Swimmer Jessica Hardy nervous about return

FEDERAL WAY, Wash. (AP) — Jessica Hardy sat up straight on a wooden chair in the lobby of suburban hotel, one mile away from where she will resume her once-skyrocketing swimming career.

She is a year away from a shocking heartbreak she likens to having a terminal illness.

Her shoulders, the engines that propelled her to set a world record in the 100 breaststroke and win four NCAA championships, shrug.

“I’m not in race shape at all, so I’m a little bit nervous — I’m really nervous for this week,” she said with a small chuckle Tuesday, a day before was set to return to competition in the U.S. Open championships.

“If I don’t do well, it’s OK, I really don’t have pressure on myself, because I have nothing else to lose.”

Hardy will swim in the 100 freestyle tonight. It was the event after which she tested positive last July for a banned supplement in a disputed drug test at the 2008 Olympic trials, weeks before she was to swim in her first games in Beijing.

The 22-year-old Hardy said she has matured and become more focused while out of competition. She says losing her childhood dream of competing in the Olympics caused her to lose most of her carefree nature. She also lost tens of thousands of dollars, depleting her savings, to get a two-year suspension reduced to one year by an arbitration panel in May.

To make the Olympics, she had stopped her pursuit of a degree at California for a year and, she says, lost all semblance of a social life to train all day, every day.

During that year, she mixed into water a powdered supplement called Arginine Extreme made by Advocare International, a Carrollton, Texas-based company that endorsed her. Many of her teammates on the national team were drinking it, she said. She said she constantly quizzed them about the supplement and what it contained, fearful it might cause a positive drug test, and she was assured it was legal.

“Swimmers basically get lucky to not test positive,” she said. “I just did it because I was thinking if I was sacrificing my life, why not do everything I can — within the rules, obviously.”

Hardy was tested three times during the 2008 trials in Omaha, Neb. The results were negative for samples taken on July 1, after she won the 100 breaststroke, and on July 6, after she finished second in the 50 free.

But Hardy’s “A” and backup “B” samples both came back positive for a low level of clenbuterol, a prohibited anabolic agent, from the test on July 4 when she finished fourth in the 100 free.

“I started crying, hysterically, and didn’t stop for 48 hours,” she said.