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BOZICH | The Forde family has an amazing Olympic swimming story to tell

  • Updated
  • 5 min to read
Brooke Forde

Photo courtesy Stanford University.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Reporting on world-class sporting events is part of the job for Pat Forde.

The Tokyo Olympics will be the seventh Summer Games he has covered in his Hall of Fame sports writing career. But a month before the torch is lit, they are clearly the most exhilarating.

“I love covering the Olympics,” Forde said. “But as you know, they are really hard and long, and it’s difficult. They’re fun to cover. But to be able to cover an Olympics and see my kid compete, it’s crazy.”

Crazy — and reality.

His daughter, Brooke, will swim for the U.S. Olympic team.

The journey from the Douglass Hills club team to Tokyo has been long, winding and wildly successful, fueled by early-morning wake-up calls to report for practice.

Pat and his wife, Tricia, agree that she did most of the driving to Lakeside. They don’t agree on the time they set on the alarm clock. He said 4:22 a.m.

“That’s not correct,” Tricia said. “Wake-up time was 4:05.”

The Fordes are one of Louisville’s First Families of Swimming. Both of Brooke’s older brothers swam for St. Xavier High School. Mitchell competed for the University of Missouri, while Clayton swam for the University of Georgia, earning a spot in the 2016 Olympic Trials.

All three began with Douglass Hills Hurricanes. Their mother, Tricia, was a top swimmer at Lakeside and Northwestern. Pat wrote for The Courier-Journal for 17 years before working for ESPN, Yahoo! Sports and his current position at Sports Illustrated.

As her parents remember it, Brooke had one swimming lesson. She learned by sitting with her mom at practice and then mimicking her brothers. Having older brothers made her competitive.

“A lot of swimming,” Tricia Forde said. “I was so blessed that all three of them were swimming, because we were all in the same place, by and large, at the same time.” 

Pat and Tricia Forde

Pat and Tricia Forde are celebrating their daughter Brooke's spot on the U.S. Olympic swimming team. WDRB Photo

Brooke is now 22 but had that star quality in elementary school. She was 8 when she set her first state record. Tricia remembers that at 9, Brooke went to a meet in Indiana and delivered the best age-group time in the country in the 50-meter butterfly.

“She hadn’t even been swimming year-round very long,” Pat Forde said. “At that point, you’re like, 'Maybe this one is a little different.'"

Actually, world-class different. At Sacred Heart, Brooke won multiple state titles and made U.S international teams. She was named national high school swimmer of the year.

She had college offers from Texas, Virginia, Notre Dame, Georgia, all the top swimming powers. She settled on Stanford, where Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky showed her the fabulous campus on her recruiting visit.

At Palo Alto, Forde was a member of two NCAA championship teams while winning four events. She’s a superb student who was named the Pac-12’s top swimming scholar athlete while earning her degree in human biology. She’ll return next year for a fifth year while securing a master’s degree in epidemiology.

As it was for so many athletes, Brooke’s senior year was more challenging because of COVID-19. She tested positive and spent two weeks in complete isolation, forced to train by doing calisthenics in her room.

Still, she finished first in her specialty, the 400-individual medley, at the 2021 NCAA meet in Greensboro, North Carolina.

But after 17 years of competition, their trip to the Olympic Trials in Omaha, Nebraska, last week was something that at one point Pat described as “the most miserably excruciating” for Brooke and her family. After she did not make the team in the 400-IM, she pivoted to the 200-freestyle. Her qualifying time registered as the 15th-fastest. She needed to finish at sixth or better to put herself in a position to earn a place on the 800-meter freestyle relay team.

Shot or no shot?

No shot, right? That's a ridiculous jump for 15th to top six.

Brooke Forde has a record of doing the unlikely. It doesn’t matter if those wake-up calls were at 4:22 or 4:05, she didn’t make all of them to surrender in Omaha. She didn't chase after Clayton and Mitchell to give up.

She finished sixth in the 200-freestyle, putting herself in position to make the team.

The fretting still wasn’t over. Brooke did not swim on Saturday or Sunday, the last two nights of the trials. She needed one of five swimmers to finish first or second in the 50-meter freestyle before her spot on the team was official.

“My sportswriter brain kind of kicked in to a degree,” Pat Forde said. “OK, this is what we need to happen. Here’s how likely it is.

“One night, like yeah, you’ve got a great shot. Awesome. Then, ugh, it didn’t quite go as well as we need it … Sunday night, your Olympic fate rests on someone else’s 24 seconds in the sprint.”

Neither Pat nor Tricia were certain they could watch and endure another second of drama. Brooke even suggested she was ready to go home.

“I couldn’t blame her,” Tricia said.

They stayed. And watched — from the arena, not the concourse, as Tricia originally planned.

What they saw was exactly what Brooke needed. Abbey Weitzeil, a rival swimmer from the University of California, broke sharply and hung on to finish second behind Forde’s Stanford teammate Simone Manuel.

Brooke Forde joined Mary T. Meagher, Leigh Ann Fetter and Caroline Burckle as the fourth former Sacred Heart swimmer to make the U.S. Olympic swimming team.

“We were jumping up and down and hugging, and it was great,” Pat Forde said.

“We had a great field of vision to where Brooke was with her Stanford teammates and they were all hugging her ... the happiness was actually radiating out of her. There was a picture from the awards afterward and just this big smile.”

“I hugged Pat,” Tricia said. “I hugged my Mom. I was just saying, ‘It’s over. Thank goodness. Thank goodness it all worked out.”

Because of COVID, Japan will not allow foreign spectators, so Tricia and Brooke’s brothers will not make the trip to the Summer games.

But there will be at least one American fan: Her father, who will be watching from his seat on press row, continuing his Olympic journey that started with the 1992 games in Barcelona, Spain. He will likely be the only American parent at the pool.

“It’s almost like survivor’s guilt,” Pat Forde said. “All the other parents can’t go, and I can. Maybe they should have been sportswriters.”

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