Adult Swim

OLYMPIC SWIMMER AMANDA BEARD IS THE SEXIEST ATHLETE ALIVE

She walks into the Santa Monica cafe with a shiny white motorcycle helmet under her arm, smiling as she peels off the white leathers, gloves and pads she donned to make the short trip from her house not far from the beach in Venice. "A little girl stopped me outside," she says with a laugh, "and asked me if I was an astronaut."

No, Amanda Beard hasn't spent any time in outer space-not yet, anyway. She's a fanatical motorcyclist, an aspiring surfer, a daredevil snowboarder, an occasional race-car driver, a demon paintball player-and, more to the point, a world-class swimmer who has won one bronze, four silver and two gold medals at the Olympics. At 25 she also happens to be a businesswoman, a spokesperson, a brand name and a mogul in the making. As of now she's also a playboy model, a new gig that may come as a surprise to those who remember her as the skinny teenager who brought a favorite toy to the medal stand at the Atlanta Olympic Games in 1996.

"People remember me for being a scrawny 14-year-old carrying a teddy bear," she says. "When they see me they're either shocked that I'm not older or shocked that I'm not still 14. I get both

ends of the spectrum, which is fun."

She likes fun, which for her means action, adrenaline, activity. With her eye on the 2008 Olympics, she's already dreading the time-it'll come this fall, she f igures-when she has to lay off the motorcycles and throw herself into five hours a day at the pool. She'll do it will­ingly. After earning medals in 1996, 2000 and 2004, she wants a shot at her fourth Summer Games, in which she holds the Olympic record for the 200-meter breaststroke. But she'll miss driving fast and climbing high and all the rest. Hell, this is a woman who has already figured out the last possible moment she could break her arm and recover in time to make the Olympic team. (November, she reckons.)

"I know a lot of athletes who are like. 'Oh, I can't ride a motorcycle, I can't go skydiving, I can't do this and that be­cause it's in my contract,'" she says, shaking her head. "I have nothing in my contract that says I can't do anything. These are things that give my life color and fun. and if I take them away, I'm not going to be happy. Everyone around me understands: If you want me to swim fast, you have to let me enjoy my life." She laughs. "I'm hard to control."

What she means, of course, is that she's the one in control. It wasn't always like that. Eleven years ago she came out of the O.C. a five-foot-two-inch, 100-pound swimming phenom who made the Olympic team, won two individual silver medals and swam on the gold-medal-winning 4x100 meter medley relay team, nearly oblivious to the import of the occasion.

And then everything changed. She grew six inches and gained 25 pounds, earthshaking alterations for an athlete attuned to propelling her small, girlish form through the water. "I was like, Wait a second. I have this new body-what do I do?" she says. "Who am I? I'm a woman? It took me a while to get used to that. I mean, I basically had a break­down at 15 and had to rebuild myself through my teenage years, when it's already tough enough."

The rebuilding worked so well that she confounded expectations by win­ning a bronze medal in 2000, one of her proudest accomplishments. Four years later, in Athens, she won her first indi­vidual gold and two more silvers-where-upon the new body she'd learned to use helped her win the Hottest Female Ath­lete designation from ESPN.com.

She enjoyed the attention and liked modeling for Speedo and for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. As for the next step...that one took a little thought.

"I'd always been asked whether I would do playboy, and I was unsure about it," she says. "I talked to my agent, I talked (text concluded on page 130)

AMANDA BEARD

(continued /mm page 115) to my dad, I talked to my boyfriend, and finally it was like, You know what? It's flat­tering that they want me to be in such an iconic magazine. It's a huge honor, and I'm not going to have this body much longer. I'm just going to go for it."

Nervous when it came time to shoot the photos—"I'm used to being in not much clothing, but I'm always in some clothing"—she wound up having fun. And she can't wait for the shock that will go through her friends, her fans and especially her competitors when the photos hit.

"What will be most interesting is the reaction in the swimming community and of the people I swim against," she says with a grin. "The more I can distract them from my swimming, the better. Or * maybe they won't see me as much of a threat, and then bam, out of nowhere...." She laughs sweetly. "Another little mind game to play with them."

Of course the time for those water-bound mind games hasn't arrived quite yet—it will come a little later, when she gears up for the 2008 Olympic trials and then the Beijing summer Olympics. She'll have plenty of time to get back into a world where the most competi­tive women have been known to hiss at one another, spit into a competitor's lane and do other things NBC never seems to mention in its "Olympic Moments." For now. though, swimming is pretty low-key (only, say, three hours a day), and the rest of her life is beckoning.

"When I'm at the pool I'm 100 per­cent into swimming and training hard," she says, "but when I come home, I'm hanging out with my boyfriend, play­ing with my dogs, going on motorcycle rides, trying to not even think about swimming. Swimming is my getaway from my life, and my life is my get­away from swimming. And for now, I just want to get my hands into as many cookie jars as possible."