As Mary T. Meagher makes her way to the diving block, she adjusts her swim cap, takes the two steps with ease, bends down and places her fingertips against the block’s brittle edge.
Around her, the crowd cheers. Commentators speak in various languages, but in the sea of noise, as Meagher stares ahead, she focuses on one thing: winning.
When the buzzer sounds, Meagher dives off the block. A couple of minutes later, she will end the women’s 200-meter butterfly race, setting her first world record, 2:09.77, at age 14 at the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
“The meet was being announced in Spanish … Even after I finished, I knew I’d won, but I didn’t know I’d set a world record until about 20 minutes later,” Meagher recalled.
Meagher set two more world records in the 1981 U.S. Swimming National Championships—in the women’s 100- and 200-meter butterfly, 57.93 and 2:05.96, respectively—records that stood for nearly two decades. In the next 10 years, Meagher participated in the 1984 and 1988 Olympics, medaling five times—three gold, one silver and one bronze.
“When Mary T. would swim butterfly, it was literally like she was floating across the water. It absolutely looked effortless,” Katy Wilson, Meagher’s former training partner, said.
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Following Meagher’s early success, she moved from her hometown of Louisville to attend college at the University of California, Berkeley in 1982, balancing student life, collegiate swimming and the Olympics.
Although swimming dominated her schedule, Meagher always made time to attend church. She said that maintaining her Catholic faith was important.
“Sometimes, I look back and wish I … did more social things in college, but it just wasn’t part of my personality, and I think my grades would have really suffered—maybe my swimming, too,” Meagher said.
“She takes on a lot of challenges, but there’s this peace about her that I would probably attribute to her spirituality,” Wilson said. “I think she’s got an amazing relationship with God, and she finds a lot of comfort and confidence in her life because of that.”
When Meagher was growing up, her parents taught her to give back to her community. At UC Berkeley, she spent her free Saturdays speaking with different school groups in the San Francisco Bay area, and although she is proud of her swimming career, she does have regrets.
At UC Berkeley, Meagher learned to swim for herself, rather than to please others. Every day, her coach wrote the workout on the board and left, challenging everyone to lead themselves through practice.
“I hated that the first few years, but by my senior year, I was able to motivate myself and work hard just because I wanted the outcome. I wanted the success,” Meagher said.
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After graduating from UC Berkeley in 1978, Meagher swam for Old Dominion Aquatic Club in Norfolk, Virginia. She moved in with Wilson’s family in Virginia Beach, and they trained together for a year before the 1988 Olympics.
Wilson was a senior in high school and an aspiring Olympian. She looked up to Meagher as a role model.
“Living with Mary T., she made hard stuff look very easy,” Wilson said. “Because I’m sure at some level, she knew there was a younger swimmer here she was influencing.”
Wilson was amazed at how easily Meagher placed herself back into the club environment after swimming at the collegiate and Olympic level, recognizing the pressure and challenges she faced breaking world records at such a young age.
The memories Wilson holds of Meagher are positive ones—riding to swim practices, swimming laps, laughing, and Meagher pushing Wilson to be a better swimmer.
After the United States boycotted the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, Meagher made a stellar showing at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, taking home gold medals in the 100-meter butterfly, 200-meter butterfly and 100-meter relay. The Soviet Union, East Germany and China boycotted the LA Olympics, so Meagher never had swum against her biggest competition: the East Germans. When 1988 rolled around, she was eager to prove herself.
Meagher lost the women’s 200-meter butterfly to two East Germans in 1988, with the first and second finishers swimming in the 2:09 range and leaving Meagher to take home the bronze medal. There was speculation that Meagher might have won the race had the East Germans not been using steroids, but that didn’t satisfy her. “I still would have been disappointed going 2:09, even if I had won, because that was so much slower than my best time,” Meagher said.
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By the end of 1988, Meagher was burned out. Watching her friends start careers while she worked at a bank and asked her dad for money made her realize she was ready for the next stage of life.
“Once I adopted the perspective that I can reinvent myself, all of a sudden I saw the world opening up to me,” Meagher said.
Meagher married former Olympic speed skater Mike Plant, and the couple has three grown children: daughters Erika and Madeline, and son Andrew. They split time between Park City, Utah, and Atlanta, where Mike is in his 20th year as president and CEO of development for the Atlanta Braves.
As a mother, Meagher didn’t want to raise her children in the shadow of two successful Olympians, so she gave up speaking events and interviews, opting to be a stay-at-home mom and occasional substitute teacher.
When Meagher met Becky Christensen in 2002 through their sons, Christensen had no idea Meagher was a former Olympian.
Meagher’s son, Drew, and Christensen’s son, Tyler, had play dates where Drew frequently told Christensen and her husband about his mother’s Olympic career. At first, the couple chalked it up to a child’s overactive imagination, but after searching online for Meagher’s biography, they realized it was true.
“That’s one thing I’ve always loved about Mary. She’s humble. She just wanted to be a regular mom raising kids and didn’t want to flaunt that around,” Christensen said.
Today, Meagher, the namesake of Louisville’s Mary T. Meagher Aquatic Center, holds an active role in USA Swimming as an athlete representative on the House of Delegates Working Group and National Board of Review Committee.
When Meagher isn’t mountain biking, skiing, hiking and snowshoeing, she volunteers in Park City, cleaning up trails and staffing food pantries. In Georgia, she volunteers for Meals on Wheels and the Girl Scouts.
Meagher, who turns 60 in October, visits the Louisville area when she can. Wilson said Meagher usually attends the Kentucky Derby and was the first to introduce her to Derby Pie.
“Even if she hasn’t physically lived there for a while, I think she does consider herself a lifelong Kentuckian and has a lot of fond memories and gratitude and pride in that history with the state,” Wilson said.