3x Gold Medal Olympian Swimmer - Nancy Hogshead

We sit down with Nancy Hogshead and discuss her journey of becoming an Olympic Swimmer that won 3 gold medals and a silver in the '84 Olympics. Swimming 800 laps per day in training, elite coaching, and a supportive family helped her get the first swimming scholarship at Duke University. After obtaining her law degree and practicing law for many years, she started Champion Women which helps support women in sports which she still runs today. She shares with us parenting advice as well as a traumatic event she endured and how she overcame it and used that event to fuel her passion for helping drive change with women in sports. This is one you can't miss!

Brian Harbin: Well, hello, my name is Brian Harbin. I'm your host today along with Jen Harbin. For today's episode, the Grit.org podcast, we have a very special guest, Nancy Hogshead, here with us today. So welcome you guys.

Nancy Hogshead: Thank you very much for having me!

Brian Harbin: Absolutely. And so wanted to give you guys a little bit of background on Nancy. So, graduate Episcopal School of Jacksonville, here in town. Undergraduate at Duke, law degree from Georgetown, spent 15 years competing with USA in swimming. Won three gold medals and a silver in the 84 Olympics. She went on to practice law at Holland and Knight. She's been a professor of law for well over 10 years. 30 year history with Women's Sports Foundation, and for the last 10 years has been CEO of Champion Women and Advocacy for Girls and Women in Sports.

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So Nancy, wanted to kind of dive right in. We love to hear about the beginning, early life. Growing up, I knew you spent early years in Gainesville and then Jacksonville, Florida. So what were any impactful moments or principles that were kind of instilled through you through family, early job, sports? Tell us a little about that.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah, so I've been really lucky in my life to have amazing coaches and as I get older, I guess you call them mentors or people who see something in you that you may not see in yourself, who pull it out of you, who give you opportunities that you may not be ready for, but you take them anyway and kind of get to go.

So when I was seven years old, my parents, they just bought a boat and they just wanted to make sure that the three kids could swim a mile onto shore if something should happen. And we were water skiing and whatnot. And my first coach ever was Eddie Reese. Eddie Reese was 40 years at University of Texas. He's probably had, I don't know, I'm guessing 200 Olympians, but he's probably 22, 24 years old at the time. And he just instilled in us a good sense of the water and, you know, like, how do you feel and how do you interact with it? But he did not grind us. We didn't work out the way that I see kids working out, probably a little too hard now, because it's just not the best way to nurture talent.

The hard part of swimming, and I think the hard part of being a lawyer or a speaker or getting here today, is it's hard work. It's hard, hard, hard work. And so you can really burn somebody out. They need to be brought in so that they get the Zen, if you will, of swimming. They get the best parts, the part that feels so good about it. There really is nothing like having your 10,000 hours at anything.

So that was my first coach. Then when we moved here to Jacksonville, Florida, I was 11 years old. The coach that was associated with Episcopal High School at the time was… My dad was the head of what used to be called the Cathedral Rehabilitation Center, now Brooks Rehab. I had to go to Episcopal High School, and his brother was there, Eddie Reese. And both of them, even Eddie at age 7 or 8, would tell me, “Nancy, I really think you could go to the Olympics.” Wow. I won everything pretty quickly.

And Randy was the one who said, “Okay, it's great that you could do all that, but you need to do it.” So you start coming to practices and working hard and then doing what you need to do during the day so that practice is prime time. You're rested, you're hydrated, you've eaten healthy, you've done all that stuff to get ready for the first two hours, and then you get two more hours after school. So he was the one who kind of instilled in me this number one work ethic and then two, he kind of gave me the vision along with it.

Brian Harbin: And that belief in you early on, it sounds like too.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah. Right. To have people around you that believe in you, it's invaluable.

Brian Harbin: And to your point too, to excel in swimming as long as you did, you really have to fall in love with the sport and love it and enjoy it. Because, I mean, at 12 years old, you were already a senior national champion and set your first record at age 15. So, you know.

Nancy Hogshead: Well, a little change. So I was the national record holder for 12-year-olds. When I was 14, I was number one in the country. I was number one in the world for women, but for 12-year-olds, Randy would probably tell you the same thing today—he moved me up onto the A team probably a little too soon, because it was kind of obvious that I was going to be very, very good. And you know, there's jealousy and there's… I'm a little kid, I'm 11, I'm 12. And who wants to have me in their lane?

In swimming, there's this, as I'm sure in most sports, enormous amount of etiquette of who leads the lane and how you tap somebody on the foot to let them know you want to go around, and how do you do that without upsetting the whole thing. Well, I don't know any of that. Right?

Anyway, I did move up quickly, and some might even say too quickly. But nonetheless, I don't know how I stuck it out through those times because the other teammates, the other women on the team, would fight. “I don't want her in my lane.” “No, you get her in your lane.” That kind of thing. But you have to have a longer-term vision of what it is you're doing.

Jen Harbin: Yeah, well, you definitely had that long term vision, it sounds like. And you qualified for the Olympics at 18, right? And unfortunately that year there was a multinational boycott, so you were unable to compete. What was that experience like? I mean, walk us through kind of.

Nancy Hogshead: It was hard. It was hard because, you know, there's nothing like being on the United States national team to make you patriotic. And we were always told before we, I mean, I compete against the East Germans and Russians behind the Iron Curtain, you know, when there was Checkpoint Charlie, when there was. Right?

And you know, we were told over and over that whatever we did reflected on our entire country and you better not mess this up. And came close sometimes, but we. So there was this, you know, profound love of country and pride in representing the country, and then to have people on the deck like, I'm no longer proud to be an American, I mean, to tell you, and a lot of really good swimmers quit probably who would have made the Olympic team if they had held trials earlier would be someplace different. And I thought that that was the end of my hard, hard, hard career.

Jen Harbin: Oh, really?

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah, because I went to Duke University, which had a terrible swimming program at the time. I was the only scholarship swimmer on the team. So they were essentially walk ons. And so…. Right. So, like, I, so I….. And I thought, like, you know, it's gonna be okay. I. That I don't win, that I'm not working as hard, that I. Right? That it's. It's gonna. I'm….. I can, you know, I'm gonna, you know, enjoy college and get into college.

So, just to give you some idea of how hard training is, like at the hard part of the season, like, when I want to impress you is 800 laps a day. When I ask audiences and I say, like, how many laps do you think you've got to swim to be the number one in the world? Most of them start around 50. I'm like, that's not even warm up.

Jen Harbin: And they can't even comprehend 800 laps, I think.

Nancy Hogshead: I think I can't even comprehend 800 laps. And, you know, plus lifting weights, plus running, plus, right. So it's really like pushing to the brink. You know, saying earlier that having an orthopedic surgeon as a father was a secret weapon because you're constantly worried about injury and sickness. And so is this injury is, do I need to back off or can I push through it? Right?

So my shoulder would just click and off. No, stop. Now it's only going to get worse. Or, I broke my sternum and I broke my foot. My dad was like, you know, it's going to hurt. And. But you're not going to delay the healing process by continuing to work out.

So you know it's going to hurt. Right? And so, but…. And like, those are the kinds of things that you want to know as an athlete. Like what? Because you're constantly just about to get injured. You're on the brink. Everybody is all a bad coach. A coach that doesn't know what they're doing, or a coach that's vindictive. Or is on some kind of power trip or who wants to abuse an athlete. They can injure an athlete like that. I don't care how good they are, I don't care how much training they have.

But yeah, you can….. And especially an athlete that isn't quite sure, who has not adopted the grit creed and who isn't quite sure about themselves. And so they don't know that. They know that. They know that I am. Who I am is a hard worker. Who needs to pull back sometimes. And so in order to not, not get injured and not, you know, you've, you've got to know yourself. You've got to have a coach that trusts you. If you've got a coach that does nothing but like, you know, yelling and screaming, which I have plenty of.

Jen Harbin: But at the right time.

Nancy Hogshead: Right. But who ultimately, if I said my shoulder hurts. Mhm. You know, didn't fight me or didn't m. Shame me for it, like, well, why did your shoulder hurt? Well what did you do? Well, what… Right? It just like the human body can only take so much. You want to push it. And after the age of, I got injured like right around between like 14 and 16 a lot. But then after the age of 16, until 22 when I retired after 1984, I never got injured because I kind of figured it out, like what the understanding…. how to walk that line. It's not easy. I mean a lot of really amazing athletes get injured or sick like you know, right before some big competition.

Brian Harbin: And I'm glad you mentioned that about the 800 laps, which is incredibly astonishing. I thought my 40 laps, the Y. I was feeling pretty good about that. You should, but no, the…... I was going to ask you so kind of to that point, you know, because it's not just time in the pool, but the great coaches that you had, you know, even up to that point. What is it that they did to help prepare you? You know, getting ready for a big meet and, or some additional things that you feel like comes from good coaching outside of just time spent in the pool.

Nancy Hogshead: So the ability to move into flow when you don't feel it. So there's nothing like feeling flow and you've all felt it. Like you know, when you're writing or when we're doing this podcast right now and you know, how smoothly you're asking questions.

When you're in flow, it feels like you're not swimming. It feels kind of like swimming's doing you. It feels like a connection with God. It feels like an effortless, breezy, you know, it's like what we all wait for. Like, you know, you're shaved, you're, you know, normally you don't shave, shaved, tapered, you got a skin suit on, you got one of the fast suits on. There is nothing like diving in that water when you have your 10,000 hours.

So what is helpful to me to have to be taught about how do you get into flow when you don't feel it at all? Like when you go to the warm ups and you're 10% off what your normal times would be. And so that's meditation.

So I got into meditation pretty early, pretty quickly and like remembering kind of what it felt like. But it's the same thing now, like as a lawyer, as a writer, you know, and I have to write something really profound, hopefully. Right? It's the same kind of process of getting into it and not just expecting it to be there and being mad if it's not there. You know, it's having that kindness and grace with yourself, knowing that it's there and you can pull it out, you can get it.

Jen Harbin: What I'm hearing you describe is sort of not fighting yourself, listening, trying to build a good habit. Similar to what you were talking about with the injuries where you push yourself and you do all what you're supposed to do and then if your body's saying, you know, not fighting it, but just continue and then the flow will come if you just continue at it. But then you're kind of finding that balance, it seems like.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah, I would say sort of the flow and the injury. Let me just disaggregate those for a second because. I just wanted to use a big word. No kidding. Because flow is being able to call forth a feeling and the experience of effortlessness, of being graced, of beauty. Most people wouldn't say that swimmers are beautiful, but swimmers would. I really did feel beautiful when… Right. It's being able to recall that.

One of my best teammates who's now coaching at University of Nebraska, Pablo Morales, what I loved about working out with him was number one, is that he could be 10% off in a practice. I mean, terrible. 10% is like, wow, is really, you know, you're really not doing well and he didn't give it any energy at all. When he would have. He knew that he was working hard, he was doing what he could do and he didn't. Right? He just let it go. Was like for me, please, before I worked out with him, when I had those workouts, it really would depress me. So I appreciated him. Like I learned a lot from that.

And then the fact that he got help from everyone so the whole team like hey, watch me push off under the water. Right? He wasn't just looking at the coach, he was also looking at all of us to hey, how's my, you know, like you know, we would be doing a set and… Okay, let's race on the last 50. Well let's do blah blah, blah. And that's my watch and I need to turn it off.

So yeah, no, like so you know, you can get coaching not just from the coach but also from a brand new swimmer or somebody like a Pablo Morales who went on to go win a gold medal in 1992. Anyway, so there's… One of the things that my coaches would say, and it's a little off script but one of the things that my coaches used to tell me that I didn't really get at the time, but now I do as I get older was that my coaches would say that I was coachable.

And I thought that what that meant was oh, when the coach says get your shoulder up or pick your chin up or what… Right? That I could kinesthetically do that. But what I've come to learn that they were talking about was there's just no pushback. You know, a lot of times my coach would tell somebody, okay, here's the workout we're doing. And they would give them guff about it like well let's, we should be doing, shouldn't we be doing more of this or… Right? Or in a sort of a combative kind of a way. As opposed to somebody who didn't complain and could just kind of, you know, sort of get what they… And then moving on. Right? So it's not a whole debate about getting your shoulder up or what the workout is for today or et cetera. Right?

Brian Harbin: You wanna the process.

Nancy Hogshead: Right, right.

Brian Harbin: Yeah.

Nancy Hogshead: Right.

Brian Harbin: And speaking of flow state. So tell us about 1984 Olympics. You're back. And tell us what that felt like. You know, obviously getting three gold medals and a silver. Tell us what that experience was like for you and what that meant.

Nancy Hogshead: So it showed me, number one, is, like, what I had missed in 1980, because, you know, I thought I had already competed against all these people. I knew them. I knew their families. I knew their coat. Right? It's all…. We're all swimmers. And, you know, when we would go compete internationally, sometimes we would stay in dorm rooms with other countries. Right?

So we totally… So there's nothing new about what's going on here. But it's the Olympics. It's unlike world championships or dual meets with the Russians or. Back then, it was the Soviet Union. Right? It was like, first of all, I walked in and the stands went so crazy that I couldn't find my family. Like, usually, you know, you wave and you know your own family. Right? Oh, that's every… You know, I waved and, like, whoa, hey, you all be quiet there, so I can find…

Jen Harbin: You could locate your family.

Nancy Hogshead: Exactly. Right. And people had their faces painted, and you know, it was the Olympics, and it was bigger than anything that I could have imagined at the time.

Brian Harbin: And favorite story, looking back from that Olympics?

Nancy Hogshead: So many. Okay. One is….. Okay. So my mom used to say, you are so strong, and it is so worthless because, like, I wouldn't mow the lawn or, you know, like, do the dishes. Right. Or. Right. Because. No, gotta save her from practice. And so we never carried our own luggage. So even though we're super strong. And now not only are we carrying our own luggage, but we have everything that every swim manufacturer has times 10. Oh, right.

Jen Harbin: All the gear.

Nancy Hogshead: All this gear. Right. And we're finally in the Olympic Village. We're finally in. And half the team made the 80 team, and now we're here for 84. And everybody dropped their luggage. And it was this spontaneous moment of, like, oh, you know, where people were dancing around the luggage. And you know, it's just the pure glee. Like, we did it. We're here. We finally… So that was an amazing moment. And I have one more, which is. So after the Olympics…. So the Olympics are two weeks, and I swam in the first week.

And so I wanted to go to Disney World right afterwards. And the police saw me, and I was wearing, I think, my credential. And he said, you're Nancy Hogshead. You know what? You know, get in the car. And he turned the sirens on and we go to Disney World.

And then I went to Disney and I got to just go to the front of the line of everything that I went to. Right? It was like, wow, this is unexpected. You know. And to have people say over and over, wow, you really did it for us. Oh, wow. Like people from Japan, people from India, like, you really did it for us. Like, whenever you're watching somebody who has their 10,000 hours, it's always extraordinary. Like, did you guys watch the Olympics this past in Paris? Yeah. And so you may not have followed fencing or track and field or. Right? On a regular basis, but I mean, isn't it just soul inspiring to… I feel the same way that art is.

Brian Harbin: Absolutely.

Jen Harbin: Yes.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah.

Brian Harbin: I mean it's the favorite…. My favorite time, you know, is in the Olympics is on just, you know, the stories and the moments. Absolutely.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah.

Jen Harbin: I love when they show you like you're saying behind the scenes of, you know, they're there right now. But all that, it took all the sacrificing on a day to day basis for years on end and ever even like you're saying if you're 10% off, you know, every little tiny thing you do has such a huge impact over a long period of time.

Nancy Hogshead: Right.

Jen Harbin: That it's just incredible. It's just kind of overwhelming.

Nancy Hogshead: And let me say one thing that I sort of got talked out of me early was I didn't sacrifice anything. So I made choices to not do some things and to do other things. So the cool kids at Episcopal High School hung out at the Pizza Hut, you know, and I don't even know if it's still there or what.

So I mean we're talking love lives and car accidents and all, you know, is going on to the pizza. So I never once went to the Pizza Hut. But I look back at, I guarantee you they had things that they wanted as much as I wanted swimming. And they just, they were not in action about it. So like, do I, like do I wish I had goofed off more? Do I wish I had? No, I don't. I'm really glad of the choices because also when you use the word sacrifice, you're kind of a victim of what's going on as opposed to having agency. Like I chose. Nobody was holding gun to my head. My parents all the time, they were not swimming. Typical swimming parents. And can I tell a quick story about that, please?

Brian Harbin: Absolutely.

Nancy Hogshead: Okay. Okay, so I'm having a tiny bit of a hot flash with menopause. Do you have any tissue? Oh, yeah, I'll grab you one. Okay, thanks. Sorry about that. Okay, so let me… I'll tell you my funny story with my parents. So I broke my first American record. Fourteen years old, as we were saying. And I broke it in prelims, and I broke it again in finals. But after prelims, I called home. Thank you. You're welcome. I called home and I said, Mom, Mom, I just broke the American record. And she's like, oh, good, good. She goes, did you get in finals? So I go, it would be something.

Jen Harbin: I would do, right?

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah, Mom, I got in first. I just went faster than anybody's ever been before. And she goes, good, good. She goes, what stroke do you swim? And I go, I swim the butterfly, Mom. She goes, I like it when you swim the backstroke because I can see your face. Oh, okay. Yes. She… So that's my beloved mother, right?

So never could I go home and talk shop about swimming. I can practice. And we did this set of eight descending 200 butterflies. Never could I. Right? But they totally supported. They figured out, like, it's hard to get a kid at 5 o'clock in the morning to swim practice and to, you know, I ate half a dozen eggs with half a pound of bacon and four halves of English muffins and two glasses of milk before practice, right?

So, you know, somebody's got to do. And then I had a repeat performance after practice. One time I was eating the, like a snack before lunch and I was heating up lasagna and the microwave was like a new big deal. And it says, feeds a family of four or swimmer training for the Olympics, right? There you go. Right?

So, you know, my… Like everybody's gonna have very different circumstances, right? Nobody's gonna have a coach like I did, or parents like I did, or live in beautiful Jacksonville, Florida, or… Right? The differences just in the teammates, the kind of families they came from, the kind of coaching methods and blah. Just profoundly different. And all of us could have found reasons to quit. All of us could have. You know, my parents, they just don't support me.

And yeah. And you know, but we wouldn't have had what we wanted, which is, you know, we wanted to be great. We wanted to see how good we could be. We wanted to experience flow at the best, highest level. Right?

So, you know, when I tell stories, I always want to make sure that just because, you know, Tracy Calkins was my biggest competitor, now she's Tracy Stockwell. And just because Tracy had parents who were involved in United States swimming, who was a starter for many of her races, who would coach her and what, she could have quit and said, ugh, they pressured me, I could have quit. Right? And so, you know, you've got to work with the circumstances that you're given.

Brian Harbin: Absolutely. And really all about how kind of you view it. Right. And using that to your advantage. And one of the things I really wanted to ask you because you had the unique opportunity to be able to compete at the Olympics in America and LA, and here we're going to be back in, you know, three years now.

What advice would you have to these Olympic athletes that are training for USA, they're going to be competing in LA? Is there anything differently you feel like they should do to kind of prepare or any advice you'd have kind of in that situation, being able to compete in LA.

Nancy Hogshead: Would be advice for Garrett Scantling. So, fellow Eagle. Yeah. Yeah. So again, you just don't know what's going to happen. Like again, we could boycott, they could have a bankruptcy. You just don't. So you want to go for a flow, you want to go for being the best that you possibly can. You want to find out what God has in for you, what you can do to bring out the very best of you.

So whether or not it's in Los Angeles, which I'm really looking forward to, or any other place or, right, is what they're doing is they're figuring out, what are the… How can I get that next tenth of a second, hundredth of a second off my time? How does that feel? How is that the best, the highest and best expression of me? So that's what I would tell them, is to go for that. And, you know, it just like, look, you guys, I tied in the Olympics down to the 1/100th of a second with my teammate Carrie Steinsifer, who was also my bunk mate. Okay.

The likelihood that I was going to win a gold medal when… So I took a year and a half off college just to be able to go train, and the likelihood that I was going to get a gold medal was pretty low at that time. And right before the Olympics, the East Germans boycotted. You just don't know that that's what's going to happen. Now, they were cheating. Do I feel like, oh, I didn't really win a gold medal because the East Germans weren't there? No, just the opposite. I'm like, yay, it was a fair competition because we didn't dope, or I didn't dope, and I didn't know anybody who did dope. I'm sure it went on, but you just don't know. And if I had gone a hundredth of a second slower, I would not… Right?

So is it only validated because I did win the gold medals? I'm frankly probably only talking to you because I did get the gold medal. But the whole process of getting there is what made me who I am, whether or not I did. You know, I had lots of my peers… Sue Walsh got sick right before Olympic trials. She is an amazing human being. Like, it just kind of makes me teary when I think of these amazing athletes who just, you know, at the littlest thing, but they're so proud of what they did and how hard they worked and how much of themselves that they put into it, and that's the result that they had.

So I think going for that, rather than going for that end result, like the gold medal… You have no control over whether or not somebody else is cheating or whether or not the East Germans are going to be there. You just… Right? So what I did was I just focused on how good could I actually be. What if I… If I ate this way, if I meditated this way, if I stretched this way… You know, that kind of stuff.

Jen Harbin: I love that you say it just made you the person that you are today. And you talking about, what if I did this this way, can translate to so many other things in your life. And I mean, the discipline, the positive attitude of not being… Of being, you know, not ever a victim of any circumstance that you can't control. How did that translate into your law career and so many other terms?

Nancy Hogshead: So funny. I was just talking to somebody about this yesterday who's… They're leaving their swimming career, and now they're going into the professional world. And to go from being… First of all, there's just a lot of status and a lot of, you know, getting a sense of who you are from being in the pool and being around your teammates and in that melod. And so then to be like, nobody knows who you are, you're in corporate America, you're doing… Right?

So it is not being okay with going back to zero hours until you get up to the 10,000 hours. So when I first started practicing law, being an Olympic champion didn't help me in the actual skills. Right? Of lawyering, of being a good writer and being, you know, the citations and making sure that you can get this piece of evidence into trial and all the strat… But the hard work, the knowing what it was that I was there… Why did I want to be a lawyer? Why did I want to write? That is what translated.

So I always tell other athletes when they're stopping one thing and they're going to another and you don't have that same skill set, don't be afraid to start over, to start at the bottom. And if you don't start at the bottom… Because what I see a lot of my athlete peers do is they go into sort of what's comfortable for them. Now some people, don't get me wrong, coaching really is their zen or broadcasting or… Right. But they're doing it because it's a way to kind of keep being the same thing. Right. Instead of just being a good writer. I mean it takes a lot to be… And years and years of doing a lot of it that makes it happen.

Jen Harbin: And I would guess it's similar to being a swimmer, a lawyer. Finding your purpose, you find your purpose and why you want to do it and then you just put the hard work into it, no matter what that is. And then the skills can be acquired if you've got the purpose and you've got the discipline and the attitude and the drive.

Nancy Hogshead: Right. Like, so I… This is going to shock you, I know. But I like to win, so… Really. Right. Yeah. So I needed, past tense, to find an arena where I could push for the good, where I could push for what I, you know, the right and the decent and the right that I had the skill set… Yeah. To be able to do that.

So I had to find the right place. Because if you're playing Monopoly with your family, for example, that might not be a good place to try to win. But if you're trying to curb sexual abuse in sport, if you're trying to end the sex discrimination that goes on inside athletic departments now, that takes a lot of work, skill set, failures over and over and over until you win.

Brian Harbin: Absolutely. And yeah, you've done exactly that because you founded Champion Women shortly after that and wrote a book about Title 9 and social change. And how did you figure out that was where you wanted to pour your heart and soul and the drive behind that?

Nancy Hogshead: It wasn't like a linear process. So after the Olympics, I was doing what I wanted. I wanted to be just like Donna Devarona, who was a television broadcaster. She did my races. We roomed together at the Olympic trials. We probably talked to Donna, I don't know, three times a week.

So I wanted to be like her. I really tried to be a broadcaster, and I hired coaches and I practiced and whatever. And here's the thing. I hated it. And I didn't care who won. I liked the swimming, but not the… You can look at Rowdy Gaines, he's so good at it, but he wasn't always as good at it as he is now. We won the same medals, and he's now the commentator for swimming. People give him so much credit, and I do too, for swimming being as popular as it is because he is such a good commentator.

Anyway, I tried. I just didn't like it. But it wasn't that I didn't try, it wasn't that I didn't effort. It was like, you know, this just isn't for me. So it was a little trial and error of finding out what do you like, what do you not like. I really liked being the advocate. I really liked representing people that needed help for whatever it was, and pushing to make that happen. I always thought I was going to go directly undergraduate to law school, but then all these other opportunities — some jockey, billboard, Times Square — all these things happened. So it kind of delayed it until I was like, no, I really do want to go to law school.

Jen Harbin: So, yeah, and you're very busy with all these organizations that you help in order to advocate for people. How do you… I mean, there's so many wonderful causes out there in that area. How do you decide where… You only have a certain amount of time.

Nancy Hogshead: Right.

Jen Harbin: Even you….

Nancy Hogshead: Right, right.

Jen Harbin: There's only 24 hours in a day. Where do you… How do you kind of decipher between…

Nancy Hogshead: Right. So Champion Women… Okay. What makes us different is, number one, I would say the number one difference between us and other women's sports organizations that I was with for many, many years is we are not afraid to speak truth to power.

So other organizations get to a certain size and they can't p*** off, let's say, the NCAA or the schools. They can't demand that the Olympic Committee make everybody in the Olympic movement a mandatory reporter for sexual abuse. You can't demand that they have a process for removing coaches who abuse athletes. So we do that. We are never afraid to speak truth to power.

And then, in order to do that winning, of course you have to work with other organizations, but those change all the time. We're the intersection of sport and sexism. So whether it's equal opportunities in scholarship dollars and treatment, or it's abuse issues, or it is — like right now — we're trying to keep women's sports for females.

Jen Harbin: Like Riley Gaines.

Nancy Hogshead: Like Riley Gaines. Oh my gosh, she's such a rock star. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's great. And, you know, mentoring Riley Gaines, I thought she would need mothering after she was in San Francisco University. And you know, she got attacked and they held her at ransom and it was awful. So me and another woman who's in my world, Kim Jones, called her and we were making sure she's okay, making sure there's… Riley was like, bring it on. She was like, I can't believe those ju… She was not damaged at all, but convicted or even more.

Jen Harbin: It seemed like that would have been your maternal instinct to check because that was a scary situation that she was in for standing up for girls in swimming and advocating for them like you do.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah, right, right. Really sweet. Yeah. So that whole issue of making… That was so not on my radar five or six years ago, to make… I was going to have to make sure… And it was not on my radar that my peers that I had worked with for all those years would say, no, men should be able to compete in women's sports. Oh, no, Nancy, they're not men. They're trans women. And like, biologically, yes, they identify as being women, but biologically they are men. They will always have athletic advantages. And to get canceled by my peers who are in the civil rights world… I never thought that would happen. I just… It still implores me that they're picking… So females, women who identify as men or non-binary or what… Okay, where do you think they compete?

Jen Harbin: What would you guess?

Brian Harbin: Uh, with…

Nancy Hogshead: So, you know, it's so hard with language these days. So I'm talking about, you know…

Jen Harbin: Oh, you mean it's like you and me.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah.

Jen Harbin: And if I identify as a transgender, I would compete with other biological females, correct?

Nancy Hogshead: Correct.

Jen Harbin: I'm assuming there are no… I haven't heard of any cases where there are trans men competing against men that are having any kind of issue. Because that clearly, biologically, logically makes sense why they wouldn't. Because they're not out there kicking the men's butts for all these biological reasons.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah. I'm only aware of one athlete, Isaac Hennig, who got, I think, sixth at NCAA finals, which is amazing.

Jen Harbin: This was a trans man.

Nancy Hogshead: This is… Yeah. Okay. Correct. So biological woman, right, transitions and starts taking testosterone, which is a banned drug, and starts competing with the men. And finished next to dead last in the Ivy Championships. Nowhere near close to being able to go to any NCAAs, let alone get in finals, let alone get sixth place. Like the gap between those two.

So that's one of the things that Champion Women did — if you go onto our Instagram or Facebook page — we found, I think, roughly 15 really amazing women athletes who compete in the women's category. I'm like, well, if they can do it, men can too, regardless of how they identify. They can compete in the men's category. But you know, they want to win.

Brian Harbin: Well, case in point. Exactly. The purpose behind Champion Women and why you are providing that voice and support for them. Because like you said, there's not always the easiest channels to be able to make that happen. So it takes time and obviously a lot of work, like you said, to be able to develop that.

And so one thing I really wanted to ask you as well — you're married to another attorney and judge, I believe, and have three kids. So what were some principles for you guys in terms of raising your kids, in terms of values, principles, anything specific you feel like you guys did to kind of instill those in your kids?

Nancy Hogshead: I mean we're very much products of our own upbringing. And my parents just expected a lot from me and my brother and sister. And so we have the same expectations for our kids and we just love them to death. The biggest difference I think between then and now is phones.

And so to try to counteract the impact of phones… You know, there's litigation going on right now that I'm not involved with — Champion Women’s not — but they're suing, saying social media, Meta, knew that what they were doing was harming children and that they were addicting them and exposing them to more and more unhealthy content. And you knew in advance… You didn't let your children do this.

So I think the phone and social media… For parents, I had no idea. Just locking down the phone on times of day and that kind of stuff. But for the most part, I want to empower what they want. Like my parents — not big on swimming — but they figured out that they paid for it because this was the time of amateurism.

And so they paid for something they didn't really care about. It's the same thing — I want to make sure that my kids know we're here for them. There's nothing like having that sense of somebody's got your back. No matter what happens, somebody's got your back and you can always come home and here's the bedroom. I think those are the major things.

Jen Harbin: It seems like it. You expect, like you said, you expect a lot out of them and you're in their corner, kind of like your parents were.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah, right.

Jen Harbin: And I would guess there's a friend of ours, Dr. Elise Falucco, who is also a swimmer and she talks about flow all the time. I know that when she sees this, she'll watch and she will be jumping up and down going with flow…

Nancy Hogshead: Yes. It's all about the flow.

Jen Harbin: And she's a great person, great mom, a wonderful child psychiatrist and pediatric psychiatrist. And I know a phrase of hers with their family, which I suspect is probably how you guys raised your kids, is their two mottos are work hard and be kind.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah.

Jen Harbin: And I suspect that that is probably guiding principles that led you and your family. And now your kids aren't in the young phase anymore. If you could give advice to either young parents or even young people — you got started so early — young people, whether it's middle school or high school age, that are kind of trying to find if there's something they really enjoy…

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah.

Jen Harbin: Finding their direction… What advice would you have? Sorry, that was like a bunch of questions. Yeah, so what advice would you have?

Nancy Hogshead: Okay. For parents, and then for a young person, I would say finding their… And it's kind of hard to say is that I would lock down the phone and the Internet for p***. Because the p*** today is not like what was, you know, I would find in my brother's room. It was not Penthouse or whatever it is. It is objectively trying… Harming women in…

Jen Harbin: And boys.

Nancy Hogshead: Absolutely.

Jen Harbin: Totally.

Nancy Hogshead: Absolutely. Yeah. So I have organizations reaching out to me saying, what do we do about this blatant misogyny — the Andrew Tates. Right. So I would get on top of that, because within a couple of hours of having it, especially for a young boy, p*** is going to be there. It is a third of everything that's out there. Which, when you think of it, is so crazy.

If you're not into p***, as I'm not, then it's hard to imagine how grotesque and how prolific it is out there. So that's one thing. And I also… One thing I tell my girls in particular is my mom trained me really hard to be nice. And I have had to untrain myself to, number one, have boundaries — and everybody talks about boundaries these days — but number two is, I tell my girls explicitly, you have my permission to be rude if somebody says something inappropriate to you.

Jen Harbin: Yes.

Nancy Hogshead: So don't feel like you have to open the door for somebody if you have that feeling inside of you. I'm okay with you standing up for yourself. And even if it turns out to be wrong and the person's perfectly nice or whatever, you take care of YOU. So that's an important part of my parenting — making sure they know that. Because that whole “be kind” thing is a lot of how women were expected to deal with the issue of men coming into women's sports. It's like, look, they’re so marginalized and society doesn't approve and blah, blah… Right?

So you should be kind and you should give up your place and all the hard work that you did. Being male is much more of an athletic advantage than the East German drugs that I competed against, which was big. They were a little bit better than we were, but they were not a body length. Right?

So the whole “be kind” thing… I do want them to be nice people. At the same time, I want them to have their own self-worth and to not let anybody stand over them. There's no way that you can do the work that I do — and they've seen the work that I do — and have the slings and arrows, and really have to lose connection with other organizations and other people that were at your wedding that were really close to you, because you're taking a particular stand on something.

So the Olympic Committee and United States Swimming were furious with me because I was speaking out on behalf of sexual abuse victims and saying, you, United States Swimming, you Olympic Committee, should be getting these molesting coaches that you know of out of sport. But the law is… I won't be too annoying. But the law is that if you don't do anything about an issue… Actually, I'll take it in a car accident example. So let's say… Okay, so now we've had this wonderful time together and I've done this podcast and I know… I just happen to know there's something curiously dangerous about that road out there.

Jen Harbin: Okay.

Nancy Hogshead: And I know that you don't know. Right. Okay. So… And you sure enough get hurt exactly the way that I know. Okay? You can't sue me because I didn't warn you or protect you or do anything about it because I don't owe you a legal duty.

Jen Harbin: And you, in this scenario, you would be like the committee, correct? Like NCAA.

Nancy Hogshead: So the Olympic Committee and swimming coaches didn't have a legal duty to the kid, to the athlete. So the less they did, the less legal liability they would have. So we had to go to Congress and twice got new pieces of federal legislation that made everybody a mandatory reporter and changed the purpose of the corporation, the Olympic Committee.

So there are two sports systems — there's the school-based system and then there's the Olympic system. The Olympic system is twice as big as the school. The schools… I think it's a total of like 8 million, but it's 18 million over here. Like when you think of USA Swimming and all that. So we changed the purpose of that corporation to be to protect athletes from physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

Brian Harbin: And like you said too, it's not a legal duty, but there's a moral duty.

Nancy Hogshead: Right. Saving money by not protecting kids. So they knew that… One of those abusive coaches was my coach from 1984. Not Randy Reese, who I've never heard a whisper about, but Mitch Ivey was my coach and at the time was molesting my 16-year-old teammate. But how it was languaged to us back in the day was this was a relationship, this was consent… And there was no recognition of the power imbalance. There was no recognition that she was underage.

And United States Swimming knew he was going around… He married one of my teammates on the national team, Noel Moran. He went on to marry another, he tried to marry Suzette, he went on to marry another swimmer… Grooming them, right?

Jen Harbin: Yeah, exactly.

Nancy Hogshead: He would groom. So it wasn't until… Like in the intro you said nice things — you know, you worked for 30 years for the Women's Sports Foundation. A new regime came on board, they needed money from the Olympic Committee, and they gave me a contract that said, you know, we want you to work for us, but you have to agree not to talk about sexual abuse in any context.

So I would have gotten $10,000 a month if I had signed that contract, but would I have been able to get the legislation changed? Would I have been able to do the other stuff? No. And we had already done all this work trying to get Congress to get involved, but it wasn't until Larry Nassar… When those victims came forward — they were Riley Gaines level of just amazing, amazing women. Rachel Denhollander, and I'm trying to think of so many Olympians who just spoke so eloquently about if they spoke up, they weren't going to make the team, they were going to lose everything.

Jen Harbin: They had worked so hard for too. That's just such an injustice that…

Nancy Hogshead: Right. You figure… If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend Athlete A that my friend Jen Sey — it's on Netflix. But Athlete A is Maggie Nichols. Maggie Nichols should have been… I want to make a crude sign… Should have been on the Olympic team and she wasn't because she was the first one to come forward and say that Larry Nassar was abusing her. And as a result, the Karolis were so mad that they wouldn't even watch her when they were at Olympic trials. They weren't even… I mean, it cost her. Mhm. She did everything I did. That's right. But huge cost.

Jen Harbin: But they're doing the right thing. And there's so many athletes after her and so many athletes because of you as well that are not going to be abused. That this won't continue anymore or that there are now, you know…

Nancy Hogshead: Right.

Jen Harbin: There's…

Nancy Hogshead: Right. The system's perfect.

Jen Harbin: No, of course not. Yes.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah. But that…

Jen Harbin: There's accountability in place now that…

Nancy Hogshead: That's right. We got the United States Center for SafeSport started, which is akin to kind of an HR department, which basically can kick somebody out of the Olympic Committee. It can't get money, it can't put anybody in prison, it's not a criminal process. But it can get somebody and put them on a database and let everybody know not to deal with this person.

Jen Harbin: Huge step in the right direction.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah. It's amazing.

Brian Harbin: And I really like what you mentioned about your advice to your kids — before you can be an advocate for others, you have to be an advocate for yourself. And standing up for yourself. And kind of to that point, I wanted to ask you — we like to ask all of our guests about the grit creed. So those are 12 principles we really try and bake in to that next generation through everything we do. But which part of the grit creed do you feel like resonates most with you, and why would you say?

Nancy Hogshead: First of all, thank you for writing this. Thank you for giving a roadmap for kids and the next generation coming forward to be able to look at these kinds of things. I like them all. There's none that I would say, no, not that one. But at the same time, I want people, particularly when they're growing up, to give themselves grace.

So, for example, one of them says, “I am cool, calm and collected.” You're not always going to feel that way. Right? But, like, what makes me feel good? What makes… You know, we all have centering things — like who I am is — and to know who that is, and it sort of changes the vibrations in the air. So who I am is cool, calm and collected. And it's not… You're not always going to be cool, calm and collected. Especially when you have a hot flash when you're on…

And, you know, it says, “I am mentally, physically and emotionally resilient.” But again, giving themselves permission to not be that at times, but knowing that you're going to get there. As an example, I've told this story many times, but when I was in college, I was raped for two and a half hours by a guy while I was out running. Duke has two campuses, and he asked me where Duke University was. I was raised to be nice, so I said, that's weird, because you're right in between the two. And he grabbed me, swung me around… I was in the top 0.001% of all strong women in the world, and the fight wasn't even close.

Back then, we didn't know that much about PTSD. Because of the feminists that went before me, I went to the police station. And because we live in the United States — if I lived in, say, a Muslim country, I would not have been believed — but I went directly to the police. They were so nice, so kind, and the school bent over backwards to make sure this did not interfere with my educational trajectory.

But I had a whopping case of what we now know as PTSD. This is 1981 — nobody knew. They just thought, and you can bleep this out, but they just thought I was f***** up. I was really in a big fat mess. I got into two car accidents — bang — never been in one before, never been in one since. That's what happens when you're dealing with trauma.

So when I read, “I am mentally, physically and emotionally resilient,” I did figure it out. I had the right friends who were willing to listen, who were willing to… Because I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that that could possibly happen to me. I thought that happened to other women — women who were very different from me, who were not as smart, not as strong, not as accomplished. I was already a 1980 Olympian.

What I learned is that none of that matters — if you're a woman, you are always going to be at risk of sexual violence. Unfortunately, it is so pervasive — women having really horrible, horrible experiences. It's got to get better for all of us. You personally cannot achieve out of it. You can't buy enough locks on your door. You can't learn the right self-defense classes. It's got to get better for all women before my daughters, your daughters, are going to be safe.

So again, “I am mentally, physically and emotionally resilient.” But I really did have to figure it out. And it was the first time… If you've ever had the experience of telling yourself, I'm safe, I'm calm, I'm in a very safe environment — lots of people around me and I've got the 12 locks on the door — but you still can't calm yourself down. You still feel scared to death, hyper-reactive… hyper-vigilant.

So again, I did figure it out. And if anybody out there is having PTSD, one of the best ways to address it is hard, hard, hard exercise. I kind of figured out that what made me feel better was working out hard — it calms the brain down. Any therapist will say that's right. How blessed and lucky am I to have been in a sport and been an athlete so that I could have a healing place to go.

Brian Harbin: Wow!

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah.

Jen Harbin: Thank you for sharing that! I didn't know that. And I'm sure that that would impact lots of people watching this that could have had an experience similar to that, to know that, in addition to seeking therapy… Right. And sharing with people, right, that talk in those overwhelming moments that you're telling yourself, I'm gonna get…

Nancy Hogshead: You know, and when we talk about grit and I'm here because I won three gold medals in the Olympics… Right? To not have the full gestalt of self here is inauthentic. And after I was raped, I used to go to the Duke library and try to find other stories. Like, oh my God, is this how I'm going to feel for the rest of my life? What's the way out of this? And I couldn't find any.

So I realized, and I tell other women who are over 30, 40, 50 to talk about those experiences. Because otherwise the young women who are experiencing rape don't have any role models of going on and winning three gold medals two years later. They don't have the sense… It just breaks my heart. You talk to… Because of what I do professionally, you talk to somebody on the phone and they so profoundly don't want it to have happened.

And so they don't want to go to the police. They don't want to go to therapy. They think they can go on as though it never happened. You could take this and abuse it and abuse yourself, right? And say, I am calm, cool and collected.

Well, that is not who's calling me — somebody who just experienced sexual violence. “I am mentally, physically, emotionally resilient.” Well, that's not how they feel at that moment. That is who they are, but it's giving them that grace to not be that way, knowing that they are tough, that they can do it… But now what you need is TLC. You need older women, frankly, around you, no offense, to do that mentoring and to let them know they are going to get through it. And to just have profound empathy — oh my gosh, do I ever. And in order to do my job, I have to have profound empathy and I have to save something for me. Because if I don't, then I'm not going to be effective.

Brian Harbin: Well, Nancy, we have so enjoyed having you on today. I mean, your story is beyond inspiring in so many different ways, and all the ways that you're still making a huge impact and continuing to do so. And so thank you so much for being here. It's really been an honor and privilege to be here with you today.

Nancy Hogshead: Yeah, this has been really great for me as well. I've really enjoyed being able just to be with you all. And I'm looking forward to getting to watch.

Brian Harbin: Well, that's a wrap for today's episode of the Grit.org podcast. We'll see you guys next time. Thanks!