Stroke of luck

When Michelle Chow was first introduced to competitive swimming, she was terrible at it.

Her parents immigrated to the United States from China under the quota system during World War II.

“So their whole life was very, very different,” she says, explaining that her mother pushed her toward the pool. “She really wanted us to be physically active, so she put us in a summer league swim team.”

Chow’s older brother and sister were both very gifted, and soon coaches noticed her siblings and tried to recruit them to USA Swimming, which was called AAU Swimming at the time.

“I remember [the coach] came to our house, and my mom said, ‘OK, we’ll join this year-round team, but you have to take Michelle,” Chow recalls with a laugh.

And lucky for her, he did. Over time she got better and better, and by 12, she was really good.

“As with any athlete, to triumph, you have to have the physical gifts, the drive and determination, the opportunity and the support,” she explains. “So I don’t know how it happened that they picked the right sport for me, and that I liked it so much that I was driven, but I was. Being on time was late to me.”

Her dad, an engineer, built Chow a swim bench that allowed her to do dry land swim training at home, “and I just did that religiously,” she says. “I was one of those kids.”

It showed. In high school, she won the Pennsylvania State Championships every year she was eligible. During high school, swimmers can only set two individual events per year, so the maximum events swimmers can win is eight.

“So that’s what I did,” Chow says. “My claim to fame is that I set the eight-for-eight unbreakable record.”

And so far nobody has tied it.

“I was third in the nation in high school rankings, and that opened up a whole bunch of opportunities for me — just the highest that were available,” she says. “I didn’t appre- ciate it at the time, but I got full scholarships from everybody. I wish I’d kept those letters.”

She decided on Texas A&M University with a full swimming scholarship. It was a time that challenged her perfectionist nature.

“I didn’t get all the things I thought would just happen,” she explains. “I always thought that equation of: work hard, train well and compete equals success. At the time, it was the most devastating thing when that didn’t happen.”

She qualified for the NCAA, which only about 30 women make each year, but she didn’t place individually. She also qualified for the Olympic trials, “but I wasn’t really a contender,” she points out.

“But I had some successes. I was one of those people who made the highest qualifications, but I didn’t actually place or make a national team,” she says. “I was just kind of like a bridesmaid, but it taught me a lot about finding meaning in where you are and at the level you are.”

Plus, all the hard work paid off when she was looking for a job and potential employers were looking for that extra thing that set her apart as a candidate.

“That helped me tremendously, especially once I went to business school and started interviewing at investment banks,” she says. “They wanted ultracompetitive people, and that’s what helped me get my job at Goldman Sachs, which back then was the best job you could get. So that’s the thing that I think really changed my life.”

After college she only took a year off before she started U.S. Masters Swimming. She was almost as fast as she was in college, so she set two world records right away.

These days, she doesn’t have as much time to train, so she’s intensely focused when she swims — always thinking about her technique and what she could do better.

Between work and raising her two daughters, swimming gives her extra balance and a sense of self, she says. “When you look at the clock, you know exactly who you are to a hundredth of a second.”