger Miller ’95, Lennox Miller's daughter, who is herself an Olympic gold medalist (4x100 meter relay in 1996).

Quarrie still has strong ties to USC. He met his wife, Yulanda Davis-Quarrie ’75, here, and they sent both their daughters here. Tara graduated in 2007 and Kira is in her senior year. Both competed on the Trojan track team, though not at the elite level their father reached.

“We didn’t force them, we invited them,” Quarrie says of his daughters’ decisions to attend USC. “It’s something I’m happy about, and hopefully when they have their kids they will invite them to come to USC as well.”

Ever humble, Quarrie says it was “a big honor to be a small part of Jamaica’s success in Beijing, giving back and assisting so we can maintain our high standard.”

As for Bolt’s recognition of his influence, “I appreciate it very much,” Quarrie says. “[World-class runners] are a tradition in Jamaica that he will keep going.”

Going Global

Of the 385 Trojans who have competed in Olympic Games since 1904, 144 have competed for foreign countries.

A week after upsetting world-record holder and two-time defending Olympic champion Grant Hackett to take gold in the 1,500-meter freestyle at Beijing, swimmer Ous Mellouli stood in front of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia’s presidential palace. The 2006 USC graduate was decorated with the insignia of the Grand Officer of the Order of the Republic, the country’s highest award of merit, usually reserved for ambassadors who perform great service for this small African nation.

Mellouli became the first athlete in the country’s history to receive the honor. The reason? His gold medal was only the second Olympic gold ever won by Tunisia – and its first in 40 years.

Mellouli is one of 20 Trojan athletes who competed for a country other than the United States at last summer’s Olympics. They are part of a truly international USC Olympic tradition that reflects the extraordinary geographic diversity of the student body. For many years, USC has been the most global university in the nation, enrolling more international students than any other school.

Of the 385 Trojans who have competed in Olympic Games since 1904, 144 have competed for foreign countries.

Some of these Trojan athletes were natives of other countries who lived and trained here. Others always had an American passport. Many had the choice of competing for the United States or another country, making for some interesting strategy considerations.

The reason why athletes are able to choose the country they represent is that nations have different requirements for Olympic eligibility. A parent born in another country will qualify an athlete in some countries, as will a grandparent or even a great-grandparent in others.

An example of an American-born athlete competing under another flag is sprinter Carol Rodriguez ’08, who holds the USC record in the 200 meters (22.23) and 400 meters (51.39). As good as those times are, they wouldn’t have been fast enough to earn Rodriguez a berth on the U.S. Olympic track team. But Puerto Rico, where her father was born, was thrilled to have an athlete that fast.

So Rodriguez, who was born in Pomona and lived her whole life in California, competed for Puerto Rico in Beijing. Although she failed to get out of the first round in either event, she gained Olympic experience that could help her in 2012.

Other Trojans competing for foreign countries in Beijing were Marvin Anderson (track) for Jamaica, Bibiana Candelas (beach volleyball) for Mexico, Rodrigo Castro (swimming) for Brazil, Natasha Danvers-Smith (track) for Great Britain, Blythe Hartley (diving) for Canada, Zoe Hoskins (rowing) for Canada, Katrinka Hosszu (swimming) for Hungary, Asia Kaczor (volleyball) for Poland, Tamas Kerekjarto (swimming) for Hungary, Sofia Konoukh (water polo) for Russia, Brigita Langerholc (track) for Slovenia, Eva Orban (track) for Hungary, Aniko Pelle (water polo) for Hungary, Ankur Poseria (swimming) for India, Zoltan Povazsay (swimming) for Hungary, Felix Sanchez (track) for the Dominican Republic, Inga Stasiulionyet (track) for Lithuania and Gabriela Varekova (rowing) for the Czech Republic.

The skill level of countrymen and -women matters in team sports and relays, and can determine which nation an athlete represents. Mellouli acknowledges that he would have to consider competing for the United States in the future if he wants to swim the 800-meter freestyle relay. But he doesn’t want to abandon Tunisia, where 2,000 people welcomed him home at the airport with banners and pictures following his performance in Beijing. There was a parade from the airport, then another parade in his hometown of Tunis, where they are thinking of naming the pool where he got his start in his honor.

The success of athletes like Mellouli will continue to draw top international athletes to USC.

“I had heard of USC in Tunisia,” says Mellouli, who is continuing his education at USC by seeking a master’s degree in sports management. “I applied to seven universities and got a call from [then-Trojans swim coach Mark] Schubert saying he wanted me to come to USC. I was sold and two weeks later landed at LAX. USC is definitely a known program, not only in Tunisia but I think worldwide. You go to any swimming competition in the world, ask about the University of Southern California and they’ve at least heard of it.”

– Matthew Kredell

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.

Freelance writer Matthew Kredell ’01 covered USC basketball, football and various pro sports for the Los Angeles Daily News. This is his first feature for USC Trojan Family Magazine.