In the Water, Harvard's Unexpected Star Thrives

Like many Harvard students, Beth Kolbe likes to use her summers to escape the campus bubble and travel abroad.

The senior is an accomplished Paralympic swimmer but, as a dedicated student athlete at Harvard, is forced to limit most of her competition to the summer months. So when an invitation to compete at the Parapan American Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil lined up with Harvard’s 2007 summer vacation, Kolbe accepted, and in the process, captured four individual medals at the event including gold in the 50-meter backstroke.

Entering her fourth year of participation on the Harvard women’s swimming and diving team, Kolbe’s name is a familiar one in the world of Crimson sports, but she didn’t come across her specialty the way most athletes do.

Kolbe never focused her athletic efforts on swimming until a car accident at the age of 14 left her paralyzed from the chest down and in search of a different form of exercise.

“I started swimming as part of my rehab therapy,” the former volleyball player said. “They wanted to give me a new medium to work out in and I immediately loved it, even though I was swimming laps in the heated pool with the elderly at the beginning.”

Shortly after, Kolbe, an Ohio native, began competing in her state’s Wheelchair Games which she said provided the encouraging start she needed, since an almost equal number of athletes competed as medals were granted.

At the urging of a fellow swimmer with a disability, Kolbe headed west for the national meet in Seattle the following month, where she received a formal introduction to the U.S. Paralympic swim program.

“In Paralympic swimming, you are classified S1 to S10, with S1 being the most severe disability” she said. “I was a three and probably will be forever, but I’m okay with that.”

Upon returning from Seattle, Kolbe met Peggy Ewald, the coach of a local club team, at the YMCA while training one day. Ewald had never coached an athlete with a disability before but took an immediate interest in Kolbe and invited her to train with the club.

“It was a new adventure for me,” Ewald said. “In the first days of working with Beth, I really had to go through my anatomy to trace some of the nerves that she did not have to the muscles to figure out why I couldn’t get her to do those movements.”

With time, though, the focus would shift “from what she didn’t have to what she did have access to.”

Kolbe’s swimming continued to improve under the direction of Ewald, but she would soon add a second coach and a 30-athlete team to her entourage.

Valedictorian of her high school class, she entered her freshman year not only looking to showcase her talents in the classroom but her athletic prowess as well.

“I met [head coach Stephanie Wriede-Morawski ’92] as a prefrosh,” she said. “But as swimmer with a disability going into a DI school, I didn’t know how I would be welcomed onto the team because I am not going to be able to score points.”

But Wriede-Morawski recognized that Kolbe was a serious athlete within her own field and, as a result, made her team manager in her first year at Harvard.

By the following year she was on the roster, training with the Crimson and swimming home meets with the squad.

“It’s always fun to cheer Beth on,” said Harvard women’s swimming and diving co-captain Lindsay Hart. “In a longer event she sets records at all the marks along the way.”

Though a Crimson swimmer and busy college student, Kolbe has maintained a relationship with home coach Ewald and continues to train for international competition, often traveling to an exotic location when the Harvard team “is just heading down to Columbia,” Hart noted.

But don’t think she’s one to drop her books at the first mention of a prestigious swim meet, as Kolbe declined invitations to both the 2004 Paralympics in Athens and the 2006 World Championships in South Africa due to her commitments at Harvard.

“I heard stories from the other swimmers,” she said about the two events, “but I don’t have any regrets. I’ll have more chances.”

The first came this summer at the Parapan American Games in Rio, for which she was selected captain of the women’s swimming contingent. Kolbe’s four medals helped her team surpass its 54-medal goal and, fittingly, her silver medal in the 100-meter freestyle marked the team’s 54th.

“It makes it extra special to be the one that won the medal to match our goal, but it is even better that we surpassed our goal by three medals,” Kolbe said in a press release for U.S. Paralympics.

A second opportunity might also be around the corner, as the U.S. will send approximately 250 athletes to the 2008 Beijing Paralmypic Games next summer.

“The plan is to stay as consistent in the water and as healthy as possible,” Ewald said. “Since injuries and illness can set an athlete with a disability even further behind.”

And while the 2008 Olympics is a lot to take on for the moment, Kolbe isn’t planning to stop there.

“In the Paralympic setting, people can last at the international level longer,” she said. “I originally considered retiring after Beijing but now plan to go out for London in 2012…I definitely see a few [more] Paralympics in me.”

—Staff writer Rebecca A. Compton can be reached at compton@fas.harvard.edu.