Michael Phelps wasn’t the only swimmer to receive a featured role in last week’s National League Championship Series stop in Phoenix.
Amy Van Dyken, a six-time Olympic gold medalist and fellow Phoenix-area resident, threw out the first pitch prior to Game 3. Unlike Phelps, though, her first pitch led to a Diamondbacks win over the Phillies – the team’s first in the series.
Van Dyken, 50, swam at the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games, winning six gold medals. Four of those were relays, and in 1996 the list included the 50 free and 100 fly individually.
At those 1996 Olympics, she became the first American woman to win four gold medals in swimming in one Olympics.
In 2014, long after retiring from swimming, Van Dyken was injured in an ATV crash that severed her spinal cord at the T11 vertebra that left her paralyzed from the waist down.
This is not Van Dyken’s first time on the mound. She also threw out a first pitch at a Diamondbacks game in 2015 as part of Disabilities Awareness Day.
After retiring from swimming, Van Dyken had a career in both morning drive-time talk radio in Phoenix and as the co-host of a sports show on Fox Sports Radio.
Would
Great swimmer, horrible commentator
Easier to be a great swimmer with Balco’s help. Horrible commentator is underselling it. 50 year old announcer suggestively growling at college guys during men’s PACs this March.
I am trying to be more positive these days!
Ok, I should support that.
She was a clientele of BALCO.
Client. Clientele is a collective noun.
I thought she was so innocent as she constantly accused other swimmers of doping.