ESPN Olympic Sports

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The months since the London Olympics have been an endurance event in and of themselves for triathlete Sarah Groff, the 2011 world championships series bronze medalist who just missed placing in the top three at the Summer Games.

She struggled for equilibrium after finishing an achingly close fourth and decided to make some changes for this season, and beyond, to try to put herself in podium contention for Rio 2016. Groff, a 31-year-old native of Cooperstown, N.Y. and graduate of Middlebury (Vt.) College, is currently training with an international group under the aegis of Canadian coach Joel Filliol.

She opened 2013 by entering a race she had always yearned to do -- the punishing Escape From Alcatraz triathlon, rescheduled this year from June back to March to accommodate the upcoming America's Cup sailing competition. Fighting through a self-inflicted head injury and the aftereffects of food poisoning, Groff was overtaken by eventual winner Heather Jackson in the late going and finished second.

Groff is based outside Hanover, N.H., with her boyfriend, distance runner Ben True, but spoke to ESPN.com by telephone this week from Clermont, Fla., where she is getting in some warm-weather training. These are excerpts from that conversation:

Question from Bonnie D. Ford: How did you go about processing that fourth-place finish at the Olympics and structuring the rest of your season?

Answer from Groff: What I didn't expect -- other athletes always talk about how amazing the experience of going to the Olympics is, the whole village experience and the cool swag and meeting all the other athletes, but they don't really warn you about what happens after the Games. There's this tremendous buildup where for years we're focused on one thing, and then I finished fourth, which adds a whole other level to it. It's probably pretty common; I got pretty severely depressed for a while. I went through the motions, did a couple more races. I would say I'm just starting to gain momentum back. But, for whatever reason, athletes just don't talk about it.

I did [turn to] a fellow triathlete, Greg Bennett, who was on the Australian Olympic team in 2004, and his wife Laura was on the U.S. team in 2008, and they both finished fourth. So if anybody's going to know what it's like after that, it's going to be them. Greg told me pretty much right after the race, "Listen, Sarah, even now to this day, I'll be lying in bed, replaying the race, thinking about what I could have done differently."

He's absolutely right. It's going to stay with me for a while. It's both the best achievement of my life and also one of those moments where you can't help but wonder what could have been if you'd approached things differently, and I think it has the potential to make me a better athlete. There's so much that can go wrong at the Games, and I've just been trying to turn it around and think about everything I did right to finish fourth, because obviously it's a great result.

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Sounds counterintuitive, but Emily Brunemann had to move back to a cold-weather climate to regain her confidence in open water swimming.

Brunemann, 26, won 10-kilometer races in Brazil and Argentina in late January and early February to open up the 2013 season and rebound from a subpar year that cost her U.S. national team status.

She chalks up her recent success to a homecoming. Last fall, Brunemann left southern California and returned to Ann Arbor, where she'd been a five-time All-American at the University of Michigan. There, she joined the Club Wolverine elite training group that includes Olympic 200-meter backstroke gold medalist Tyler Clary and butterfly specialist Wu Peng of China.

Brunemann slipped back into workouts run by Michigan associate coach and distance guru Josh White and is also putting in volunteer coaching time with the Michigan women's team. She feels like part of a community again, a welcome change from what was mostly solo training under the aegis of the now-disbanded elite FAST program in Fullerton, Calif.

"I'm a big fan of having balance in my life, and not having something else to offset swimming was more stressful than I anticipated," said Brunemann, a Kentucky native.

In the Jan. 27 10K race in Santos, Brazil, Brunemann pushed the pace and finished a comfortable 30 seconds ahead of fellow American Eva Fabian. She stayed with the pack and outsprinted Ana Marcela Cunha of Brazil a week later down the stretch in Viedma, Argentina to win by four seconds.

As is typical of the open water circuit, the two races, both established World Cup events, featured very different conditions. Santos was held in a bay within sight of a working harbor, while the course in Viedma was on a river with considerable current. White said the fact that Brunemann won two races that required such different tactics is very encouraging. The 10K is increasingly becoming the province of fast "milers" who transition from the pool rather than grinders, and White said Brunemann is poised to excel both because of her athletic ability and her maturity.

"She's really grown a lot in terms of her perspective, how the sport fits into her life," the coach said. "She's allowed herself not to live and die by the sport."

Water temperature, which has preoccupied swimmers and coaches since Fran Crippen drowned in sweltering conditions at a race in the United Arab Emirates in October 2010, wasn't an issue on the South American swing thanks to temperate weather. Brunemann said the number of safety craft on the courses appears to have been ramped up since the tragedy.

But she, like many other open water swimmers, still feels athletes will need to stay vigilant and keep pressure on officials. The current international ceiling of 31 degrees Celsius (87.8 Fahrenheit) is considered too high by many swimmers.

"I do see more boats and kayaks on the courses," Brunemann said. "But I still don't know if they take water temperature seriously."

The fallout after Crippen's death also prompted international officials to mandate that each open water swimmer is accompanied by a coach at elite events. Previously, it was not unusual for one coach to be responsible for "feeding" multiple swimmers, extending cups or squeeze bottles with liquid nourishment from floating docks on the course. The rule is meant to help ensure that heads are counted on each lap and swimmers have ample opportunity to hydrate.

The U.S. national team provides staff support for swimmers on the roster, but athletes like Brunemann who are trying to work their way back have to pay for their own travel and coaching.

"I'm figuring it out," said Brunemann, who brought her father along to serve as coach in one race and had former Michigan swimmer San Wensman with her for the other. "I'm fortunate that my parents believe in what I'm doing, and they're giving me financial help. It's not easy." Brunemann is hoping to regain her national team status by finishing in the top six at the U.S. championships in May at Castaic Lake north of Los Angeles.

Brunemann is no stranger to the podium at 10K races. She won two events in Asia in 2011. And she's also familiar with setbacks. She served a six-month suspension in 2008-09 after her out-of-competition urine sample tested positive for a banned diuretic. The arbitration panel that heard her case stated in a strongly-worded ruling that Brunemann had no intention to cheat, but had to be sanctioned under the rules for the "unfortunate mistake" of taking one of her mother's prescription pills she thought was a laxative. Brunemann missed an entire NCAA season as a result.

She had a lot of time to think about how to use her talent during the imposed layoff, and began competing in open water events shortly after her return. She's not about to call the whole interlude a blessing, but it "opened my eyes... I don't know that I would have gotten into open water when I did if it hadn't happened. It made me realize how easily a career can be taken away."

Mike Krzyzewski talks about why he will not coach Team USA for the world championships:

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Two-time track cycling Olympian Bobby Lea of Topton, Pa., recommitted to a third bid in his mind before he even got home from the London Games, where he finished 12th in the demanding two-day, six-event omnium. The 29-year-old trains with Philadelphia-based coach Brian Walton, a 1996 Olympic track cycling silver medalist for Canada. Lea looked ahead in a recent chat with ESPN.com:

Question from Ford: What was the biggest contrast between your experiences in London and Beijing [in 2008]?

Answer from Lea: The single biggest thing was just knowing what I was in for. I knew the details would be different, but the bigger picture was the same, and I was much more prepared to handle it. In the run-up to the actual event, it was much more calm and quiet and easier to focus on the task at hand than it was for Beijing. As far as the performance was concerned, I really wanted to get inside that top 10. But when I take a step back and look at the event as it unfolded, five of the six events were the best I'd ever done, so it was hard to argue with that. Two-tenths of a second in one event [the kilo, or 1-kilometer time trial] would have made the difference.

That's bike racing, that's track racing. I went to London thinking if I turned in a performance I was satisfied with, I could walk away from track racing in the Olympics and say it's been a good run and made up for a performance I wasn't really happy with in Beijing [Editor's note: He finished 16th in the Madison]. But by the time I touched down in Newark, I was already thinking about Rio [in 2016]. I wasn't anticipating that, but that's kind of how it unfolded. The placing was nothing to write home about, but the finer details showed a pretty significant jump in performance from where I was in the two years leading up to the Olympics. My takeaway from that is if I can do that in three months, if I can take the next four years and really dial in my support structure and work even harder, then I can go to Rio and actually be a contender instead of someone just shooting for a top 10.

Q: If you were king and had control over the Olympic program, what would you create?

A: I've made my peace with the omnium. I certainly struggle to deal with all the different elements, learning how to prepare and how to handle myself in the midst of the event. But if the omnium remains unchanged in Rio and that's the event, I know what I'm dealing with and I know how to work for it. I'm not too fussed about what the event's going to be. If I can make it four more years and I can set up that support structure, then I'm ready to take a run for Rio. Part of the question I've been dealing with since I got home is, what does that mean? It's easy to answer that question if you're part of a big national federation that has an endless budget, but as basically a privateer trying to put together a program, it's an entirely different question. I've got a year or two to sort that out.

Q: How does this affect your road racing aspirations? That was at the top of your future agenda when we last talked.

A: At this point, I'm still treating the rest of my career like an open book and it's day to day, month to month, year to year. I've got a job riding with SmartStop-Mountain Khakis next year on the road, so between that and a couple of winter sixes (six-day races) with my Madison partner [Jackie Simes], we'll see what happens. We're hoping to get a start in Rotterdam in January. It's been a long time since there were Americans racing on the six-day circuit. That would be a really neat thing to do that doesn't conflict with road racing.

My team for next year is really supportive of my extracurricular activities on the track. It's a good place for me to race the road and have a lot of fun and get back into domestic road racing and [Simes] is going to be joining me on that team. Where it goes, who knows, but I'm not writing anything off. 2010 was my last full season on the road. I'm ready to jump back in, I miss it.

Q: Do you feel like you're in a situation where you can compete clean at the Continental level in this country?

A: Absolutely. It's not something I would be doing if I thought I was trying to swim upstream.

AP Photo/Alastair GrantMaggie Steffens, right, and sister Jessica helped lead the U.S. women's water polo team to its first Olympic gold this past summer.

With every sunrise and sunset, with the change of another season, the moments from the greatest two weeks in Maggie Steffens' young athletic life drift further and further away. Four months after carrying the U.S. women's water polo team to its first gold medal, the 19-year-old is adjusting to life as a college freshman and Olympic champion.

There are days like the one not too long ago, when Steffens shared her gold medal with a mother who immediately wanted to take a picture biting the hardware.

"I was like, 'Uh, no,'" Steffens said. "I brushed it off as no big deal, but inside I was cringing. I mean, really? This isn't some chocolate bar."

And on the day she moved into her Stanford dorm this fall, there were the whispers. She heard them. "There goes the Olympic girl."

"I told them, 'Nope. My name is Maggie,'" she said. "I'm the same Maggie I was before all of this."

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Michael Regan/Getty ImagesMaggie Steffens will play for Stanford's water polo team this year.

She may be the same person, but the way strangers view her is infinitely different. Four years ago in Beijing, the feisty 15-year-old watched from the stands as her older sister, Jessica, and other members of the U.S. team lost in the gold-medal match for the second time in three Olympics. She insisted it wouldn't happen again.

Then in London this past summer, as the youngest member of the U.S. team, Maggie scored an unfathomable 21 goals on 27 shots -- including a 5-for-5 showing in the 8-5 gold-medal victory over Spain -- to win the Olympic crown and make "The Star-Spangled Banner" the song of choice at the tournament's conclusion.

When her world stopped spinning, when Steffens finally returned home to California and had a second to hop in her bed, close her eyes, take a deep breath and try to absorb what had just happened, the memories that most prominently flooded the 19-year-old's head weren't the images everyone would have expected.

Sure, she thought about the goals she scored and the plays she made. Of course she reflected on the moment her gold medal was hung around her neck and the night her and Jessica paraded around the pool deck with the American flag draped behind them. The gut-wrenching semifinal win over Australia is there, too, a night when the Aussies forced overtime with one second left. But the memories that make her smile most are the ones no one knows about.

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