While alcoholic falls from grace are as common as they are tragic, there isn’t often an Olympic pedestal involved somewhere in the story. Unfortunately for three-time Olympic champion Carrie Steinseifer Bates, her story has one in it. Her decades-long plunge into alcoholism didn’t just devastate her family and destroy relationships—it almost erased her monumental athletic achievements from memory. “When you have somewhat of a public life, your problems aren’t any worse or more dramatic,” she says, “but everyone in my community knew. And let’s face it: when you’re being put in the back of a police car at three in the afternoon when the school bus is dropping off kids, the gig is kind of up.” Bates, who first competed in the 1983 Pan American Games, realized that none of her gold medals mattered much if she couldn’t escape the long shadow that alcoholism cast across her life and remarkable career.

At 15, Bates won gold medals in 4×100-meter freestyle and 4×100-meter relays, which she parlayed into Olympic wins the very next year. Beneath the brightness of her wins, though, something dark was percolating and about to rear its head. “I grew up in an alcoholic home, so swimming was my escape and my safe place—and I just happened to be good at it,” she noted. “That’s where I went to work out my fear and my anger. I took it all out in the pool and nobody can see you cry underwater, right?” Where that fear and anger informed her will, commitment, and singular drive to succeed in her competitive career, it later underscored a just-as-epic drinking career, too. “All the [sayings] that brought me my greatest accomplishments: ‘Don’t ask for help,’ ‘Barrel through it,’ ‘Bulldoze your way there,’ and ‘You’re strong’ became the same things that nearly killed me.”

Bates first tasted alcohol on a 14-hour flight from Tokyo, which sent her off to the races (pun intended): “I was on an airplane and I was one of the youngest traveling with the national team,” she remembers. “Nobody was monitoring what we were doing. Not only did the drinking feel good, but it was more of a feeling like, ‘Oh my God. I finally fit in.’ I’d always had a sense of not being comfortable in my own skin.” (She drank enough wine coolers to vomit on the plane and pass out.) Still, her competitive swimming career continued after her ’84 gold-medal wins and meeting then-President Reagan. She attended the University of Texas, where she was a member of three NCAA national championship relay teams, not to mention representing the US at the 1987 Pan American Games and the 1989 Pan Pacific Swimming Championships. (She won gold medals for the latter two, as well.) And yet, alcoholism doggedly pursued her like a competitor in her own swim lane. “I don’t think I really crossed that proverbial line to alcoholic drinking until my late thirties,” she said. But when Bates finally crossed the line, everything came crashing down.

It’s particularly interesting to listen to Bates describe her recovery because she begins to speak with pronouns like “we” and “our,” rather than describing it as some sort of sad solo act. “My daughters aren’t ashamed of me and they’re not ashamed of our journey. We all own our story out loud and my kids have no interest in hiding the truth.” As Bates reflects, it’s clear that she’s come a long way from not only her drinking days, but an early recovery that found her “paralyzed by fear” and afraid to leave her house out of shame. Now remarried, Bates credits her “fabulous” husband for helping her achieve sobriety, saying that “he would walk in front of me until I was brave enough to be seen, in back of me in case I slipped, and next to me with pride when I was strong enough.”

In many ways, Bates is as much a force of nature now as she was as an Olympic champion, if not more so. She recounts signing up for half-marathons, full marathons and Iron man competitions with enthusiasm and grace, not an unbridled ego ready to destroy other people. Bates isn’t broken by her past so much as she’s humbled by it. She’s keenly aware of the gulf between standing on the Olympic pedestal and lying on her kitchen floor. “I have the seen the world from a view that very few people will get to see in their lifetime: as an Olympian, a gold medalist, as someone who traveled the world,” she notes. “I have seen and done things a lot of people will never get to do in their lifetime. But I’ve also absolutely lived in hell on earth.”

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