Amanda Beard pens "It the Water They Can't See You Cry - A Memoir"

Amanda Beard, winner of seven Olympic medals in the race pool for the US, including gold over 200m breaststroke in 2004, provides insight into her life, loves and swim career in the pages of "In the Water They Can't See You Cry: A Memoir". An Olympic medallist at 15 in 1996, she recounts a  bubbly childhood with her family amid the hissing of summer lawns in sun-drenched Irvine, California. She had an obsession with neatness, order that lent itself to the disciplines required in competitive swimming. Water, she writes "became my gateway" from the time she was 4. The memoir trawls through the years of triumph and toil in the pool coupled with the emotional toll of life along the way: her parents' separation, late-onset puberty, mild dyslexia and the pressure to deliver in a sport she found "incredibly monotonous" at times. Traumas included botched relationships, bulimia, drug experimentation and what is described by some reviewers as "depression-fuelled self-inflicted cutting". There was the Playboy shoot too and much happiness in the form of her marriage, the couple's child and a return to a sport she also loved on the way to attempting to make another US team for the Olympic Games at trials in June this year aged 30. The work is published on April 3.

Written by and first posted by Craig Lord at www.SwimNews.com