To the outside world, Julie Ertel looked like an inevitability as her lead slowly increased lap after lap on the run at the second U.S. Olympic Triathlon Trials in Tuscaloosa.
Photos by Timothy Carlson

She broke out to an eight-second lead, with a lightning transition from bike to run. After the first lap, it was a 13-second lead. Then, after 5k, 15 seconds; and finally, with one lap to go, 20 seconds.

But Julie and a few other people in the ring with her saw things in a different light. The 43 family members who were cheering for her chief rival and wearing T-shirts that said things like “I’m Sarah Haskins’ cousin’s girlfriend” didn’t think it was inevitable. They firmly believed their girl just might pull off a 20-seconds-behind rally, with Haskins’ swift legs that outran Julie Ertel in the big races at Hy-Vee, Hamburg and Beijing last year.

And just as some hyper charged-up collegians along the Black Warrior River in Bear Bryant’s old haunts tried to psych her up with a mile to go by screaming “You’ve got it! You’re going to Beijing!” Julie Ertel almost let her guard down.

“For just a second or two, I allowed myself to think about making the Olympics in a second sport,” says the 35-year-old Orange County girl with an Olympic water polo silver medal tucked away somewhere safe in her Irvine home. But Julie knew better than anyone not to let the laser focus she had held for seven years slip away so close to the finish. “I shut out all those daydreams,” she says. “I didn’t want to push so hard I ended up passing out. I know it’s happened to other great athletes trying to make our Olympic team.”

Silver medalist Julie Ertel knows far too well not to trust to inevitability. She started swimming at age 6, but was bored by high school. That’s when her older sister Jana introduced her to some kids who were having a lot more fun in the pool.

It was the water polo team. All boys at the time – but as it turned out the door was open to women at this pool party.

“I was never that great of a swimmer and I was losing interest,” Julie recalls. “It looked a lot more fun and I asked the coach if I could try. I played in a few games and he told me I could try out and I’d play if I made the team.”

Julie swiftly gained leg strength with all those hours of eggbeater kicking keeping her afloat, and the weight training that built up her arms and shoulders gave her the strength to push off the boys – and eventually much bigger women – who would be leaning on her like Shaq backing in on a skinny opposing center.

When some of the guys told Julie she should try out for the junior national team, she was stunned. “I had never seen girls play,” she says. When she drove up to Modesto and tried out, the coaches were impressed, but cut her because she’d always played with aggressive boys and never had to develop offensive skills. But when one of the girls on the team broke a shoulder, Julie was the only available candidate with a passport ready to hop on a plane to Brazil.

When they faced elimination by Hungary in the final Olympic qualifying tournament in Europe, an exhausted American team managed to hold a one-goal lead to the finish. Julie Ertel (then Swail) stopped the Hungarian’s top attacker, a woman six inches taller and 50 pounds heavier, with her speed and quickness.

At one point Julie and her team nearly dropped out in the Olympic semifinal, with the Netherlands team up 5-3 in the first half. “It seemed statistically impossible that they would lose,” recalls Julie. “But somehow they made one mistake after another. And by fluke or the grace of God, we shut them out and came back with three goals.” Even with U.S. center forward Heather Moody knocked out with a bloody nose, U.S. goalie Bernice Orwig stopped a point-blank shot with less then a minute to play, preserving their dramatic 6-5 win.

The game between the U.S. women and heavy home favorite Australia, in front of 17,000 crazed and screaming fans in the gold medal finale, was a classic. From a 2-1 advantage at the half, the U.S. women gave up two goals to the Aussies and were trailing 3-2. Then with just 13 seconds left, the U.S. tied the score. They only had to defend one more attack to go into overtime. But with just four seconds left, U.S. Captain Julie Ertel was called for a hotly disputed foul and Australia was given a free throw. “Then I was ejected because the referee ruled I didn’t give enough room while defending the free shot,” says Julie. With only 1.3 seconds left, the U.S. women surrendered a shorthanded goal, and all Australia erupted in joy.

While some of her teammates were crying and felt desolate and angry about the final calls, Ertel says she was never bitter, never crushed. “There was definitely a feeling of disappointment. A lot of us felt let down and were crying. But a good way to look at it is that there has to be a winner and a loser in the gold medal game. I felt so thankful I had the experience of playing in the Olympics. And I always considered that we had won the silver – not lost the gold.”

While she was busy winning silver in Sydney, Julie managed to find a TV to catch the finish and the awards ceremony for the very first Olympic triathlon, in which Brigitte McMahon out-sprinted Michellie Jones for the gold. “It was a pretty cool race,” she recalls. “I hadn’t done a triathlon yet, but I knew it was something I wanted to do.”

Julie had earned a modest reputation as a runner with her fast-twitch sisters in water polo – “It was a total of three miles a week running to and from our weight training gym, and I usually arrived a minute or two ahead of my teammates,” she says. “So I thought I was a runner.”

Shortly after the Olympics she signed up for the Catalina sprint triathlon and three weeks later she took third overall, riding the bike leg in her running shoes. “I loved it,” she says, and proceeded to train with friends in Orange County – like Bill Leach and Sue Davis, a strong duathlete from nearby Costa Mesa who coached her ever-improving run. Meanwhile, Julie made a living coaching the UC Irvine Anteaters women’s water polo team.

In 2002, her 10k run had evolved nicely to the mid 38-minute range – still two minutes slower then elite contending level, but nonetheless encouraging. “I watched the pros the next day and compared my times to theirs,” recalls Julie. “I would have been middle of the pack and I thought ‘Wow, I could hang with those guys.’”

Early in 2003, the UC Irvine athletic director felt Julie’s interest in her new sport detracted from her coaching and forced her to make a choice. “She was surprised that I chose triathlon,” says Julie. “But I was enjoying my training and racing and I decided I would keep going as long as I could make a living.” Then she finished sixth at her first pro race in March, a Pan Am Games qualifier in Clermont, Florida. She recalls: “I was thrilled. I got a check that paid for my air fare.”

Thus began a long, patient, steady and largely independent climb into the top tier of America’s best female triathletes. In 2004, Julie finished second alternate on the U.S. women’s Olympic team, just behind the very disappointed first alternate Laura Bennett. As always, Julie looked on the positive side. “Susan Williams inspired me,” says Julie of the long shot who made the team with her strong bike ability and rode to a bronze medal in Athens. “Susan could inspire anybody. She showed me that you can make your dreams come true.”

In one brilliant mid-summer stretch in 2005, she scored a second place at the prestigious Corner Brook ITU World Cup, and took big wins at the New York and Boston triathlons, scoring a series win at the Haul to the Great Wall series. These performances earned her first monthly stipends from U.S.A. Triathlon, but it was far from a gravy train. “At the end of the year I qualified for their most basic level of help – a couple hundred a month – but I was happy,” she says.

Still, that small but welcome reward underlined the fact that, unlike the majority of U.S. resident elite triathletes who lived, ate and worked out at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Julie was still working nearly full time and carrying on her quest like old-time amateur athletes.

“Of course it seems frustrating at times to think you could do so much better if you didn’t have to spend so many hours working,” says Julie. “On the other hand, I have a great balance in my life and I never want to wallow in self-pity and think ‘Wow, I wish I had this, I wish I had that.’ I just became good at budgeting my time and getting done what needs to be done. When times are tough, I give myself more rest and I just work harder in the off times.”

In March of 2006, her rising career arc took a nosedive when she crashed heavily on a bike-training ride during a short stay at the Chula Vista Olympic Training Center, and broke three ribs. “I recovered surprisingly well, but lost the base training I needed to do the speed work to get my running at a higher level,” she says. Because she had already bought the ticket, she flew to Ishigaki but finished well off the pace.

Her lowest point came when she raced at Corner Brook as the defending silver medalist. “I was coming off sickness and injury and it was my first race in a month. After a great bike, I got off and hobbled through the run even though everyone behind me had dropped out.” Julie says she accomplished something important that day. “I did not want to get into a bad habit. If you can physically finish a race, you should finish what you started, no matter how ugly it may seem. If I’d pulled myself out of that race… you leave yourself an out if you are not having a good day. That’s something my parents instilled in me long ago. They’d let me try anything I wanted, but once I started something I had to finish it. I definitely have a tougher mentality as a result.”

Julie Ertel made her first big breakthrough of the year with a win at the U.S.A. Triathlon elite nationals in Honolulu May 20. It came down to a duel on the run with four-time ITU World Championship medalist Laura Bennett, and Ertel’s budding rival Sarah Haskins, the elite defending champion who had reached top 10 in the ITU world rankings. In mid-June, Ertel faced Haskins again at the Pan Am Games. Haskins was coming in full of confidence after a second place finish at the Vancouver World Cup. But once again, Ertel outran Haskins in the stretch for a prestigious gold.

With the second U.S. Olympic Trials qualifier coming up April 20 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Ertel went all out. In the final weeks before Tuscaloosa, she worked hard on her run, racing at several local races, peaking with an age group win in 17:05 at the Carlsbad 5000. “I decided to put all my eggs in one basket and took a big taper before Tuscaloosa,” says Ertel, who was looking ahead rather than fearing a loss. “If I won there, I thought I’d be better able to prepare for Beijing.”

In fact, her whole neighborhood helped her prepare. “Most seasons my transitions start out a little sluggish until I get a few races in,” she says. But this year Julie and her husband and some other friends practiced transitions in their driveway two or three times a week until everything was second nature and mistake-free.

The night before Tuscaloosa, her husband Greg told Julie: “Win lose or draw, tomorrow night I’ll take you to TCBY for an ice cream cone.”

From the gun, it was Julie versus the three Sara’s, as Ertel, Haskins, Sarah Gross and Sara McLarty broke out in the swim and settled into a four-woman breakaway on the bike. Ertel played it cautious. “It was really windy on the bike, so I made sure we stayed a safe distance apart,” says Ertel. “It would have been a shame if we’d crashed after all that work to get a lead.”

Coming into the bike-to-run transition, all those little details Julie Ertel had taken care of made the difference. After racking her bike, Ertel’s transition went as smoothly as a Mississippi River card shark’s deal, while Haskins lost a few seconds reaching for the running shoes she’d placed on the wrong side of her bike. “It doesn’t seem critical,” says Haskins, who started her run eight seconds back, “but you always want to start the run in touch. It’s a lot harder to make up that gap on the course.”

As she ran into the chute, Ertel was ruled by visions of the fleet feet of Sarah Haskins coming hard, chasing the same dream. She didn’t have to think of what happened in Sydney in those fateful last few seconds, because it had been deeply embedded in her competitive mind. So, quite unlike what Matt Reed would do a few hours later when he stopped to soak in the love for his upset win, Julie Ertel ran right through the finish line at full speed.

Only then would she allow herself to let the reality of what she had done sink in.

“I had done it,” she recalls. “I won the Olympic Trials. I am going to the Olympics in a second sport and I am going to represent the U.S. again.”

After she got back home to Irvine, Julie thought back on all her training partners in Orange County.

“It’s the neatest thing,” she says. “Through all of this I’ve touched so many lives. The other night, while working out on the track, someone came up to me and said ‘I can’t tell you what an honor it is to run with you.’ It means a lot to me that people are so excited to feel a part of the Olympic movement.”