With each powerful stroke through the water, Olympic gold medalist Amanda Beard could feel her worries evaporate.
Her parents’ divorce.
Her bulimia.
Her troubled love life.
Her self-mutilation.
Once back on dry land, the world champion swimmer was soon drowning again in her sorrows — and the solutions remained elusive.
“It kind of started off as how I dealt with big issues,” she recounts. “The divorce, I didn’t deal with it. I retreated to the pool, swam and swept the emotions under the rug.
“Nothing gets solved that way.”
Her new memoir, “In The Water They Can’t See You Cry,” offers details of Beard’s plunge into the deep end of competitive swimming — and the fallout for a teen-ager uncomfortable in the spotlight.
By the end, Beard emerges from her personal whirpool intact and improved, but sparing no details along the way.
“It’s very personal,” Beard says by phone from her Arizona home. “This isn’t something you’re telling a girlfriend over coffee. It’s a very different experience to put it down on paper. It’s very nerve-wracking.”
So why lay it all out in print?
“I work with a lot of young female athletes and moms,” she explains. “And I felt like a fake standing up talking about everything in my life without saying that it was a roller coaster of a journey, that I have had hard, dark times.
“There are people going through, or dealing with, the same things. I felt so embarrassed, but I’m now feeling confident about who I am. The things I went through, I’m not ashamed or embarrassed about.”
Beard arrived on the world sporting scene at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, a precocious 14-year-old who carried a teddy bear named Harold while winning two silvers and a gold medal.
By then, her parents were already split up and the sudden attention was crippling for a girl yet to hit puberty. The water became a refuge for Beard, a two-time Olympian before her 21st birthday.
“You’re alone with your thoughts,” she says. “It’s a sanctuary. I don’t meditate. But this was my form of meditation.”
The pool proved only a temporary panacea.
AMANDA BEARD: STUNNING BOOK EXCERPT TELLS HOW OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST & MODEL CUT HERSELF
The cutting, initially sparked by fights with her then-boyfriend, began when the winner of seven Olympic medals was in college.
The small slashes in her arms continued until a bloody gashing produced a confession of the secret self-mutilation to her now-husband, Sacha Brown.
“I wasn’t healthy,” says Beard, whose sex symbol status — she posed naked for Playboy and for Peta — and clutch pool performances presented a far different public persona.
“There’s all kinds of health — nutrition, exercising,” Beard says, “but there’s also mental health, and my mental health was awful.”
Those days are in the past, thanks to therapy, a stretch on medication and a happy marriage.
Beard is now 30, the mother of a 2-year-old boy — and hopeful of making her fifth Olympics this summer in London. Trials for the U.S. team are set for June.
Bur first, the swimmer is set to appear Wednesday in Ridgewood, N.J. at Bookends, and Thursday at the Book Revue in Huntington, L.I.
While the book revisits some painful memories, Beard said the process left her with no regrets.
“I would not change anything about my life,” she said. “That’s what makes you who you are, what sculpts and makes you stronger. I’m very much a stronger person in every aspect because of the things I went through.”
lmcshane@nydailynews.com
