Gold Medal Life

Amanda Borden calls it “living gold medal.” It’s a motivational mantra the former Olympic gymnast, 39, learned from her coach, Mary Lee Tracy, that Borden says not only helped her captain the USA gymnastics team (later dubbed the “Magnificent Seven”) to gold medal glory at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, but has effectively guided her to grip the high bar in life ever since. 

“I love to motivate others to dream big and work hard to accomplish their dreams,” says Borden, who, along with husband Brad Cochran, runs Gold Medal Gym in Tempe and Chandler, where she also coaches. “We are here to teach kids gymnastics, obviously. But we are also life teachers. I always tell our employees and our kids, ‘You know, gymnastics is going to end for everybody at some point – whether you’re an Olympic champion or not. But then you can go on to use the skills you learned by being an athlete to be successful at other things in life.’”

Borden is one of several Olympic medalists living in the Valley who now coach young hopefuls to go for the gold, and who’ve been able to parlay their championship moments into successful training careers.

“When I touched the wall, I knew that I had had the race of my life,” says Mesa-born former competitive swimmer Misty Hyman, whose gold medal win in the women’s 200-meter butterfly at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney ranks as one of the games’ greatest stand-up-and-cheer moments. Hyman’s upset over the undefeated Australian Susie O’Neill surprised everyone – especially Hyman, whose wide-eyed amazement at seeing her name atop the scoreboard mirrored every athlete’s most genuine Olympic dream.

“It kind of had that movie moment feeling, where it superseded reality,” Hyman, 37, says. “If I had to write the screenplay myself, I couldn’t have written it better.”

Hyman surprised again by not capitalizing on her movie moment, declining an offer to appear on a Wheaties box to go back and finish her senior year with the swim team at Stanford. “I wanted to go back to college and have a somewhat normal senior year,” she says.

After Stanford, Hyman spent three years working in the hotel industry in St. Croix and another year in Switzerland. She returned to Arizona to coach at her alma mater, Shadow Mountain High School, only to find her Olympic moment still carried cachet. Today she serves as assistant coach for ASU’s swim team and gives private swim instruction ($150/hour) at Sanctuary Camelback Mountain Resort & Spa. “I never wanted to sing ‘Glory Days,’” Hyman says, laughing. “But I found I still had a lot to share and that there was a niche for me, that people were still interested in having me share what I had learned from a life in swimming. It was a pleasant surprise – again!”

ASU alum Nick Hysong, who sprang to Olympic fame by winning gold in men’s pole vaulting in the 2000 Sydney games with a 5.9-meter jump, claims his life didn’t change much afterward – although he admits the win presented new opportunities. “There was no question that I was going to be in whatever meet I wanted to compete in after that,” says Hysong, who went on to win world championships in Edmonton and Helsinki.

Olympics fame also allowed Hysong, who previously held workaday jobs at Circuit City and the Phoenix Public Library, to launch his dream business. Today Hysong and his wife Kolette run RISEN Performance, a training program operated on a 1.3-acre track and pit located directly behind their home off of Shea Boulevard and 38th Street.

“We bought this place specifically to put the pit in,” says Hysong, 44. “I had the runway and the mats in within six months… There’s a ballet school across the street, there’s a Montessori school next to us. It fits the neighborhood.” Hysong, who still holds the pole vaulting record at ASU, says his backyard academy has trained some top vaulters, including Brophy’s Cole Walsh, who won the USA Track & Field Junior Championship in 2014. But he’s yet to mentor another Olympic champion.

That may soon change. “I have three post-collegiate athletes now that are working on hitting the Olympic trial qualifying mark,” he says. “And they’re all… really close to making it.”

Light flyweight boxer Michael Carbajal has had perhaps the most storied post-Olympics career. After winning the silver medal in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, he went pro. He retired as a five-time world champ in 1999, and was elected into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 2006.

Carbajal, 49, still lives in the Downtown Phoenix neighborhood where he was born, and coaches youth at his Ninth Street Gym. There, in addition to teaching his right hook, he imparts life lessons. “You’ve got to love what you do,” he says. “You can’t just do it because you want fame or money – because that doesn’t always last. You have to fight because you love it, and you’ve got to have a whole lot of confidence. That’s what I instill in the kids that come through here. It’s all about building world champions in life.”