Keller Is Home Free in the 400

It was butterfly time for Klete Keller.

Not in the pool at Wednesday’s opening session of the U.S. Olympic swimming trials in Long Beach, but in his stomach.

For the 24 hours before the men’s 400-meter freestyle event, Keller had agonized, his pulse racing, his heart beating rapidly, his stomach doing back-flips.

“I was more nervous than I have ever been,” Keller said. “I almost felt like I was going to cry.”

Keller couldn’t blame his nerves on the uncertainty of dipping his toes into Olympic competition for the first time. He had not only been through the Olympic trials before, but is a former Olympic medalist, having won silver (800-meter free relay) and bronze (400-meter freestyle in American-record time) at the 2000 Sydney Games. And, at the Olympic trials earlier that year, Keller set an American record in winning the 400-meter freestyle

“I don’t know why I was this way,” Keller said. “You would think the second time at the trials, I would be more relaxed, but it was just the opposite.”

Wednesday morning, Keller won the 400 preliminaries in a time of 3:49.04.

So did that relax him?

No way.

“Between prelims and finals,” Keller said, “I usually try to take a nap, but that wasn’t going to happen.”

His coach, Jon Urbanchek, wasn’t worried about Keller’s prospects for the finals, although, in his pocket poolside, the coach carried a pill designed to ease a queasy stomach.

Keller didn’t need it. The moment he plunged into the pool, he channeled that nervous energy into the task at hand and won the event in 3:44.19, an American record.

In securing a spot on the Olympic team, Keller not only shaved nearly five seconds off his morning time, but was just over three seconds off his time in the finals of last month’s Janet Evans Invitational where Keller finished second to Ian Thorpe of Australia with a time of 3:47.38.

“In the last Olympics trials,” Urbanchek said, “Klete was naive. He didn’t know which end was up. This time, I think he felt more pressure.”

Afterward, Keller said most of Wednesday’s race was a blur.

“When I dove in,” he said, “I was kind of on autopilot and don’t remember much until the finish.”

Maybe so, but once he was in the water, he did remember his strategy in the Janet Evans. He did remember forsaking his normal strategy of starting slow in order to stay in the hunt with Thorpe.

It worked that day, so he tried it again.

“He went out faster than he normally does,” Urbanchek said. “He changed his strategy and fooled the opposition.”

Toward the end of the race, Keller began to cramp up, but he had enough left in his churning legs to break the record of 3:46.73, set last year by Michael Phelps.

“My goal wasn’t really to break the record,” Keller said. “I just wanted to win the race. [Phelps] is a really impressive swimmer and, to break a record of his makes me pretty happy and pretty proud. He’s a record machine.”

While the 22-year-old Keller performed like a cool, efficient machine, he sometimes gets stuck in first gear, requiring a kick start to break out of his laid-back nature

So laid-back that he lost his pass to get into the Janet Evans event before the first session.

“I was going to tie it down with part of his body so he won’t forget it,” said Urbanchek at the time. “We don’t know where his mind is. When he puts his mind into it, he does a good job.”

Keller attended USC but dropped out this year to join a swim club in Ann Arbor, Mich. He plans to return to his home state of Arizona in the fall and enter a junior college with the hope of eventually enrolling at Arizona State and pursuing a degree in criminology.

To remind himself of his roots, Keller has the Arizona flag tattooed on one of his biceps.

“I love the sunsets there,” he said. “They really calmed me.

“I wanted something to remind me of Arizona. I live in Michigan now where there isn’t any sun.”

Wednesday, nothing calmed him. Until he hit the water.