1972 Olympic gold medalist Mike Stamm has died while in Costa Rica. He was 73 years old.
According to a GoFundMe launched to help cover his final costs, Stamm died after a ‘brief hospitalization.’ While no official obituary has been published, individuals close to Stamm say he passed on June 24.
Stamm was an All-American performer at Crawford High School in San Diego, where at one point he held every school record in swimming. He also trained with Coronado-Navy Swim Association under Mike Troy, himself a double Olympic gold medalist.
His accolades caught the attention of Hall of Fame coach James “Doc” Counsilman at Indiana University, where Stamm would commit to swim in college.
As a freshman, he broke Big Ten Records in the 100 and 200 yard backstrokes and help the team to its fourth consecutive NCAA Championship. That same year, Mark Spitz was a junior.
In 1970, Stamm briefly held the World Record in the 200 meter backstroke for about three weeks.
Both Stamm and Spitz would go on to make the 1972 U.S. Olympic Team (along with five other members of the Indiana varsity squad). In Munich, Spitz won a record-setting seven Olympic gold medals.
Stamm contributed to one of those, swimming the backstroke leg of the gold medal winning 400 medley relay. He also won individual silver medals in the 100 and 200 backstrokes, breaking the American Record in the 100 back in the semifinals.
While he ultimately lost to East Germany’s Roland Matthes, in both backstroke races, both swimmers cleared the existing World Record in both finals.
A year later, Stamm won NCAA titles in the 100 and 200 yard backstrokes. He broke his own American Records in both events and led Indiana to its sixth-straight NCAA Championship.
While he had planned to take a similar route to Spitz and attend dental school, he learned his grades weren’t good enough, according to a 1978 interview.
Stamm left swimming after his senior year at Indiana and worked various jobs before returning to the sport in 1975. He missed the 1976 Olympic Team, and lived a bit of a Bohemian lifestyle before becoming a chef in 1980.
He worked at several restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Ernie’s, The Claremont Resort & Spa, Black Oak Ranch, and the St. Francis Yacht Club.
He would go on to help launch a culinary program at the Society of St. Vincent de Paul in Oakland, where he taught men and women from low income and substance abuse background how to cook, hoping to find them careers working in institutional settings (read more here).
He once compared cooking to swimming.
“I found out chefs are like me — goofy, crazy, creative,” he said in 2007. “And cooking was like swimming; it’s all about the training. It’s repetitive. When the dish goes out, that’s like the race. You can still do everything right and fail.”
One of his colleagues from the cooking world Edie Monica said of Stamm “he was a top Chef, an Olympic gold medal winner but most of all he was a good friend and such a kind person.”
Sounds like a good guy, little bit of a Renaissance man like Rick Demont
RIP