Groundwork Laid for Future Lynne Cox Swims

Lynne Cox was standing on a street corner in Tbilisi, in the Soviet state of Georgia, when a local citizen approached.

“You are not a hero in the Soviet Union,” the man told Cox through her interpreter. “You are a legend.”

Cox returned last weekend from a 12-day tour of the Soviet Union to lay the groundwork for a series of cold-water swims in July and August.

The project is a follow-up of her unprecedented swim of the Bering Strait between America’s Little Diomede Island and the Soviets’ Big Diomede last Aug. 7.

“It’s a done deal,” she said from her Los Alamitos home. “It’s going to happen.”

In Moscow she met with members of the Soviet Sports Committee.

“It was like, ‘Whatever you want to do, we’ll work with you on it,’ ” Cox said.

She wants to schedule swims at Moscow, Leningrad, Tbilisi and Lake Baykal in Mongolia, but also will let the Soviets select other sites for their historical importance or scenic beauty.

“I don’t know what they might add to it,” she said. “We will go to areas that have not been opened (to tourists).”

Cox was accompanied by Bob Walsh, chairman of the 1990 Goodwill Games at Seattle. They were provided interpreters and chauffeured limousines at their stops, which also included Leningrad and Tbilisi.

Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, reported her visit with a full page of coverage, and she gave a 2 1/2-hour press conference at Tbilisi.

“It’s not the country I thought it would be,” Cox said. “Moscow is bigger than I thought, (with) big buildings that look Russian. It snowed, which was sort of the way I pictured it. Leningrad is beautiful.”

When Cox swam the 2.7-mile, 43-degree strait in 2 hours 5 minutes last summer, she wore neither grease nor a wetsuit. The feat was widely reported by Soviet newspaper and television reporters who met her on the rocky shore of the Siberian island, and she found she is now well known in the country.

“A swim coach told me, ‘We believe that you die after seven minutes in that water temperature. What you did went beyond what we thought was humanly possible.’

“In Tbilisi, a woman took off her Georgian Orthodox crucifix with a silver chain and gave it to me. I have it on right now. It was so precious to her, she wanted to give it to me.

“We were invited to people’s homes for dinner. There was an incredible amount of food and a toast with wine. They have philosophical discussions during the toasts. The meal goes on for 3 or 4 hours and they just pile plates on plates.”

Cox does not believe her visit was tightly orchestrated by the Soviets to show only their best side.

“I walked around on my own and there weren’t people watching me, like I expected,” she said. “We’d tell our driver, ‘We want to go here and there,’ and we would. They couldn’t set that up.”