Amanda Beard has swam in the Olympics
four times, dissed Michael Phelps, and
been tattooed on LA Ink. Now back
from Beijing, she's ready to dive in to life
outside of the pool. By Jennifer Goldstein

Michael Phelps is boring. Sure, he's one of the greatest swimmers ever, but
where's his personality? His ego? His edge? In the interviews after the Olympics,
all he could do was stick to the script: He thanked his team. He thanked
his mom. He was humble. He was gracious. He was mind-numbingly dull.

Luckily, USA Swimming has a more interesting (and better-looking)
athlete—Amanda Beard. The 27-year-old swimmer's Beijing Olympics didn't
go as well as Phelps' (more on that later), but she seemed to be having more
fun. In fact, the rumor in Beijing was that she had hooked up with Phelps after
his win. It didn't happen, and to set the record straight, she joked to a Tucson,
AZ radio show: "Eww, that's so nasty! ... Come on, I have really good taste."

USA Swimming would probably have preferred if she politely denied the relationship
but anyone who knows Beard, knows she'll do anything for a laugh—
and she doesn't like to follow the rules.

Beard grew up in Irvine, CA, and got her start in the pool when she was just
4. She was a strong swimmer, but she was horrendous at the breaststroke. So
her coaches forced her to work on the stroke, until one day, she says, "It just
blossomed." At 12, she became a breaststroker. When she was 13, she won
a U.S. national title in the 100-meter breaststroke and medaled at the Pan-
Pacific Championships. At 14, she joined the U.S. National team and began
training for the 1996 Olympics.

Fourteen isn't young to excel in sports like gymnastics and diving, where a
tiny frame and extreme flexibility help you. But swimming is different. You need
height, a muscular chest, long arms, and a lot of power. In 1996, at 5 foot 3
inch and 92 pounds, Beard didn't look anything like an Olympic swimmer. But
she made the team and went on to win silver medals in the 100- and 200-meter
breaststroke. On the medal stand, with her gangly frame and a smile that
was almost too big for her face, she held a teddy bear as she accepted her
medals. Most people thought she brought the bear along because she was
sweet and shy, but Beard says the incident was "kind of a joke." "My sisters
were messing around with me, and they said, ‘We dare you to take that out to
the blocks with you.' And I was like, ‘I totally will.'"

She should be glad she accepted their dare; that teddy bear cemented
Beard in American's minds as the adorable face of the Olympics. But as
cute as she was, Beard wasn't exactly an all-American sweetheart. Less
than three years after her Olympic debut, at 17, she was in the tattoo shop
to get her first tattoo - not something you could picture an Olympic darling
like Mary Lou Retton doing. "I got the zodiac sign for Scorpio on the back
of my neck," she says. "I was underage, so I had to use my sister's ID, and
she's a Pisces. Luckily, they didn't check it very carefully."

With her tattoo, her silver medals, and an Olympic gold she had won in a
relay, Beard continued swimming throughout high school and struggled to adjust
her stroke as she shot up five inches in height. She was ranked only sixth
in the country in the breaststroke when she made the Olympic team in 2000, so no one really expected her to win a medal. But Beard
earned a bronze in the 200-meter breaststroke in Sydney.
"That Olympics was a little bit different for me," she says. "I
was still a teenager, but I was starting to think, You know,
I could maybe make a career of this."

She went off to the University of Arizona, where she
won an individual NCAA Division I championship in 2001.
Then, at the 2003 World Championships in Barcelona,
she broke the world record for the 200-meter breaststroke
and was thrust back into the spotlight.

The swimmer America was reintroduced to in 2003 was
very different from the gawky 14-year-old with the teddy
bear they'd awwed over seven years before. She'd grown
into her huge smile, and some curves had appeared on
her 5 foot 8 inch' frame. With her full lips, blue eyes, and
high forehead, more than a few people commented on her
resemblance to another bad girl, Angelina Jolie.

Beard made the most of her newfound sex-symbol status,
posing for a revealing spread in FHM magazine that rankled
USA Swimming. "After that, I had a lot of people hating,"
Beard remembers. "They were saying, ‘Oh, you're a woman
and you're an athlete and you should be holding yourself to
higher standards.' But I didn't see a problem with it at all. It's
not like I was forcing people to buy the magazine."

But many people did. And with millions of Americans
watching (including more than a few men who had probably
never seen a swim race before), Beard swam her way
onto the 2004 Olympic team and headed off to Athens
to compete. With four Olympic medals to her name, she
didn't have to prove anything. But she says she really
wanted to win gold. "I was just like, Gosh, I know I can do
this. I am at the best physical shape that I could possibly
be, and I'm sitting here thinking, Why can I not bring home
a gold medal in this event?" She put a lot of pressure on
herself in the weeks leading up to the 2004 Olympics,
and it paid off. She won gold in her signature event, the
200-meter breaststroke, and she picked up two more silver
medals in the relays. "It was this huge relief," she says.
And she and the other swimmers celebrated accordingly.

"Everyone had been cooped up, stressed out of their
minds for the last year, and people went crazy. I think they
gave us a curfew of, like, 6 a.m. because they basically
just wanted to make sure were still alive in the mornings,"
she says, laughing. "We have a really dull sport, where we
stare at the bottom of the pool …. So when we get to go
out and, uh, socialize, we're pretty crazy. Swimmers party
hard, probably harder than any other sport."

The fun continued after the Olympics, too. "After I got
the gold, it was like, okay, now I can continue with my life,"
she says. She picked up a few new hobbies, including
snowboarding, surfing, and riding street bikes. She also
picked up more tattoos. "Oh man, I don't remember most
of them. There's a star on the back of my calf that means
nothing—it's just swirly colors. I have three stars on my
lower back, they have the letters A, T, and L in them, which
stands for Amanda and Taryn and Leah, my sisters. I also
have the name Ray tattooed on my leg. It's my middle
name, my dad's middle name, and my grandpa's name."