Steve Clark, a two-time Olympic swimmer who won three gold medals for the United States at the 1964 Summer Games in Tokyo and, decades later, candidly acknowledged the depression that he and many Olympians experience when their careers end, died on April 14 at his home in Larkspur, Calif., in the Bay Area. He was 82.<\/p>\n
The cause was complications of Parkinson\u2019s disease, his wife, Betsy Clark, said.<\/p>\n
From the time of the ancient Greeks, Olympians have been viewed as the ideal of human form, might, speed and endurance, but out of the pool, away from the playing field, they have also been reminders of human susceptibility.<\/p>\n
Prominent recent Olympians like the swimmer Michael Phelps<\/a> and the gymnast Simone Biles<\/a> have freely discussed mental health issues like anxiety and pressure that accompany careers. These often hinge on peaking every four years for the Winter or Summer Games, followed by a feeling of emptiness, sometimes called Gold Medal Syndrome<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe all get depressed when we retire; it\u2019s like, Who are we?\u201d said Donna de Varona, who won two swimming gold medals at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and has counseled athletes as they transition to different careers.<\/p>\n In Clark\u2019s era, athletes were expected to be stoic. To acknowledge vulnerability was often viewed as a sign of mental weakness. In an unpublished 2012 essay, he wrote that he wrestled with depression intermittently for 30 years between 1966 and 1996 but kept it to himself mostly out of embarrassment and \u201cfaked feeling normal.\u201d<\/p>\n Swimming for Clark was \u201clike a mental and physical health practice,\u201d his daughter Nicki Clark said in an interview.<\/p>\n \u201cMy dad struggled with depression most of his life,\u201d Ms. Clark added. \u201cI feel like it\u2019s a big part of his story. I think he knew how important it was to move his body. Swimming was in his blood. Even when he didn\u2019t want to, I think he would sort of make himself because it always made him feel better.\u201d<\/p>\n Clark came to athletic prominence while still in high school in the Bay Area, when he competed in the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. In 1964, while attending Yale University, he delivered three stirring performances that helped lead to Olympic gold medals and team world records in the 4×100-meter freestyle relay, the 4×200-meter freestyle relay and the 4×100-meter medley relay.<\/p>\n During his career, he won five individual N.C.A.A. titles, set multiple world records and was the first man to swim the 100-yard freestyle under 47 and 46 seconds. He was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame<\/a> in 1966.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to work with and live with saints, get a bunch of Steve Clarks,\u201d Phil Moriarty<\/a>, his coach at Yale, told The New York Times<\/a> in 1964. \u201cHe has everything good in an athlete \u2014 attitude, ability, importance as a team member, no temperament.\u201d<\/p>\n Clark retired from swimming in 1965, the year he graduated from Yale with a bachelor\u2019s degree in political science. The Olympics were for amateurs in those days. There was little or no money to be made. After a break, he entered Harvard Law School, from which he graduated in 1969, but realized immediately that the qualities that made him a great swimmer didn\u2019t prepare him to think analytically as a law student.<\/p>\n \u201cI had developed myself as a swimmer,\u201d he wrote in the essay, \u201cbut what I didn\u2019t develop was an identity apart from swimming.\u201d<\/p>\n He described much of his law career, spent in Northern California, as unfulfilling. At times, he lacked confidence, something that did not elude him in the pool. His drinking increased and, in 1996, his first marriage \u2014 to Etta M\u00fcller, with whom he had three daughters \u2014 ended in divorce.<\/p>\n He soon began seeing a psychiatrist, who prescribed medication, and a psychologist, who provided talk therapy. He began to feel relief from his depression, ultimately stopped drinking with help from Alcoholics Anonymous, and repurposed his sports background by providing legal guidance and financial services to professional athletes.<\/p>\n De Varona said that Clark had supported the American swimmer Rick DeMont<\/a>, who futilely sought to have his 1972 Olympic gold medal reinstated after it was stripped \u2014 many feel unjustly \u2014 when he tested positive for a banned substance contained in his prescribed asthma medication.<\/p>\n Clark also began swimming three or four times a week and participated in open-water events in places like the chilly currents near Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. He also coached high school and masters swimmers. Along the way, he wrote, he learned \u201chow not to be a perfectionist.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2005, he donated one of his Olympic gold medals to Yale in honor of Moriarty, his former coach. \u201cThe gold is still shiny but the ribbons are as faded as I am,\u201d Clark said<\/a> at the time. \u201cI don\u2019t want to live on past athletic glory.\u201d It was, he said, \u201cnot the way I was raised.\u201d<\/p>\n Stephen Edward Clark was born on June 17, 1943, in Oakland, Calif. His father, Lyman Clark, worked in sales for the Westinghouse Electric Company. His mother, Mary Margaret (Simon) Clark, ran the household and did volunteer work.<\/p>\n At age 9, Steve began swimming competitively at the Santa Clara (Calif.) Swim Club<\/a>, where the renowned coach George Haines<\/a> helped develop Olympic champions like Clark, Don Schollander, de Varona and Mark Spitz.<\/p>\n Clark experienced tendinitis in his shoulder at the 1964 Olympic trials and did not qualify in individual events for the Tokyo Games. He did make the American relay teams, and his shoulder discomfort subsided before the Olympics began.<\/p>\n Clark\u2019s searing leadoff leg in the 4×100-meter freestyle relay in Tokyo equaled the individual world record for the 100-meter freestyle, 52.9 seconds. Had he been eligible to swim the individual 100-meter freestyle race, he would have been a favorite. Instead, the victor was his teammate and rival, Schollander, who became the first swimmer to win four gold medals in one Olympics.<\/p>\n Before entering law school, Clark coached in Peru and wrote an early coaching manual, \u201cCompetitive Swimming As I See It\u201d (1967). Among other things, he suggested with dry humor that the common practice of shaving the body to reduce drag in the water was overrated.<\/p>\n A prepared swimmer, Clark wrote, \u201cis not going to abruptly swim a terrible race simply because he forgot to shave five hairs off his belly button.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to his daughter Nicki, he is survived by his wife, Betsy (Anderson) Clark, whom he married in 2000; two other daughters, Nina Sealander and Kim Fowler; a sister, Sally Clark Michel; and six grandchildren.<\/p>\n Clark spoke to young people, encouraging them not to feel guilty or ashamed of their depression. In his unpublished essay, he suggested that life balance and self-awareness could help ease the arduous transition to everyday life for world-class athletes.<\/p>\n \u201cThe goal is to help athletes break out of that tunnel-vision focus, workout-induced endorphins and singular drive for perfection,\u201d he wrote, \u201cin order to open them up to a different world which does not measure success by a stopwatch.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Steve Clark, a two-time Olympic swimmer who won three gold medals for the United States at the 1964…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218034,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1590,85978,9,11,10,85977,85976,11472],"class_list":["post-218033","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-deaths-obituaries","tag-depression-mental","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-olympic-games-1964","tag-steve-clark-1943-2026","tag-swimming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218033","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218033\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}