The Cal 100 -- No. 70: Mary T. Meagher
We count down the top 100 individuals associated with Cal athletics, based on their impact in sports or in the world at large – a wide-open category. See if you agree.
No. 70: Mary T. Meagher
Cal Sports Connection: Meagher won six individual NCAA titles in the 100 and 200 butterfly for the Golden Bears in the 1980s and was twice the Honda Sports Award winner as the nation's top female collegiate swimmer.
Claim to Fame: She claimed five Olympic medals, including three golds at the 1986 Los Angeles Games, and world records she set in the 100 and 200 butterfly remained the standard for nearly 20 years.
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To understand how extraordinary Mary T. Meagher was as a world-class swimmer it’s necessary to both look forward and back.
Meagher, who checks in at No. 70 in The Cal 100, broke her own world record in the 200-meter butterfly for the fourth time at the 1981 U.S. championships with a mark of 2 minutes, 5.96 seconds.
How fast was that?
Her time remained the world record for 19 years — eons in competitive swimming — until Australian Susie O’Neill finally eclipsed it in 2000. Her world record of 57.93 in the 100 butterfly, set three days later at the same meet, made her the first woman to break both 59 and 58 seconds and survived 18 years.
“I didn’t think they would last so long,” Meagher said of her world records. “I’m proud of them, especially as I always swam in a natural way.”
Looking backward, it’s stunning to realize that it was just 14 years earlier when the first male swimmer broke 2:06 in the 200 butterfly. That was Mark Spitz.
Known as “Madame Butterfly,” Meagher wound up winning five Olympic medals, including gold in the 100 and 200 butterfly and in the 400 medley relay at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. She returned to compete at Seoul in 1988, but missed her chance to dominate as a teen-ager at the 1980 Moscow Games when the U.S. boycotted.
Her times in both of her specialty events were significantly faster than gold-medal winning East German swimmers recorded at Moscow.
She later told Swimming World magazine that she spent some time feeling sorry for herself after missing out on Moscow. “On the one hand, I feel so lucky, so blessed, that God chose me to have that surreal experience of winning and traveling the world,” said Meagher, who was not 16 when the Moscow Olympics were held. “But the timing (of the boycott) wasn’t ideal. According to the times, I would have won in 1980.”
Mary T. Meagher during her Cal swim career
Photo courtesy of Cal Athletics
Meagher’s competitive resume also includes 24 U.S. national titles and six individual NCAA crowns in the 100 and 200 butterfly during her career at Cal (1983-87). She was the Honda Sports Award winner in 1984-85 and 1986-87 as the top female collegiate swimmer in the country, and in ’87 was honored as the Honda Broderick Cup winner, given to the nation’s top female athlete.
In both 1981 and ’85, Swimming World named Meagher the Female World Swimmer of the Year.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky as the 10th of 11 children, Mary Terstegge (her mother’s maiden name) Meagher went by Mary T. because one of her nine sisters was named Mary Glen.
She was just 14 when she first broke the world record in the 200 fly at the 1979 Pan American Games in Puerto Rico. Already, she was almost without flaws as a swimmer, according to one of her early coaches.
“When she was a teen-ager, Mary showed no weaknesses,” Dennis Pursley was quoted saying by Olympics.com. “Every athlete I’ve ever known had some form of weakness, be it in terms of motivation, technique or physical attributes, but Mary was the exception.”
Now 58, Meagher is a member of the International Swimming Hall of Fame and has been honored locally as an inductee into the Cal Athletics Hall of Fame and the Bay Area Sports Hall of Fame. She also has a street named in her honor in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.
-- No. 71: Nikoloas Papanikolaou
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Cover photo of Mary T. Meagher at the 1988 Seoul Olympics by Porter Brinks, USA Today
Follow Jeff Faraudo of Cal Sports Report on Twitter: @jefffaraudo