Arizona was no one's idea of a national swimming power when George DiCarlo emerged as an elite recruit at Denver's Thomas Jefferson High School in 1980.
The UA had won a single NCAA individual championship, never finished higher than fifth in the Pac-10 and was dwarfed by the league's powerful swimming conglomerate of Stanford, Cal and USC.
Texas coach Eddie Reese, who would go on to win 16 NCAA championships with the Longhorns, visited DiCarlo in Denver. Later, DiCarlo took an official recruiting visit to Arizona State and was approached by Stanford's head coach about visiting the school's campus in Palo Alto.
Today, DiCarlo, a recently retired pharmaceutical executive, laughs about his visit to ASU. "I asked the Stanford coach if it was appropriate to recruit me while I was on an official visit to another school,'' he remembers. He ultimately chose to enroll and swim at Arizona. Good decision.
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George DiCarlo became the first Arizona Wildcat to win a gold medal in the 1984 Summer Olympics.
Those elite coaches from Texas and Stanford knew what they were doing. Four years later, DiCarlo won an Olympic gold medal in the 400 meters, setting an American record. He also won a silver medal at the '84 Los Angeles Olympics.
There's little doubt that DiCarlo triggered Arizona's rise as a swimming superpower across the next 30 years. He became just the second Wildcat to win an NCAA individual championship (he won the 500 meters in 1983 and 1984). Now you almost need a calculator to realize that 17 Arizona men's swimmers went on to win NCAA individual championships, Olympians such as Simon Burnett, Roland Schoeman, Kevin Cordes, Albert Subirats and so many more.
Today, DiCarlo says, "I can fondly look back and grin. What a ride.''
In the Star's eight-week summer series about the Mount Rushmore athletes and coaches of UA sports, I found it easy to select DiCarlo as the athlete from UA men's Olympic sports — tennis, track, swimming, golf — who carved out the first Mount Rushmore spot from those sports.
My other choices are nine-time NCAA championship swimmer Ryk Neethling (1997-2000), 1960s distance runner George Young and homegrown 1960s tennis All-American Bill Lenoir.
You may ask about former UA golfer Jim Furyk, who has gone on to win the U.S. Open and become a USA Ryder Cup captain. True, Furyk was a vital part of Arizona's 1992 NCAA championship team, but he was never the No. 1 golfer at Arizona, unable to surpass future PGA Tour players such as Robert Gamez and David Berganio.
Here’s more about my other Mount Rushmore picks of UA Olympic sports:
Arizona tennis player Bill Lenoir won two high school state singles titles, played Wimbledon twice and also coached the UA and ASU tennis teams.
– Lenoir: After winning state tennis titles at Tucson High in 1959 and 1960, Lenoir chose to stay home and play for new UA coach Dave Snyder. It was a match made in tennis heaven. With Lenoir playing the No. 1 singles spot, Arizona finished third in the NCAA finals in 1962, fourth in 1963 and fifth in 1964. Lenoir was a three-time All-American who went on to play at Wimbledon twice immediately after his college years. As a collegian, he twice defeated UCLA's Arthur Ashe, one of the sport’s historic icons.
Lenoir wasn't all about tennis. He was a 3.75 GPA student whose senior class list included advanced geometry, chemistry, physics, ROTC and English. His father was a UA law professor.
Lenoir was so respected at Arizona that when Snyder took a year's sabbatical from teaching/coaching at Arizona in 1966, the 23-year-old Lenoir served as Arizona's head tennis coach. Lenoir went on to become the head tennis coach at ASU — yes, ASU — and spent the rest of his life as a tennis instructor in Florida. He died in 2007.
– Young: Lightly recruited out of Silver City, New Mexico, Young almost immediately became one of America's leading distance runners. Amazingly, he made the USA Olympic team in 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1972. He won a bronze medal in the steeplechase at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and became one of the first distance runners in American history to crack the 4-minute mile, doing so in 1972.
Young made Team USA as an Arizona junior in 1959 at the Pan American Games, was fifth in the steeplechase at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and, at age 31, made the USA Olympic team at the '72 Munich Olympics in the 5,000 meters. He also made the USA Olympic team in the marathon in 1968.
After his impressive running career, Young became the athletic director and track coach at Arizona Central College, where he became most known for hiring former CAC baseball player Mike Candrea as CAC's softball coach (Candrea won two NJCAA national championships before being hired by Arizona. Young died in 2022.
– Neethling: Easily the most successful swimmer in Arizona history, men's or women's, the South African swimmer won nine NCAA individual swimming championships, then a record. As a senior, he led the Wildcats to a third-place finish at the NCAAs, winning the 500 freestyle, the 1650 freestyle and being part of a relay team that won a national title. Neethling was a 17-time All-American who won a gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics in the 1,500 freestyle relay.
My enduring memory of Neethling came on a Saturday afternoon at the 2000 Sydney Olympics when, as a college senior, he took on the world's 10 greatest distance swimmers before a rowdy, overflow crowd of 17,000 at the Sydney swimming arena. Incredibly, Neethling broke his personal record by 14 seconds, finishing fourth to Olympic icons Grant Hackett, Kieran Perkins and Chris Thompson. Neethling finished in 15 minutes and 48 seconds.
Swimming experts said it was the greatest 1,500-meter race in history. Afterward, Neethling stopped to chat with me on his walk to the locker room. "I'll never forget this day','' he said. "I couldn't have swam a second faster. The gold medal got away, but someday I'll get one.''
Four years later, he did just that.
Greg Hansen's picks for Mount Rushmore of Arizona baseball | Greg Hansen
