From Episcopal Academy to the Paris Olympics, here are the nine remarkable stories of swimmer Ivan Puskovitch

Every Olympic athlete is supposed to have a story, and every Olympic athlete’s story is supposed to be sweet or sad, inspirational or dramatic, sentimental or even secretive. Ivan Puskovitch doesn’t have a story. He has stories. Here are nine.

Back in May, while he spoke on his cell phone from Colorado Springs, Colo., Puskovitch glanced at an elastic band wrapped around his left wrist. An Episcopal Academy alumnus, he was at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center, preparing for the Summer Games in Paris, where he will represent the United States in the men’s marathon swimming event. On his wristband were the words, “WORK THE DREAM,” the motto of the Fran Crippen Foundation.

Crippen remains the most famous open-water swimmer in the world … nearly 14 years after his death. He grew up in Conshohocken, was a star swimmer at Germantown Academy and the University of Virginia, and, at 26, drowned amid dangerously hot weather conditions during a 2010 race in the United Arab Emirates. His sister, Maddy, competed at the 2000 Games in Sydney. Fran never qualified for the Olympics. Puskovitch never met him. A generation separated them. That distance didn’t stop Puskovitch from idolizing him. A giant poster of Crippen hangs on his bedroom wall.

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“I was very much aware of who he was because I saw his name all over the record books,” Puskovitch said. “Pennsylvania swimming is really rich in history. It’s a rich history of success, rich in tradition of love and passion for the sport. Fran was this incredibly admired athlete and ambassador of the sport across all of Pennsylvania. In the country and the world, he’s a symbol, and he’s a symbol I think of regularly.”

Robyn Rabinovitch put her elder son in a pool before he could walk. She had swum at the beaches along southeastern Connecticut as a child and was giving lessons before she was a teenager, and, after having Ivan splash around in a 4-foot, easy-setup pool in their backyard in Scranton, she signed him up for a team when he turned 5. His immersion was total. Rabinovitch took up coaching again. Her swimmers became Ivan’s babysitters.

At 8, he entered his first open-water competition, at a lake near State College in the Eastern Zone championships. The weather was overcast, rain falling intermittently, and Rabinovitch lost sight of her son during the race because there was so much fog. She saw him again when he crossed the finish line … in first place.

At 9, he and his younger brother, Vlad, climbed into the back of their mother’s car after she broke up with their father, MJ; she and the boys relocated to West Chester: better educational and swimming opportunities there, she figured. At 10, Ivan broke the national age-group record in the 500-yard freestyle. “That was the moment where things changed in the sport for me,” he said. “I realized I can do something impactful here. I can pursue this at the highest level. I have the talent. I have the work ethic. I have the drive. I have the love for it.” He also had the perfect physical makeup: tall and lean with a body wired for endurance. “That boy is nothing but slow-twitch muscle,” Rabinovitch said. “Don’t ask him to do the 50 free. But he’ll do the mile for you, and he’ll gladly swim a 10K.”

Puskovitch is 23, and he’s never gotten a haircut in his life. He has never wanted one. “I like long hair,” he said. “It suits my vibe and lifestyle now. Love rock. Love metal. It’s nice to bang your head with such long hair.” Blond and wavy, his hair falls to the top of his rear end. Since he’s 6-foot-1, by a rough estimate, he has nearly 4 feet worth of locks to stuff under his cap before a race.

“The pool chemicals keep it in check — they do a number on it,” he said. “I brush it to keep it at a maintained length. It would be so much longer if I wasn’t a swimmer.”

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At La Salle University’s Kirk Pool in the Eastern Interscholastic Championships, Puskovitch broke Crippen’s 12-and-under record in the 500-yard freestyle and received the Fran Crippen Award for it. With that achievement, the men who coached Crippen early in his career — Dick Shoulberg and Chris Lear, longtime coaches at Germantown Academy Aquatic Club — became the same men who coached Puskovitch early in his.

“He and his mom approached me and Shoulberg about coming to swim at GA,” Lear said in a phone interview, “and Shoulberg was like, ‘I want you to look out for this young man, take care of him.’”

Puskovitch at first attended Episcopal but swam for GA. “Ironic,” he said, “because they’re rival institutions.” When Shoulberg left GA after the school put him on administrative leave in 2013 — rumors of a hazing incident between two swimmers were investigated and resulted in no sanctions — Puskovitch and Lear left, too. The former started swimming for Episcopal; the latter took a job there as an assistant coach. “They are still my coaches,” Puskovitch said. “I loved them as people. I trusted them as people. They know how to coach me as a person, not just as an athlete.”

His schedule, throughout middle and high school, was time-swallowing: practice from 6 to 7:30 every morning and two hours in the afternoon or evening during the school year, then three hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon during the summer. The accolades piled up, just like they had for Crippen: Inter-Ac championships, long-course championships, scholastic All-America awards, pool records. “I feel like I’ve done justice by Fran’s legacy,” Puskovitch said, “and going to the Olympics off the development I reaped under Coach Shoulberg and Chris — Fran never had that opportunity, and most people in the sport would say he damn near probably would have gone in 2012 at the London Olympics. There really is no way to overstate the impact he has on me.”

When Puskovitch swam at the World Aquatic Championships in Doha last February, a berth in the Olympics on the line, Lear woke at 4 a.m. and, still in bed, got online to see if the results were in. Puskovitch had to finish among the top 15 in the open-water race to qualify for Paris. Lear squinted at the standings. Puskovitch … 14th … He started to shake. Then his phone flickered with a text message. It was Puskovitch, confirming the good news.

“It was awesome,” Lear said. “Fran was like my little brother. I started at GA when I was in my early 20s, and here comes this 8-, 9-year-old boy, and we hit it off immediately. For the two of us, we came up through the ranks together — me as a coach and him as an athlete. We formed that brotherly bond, always looking out for each other, and as we got older, we were more like best friends.

“With Ivan, it’s almost the same way. I get this kid at a young age, and I’m able to provide a stable environment for him for a lengthy period of time amid some pretty tough times. We stay in touch the same way, talk the same way. There’s still swimming talk, but now it’s ‘How are you doing? What are you up to?’ It’s really big.”

Bigger than most knew, actually. Some pretty tough times, Lear said, and he was right. He was one of the few people connected to Episcopal who had an inkling of just how trying and traumatic Puskovitch’s years there were.

Puskovitch wanted to go to college somewhere outside Pennsylvania. He picked Southern California. The man in charge of its swimming program, Dave Salo, had coached in the Olympics more than once, and Catherine Kase, one of Salo’s assistants, was a widely respected open-water coach. “That was the match made in heaven,” Puskovitch said. Until it wasn’t.

Salo resigned in January 2020, he said, to focus exclusively on training swimmers for the Tokyo Olympics. Kase also left USC shortly thereafter because, she said in a phone interview, her husband had a business opportunity in Boise, Idaho, that he couldn’t pass up. Jeremy Kipp, Salo’s successor, resigned in March 2022 amid allegations that he mentally and emotionally abused his swimmers.

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“I almost quit the sport,” said Puskovitch, who declined to speak on the record in any detail about Kipp’s tenure as head coach. “I was really considering it. I’m 21, just finishing up my junior year of college, and I’m swimming at the same level as when I was 14. I’m going to practice and giving a hundred percent, but it’s remarkable how much the mind impacts your ability to succeed.”

Desperate, Puskovitch contacted Mohammad Khadembashi, the head coach at TSM Aquatics, an elite club in Santa Monica, on April 21, 2022; yes, Puskovitch remembers the date. Khadembashi was surprised to learn that Puskovitch, when training, was swimming freestyle and freestyle only, so he revamped Puskovitch’s entire program, incorporating more strokes, forcing him to swim faster during workouts, reducing the amount of weightlifting that Puskovitch did. Within six months, Puskovitch’s time in the mile had dropped by nearly 90 seconds. “We shocked the body,” Khadembashi said, “and the body responded.”

Concerns about the conditions of the open-water competition — about the cleanliness and temperature of the water, about the effect of a city’s overall pollution, about the swimmers’ health and safety — are something of a twisted Olympic tradition. In 2019, less than a year before Tokyo was scheduled to host the Summer Games, marathon-swimming competitors complained that the water in the Odaiba area of Tokyo Bay smelled like a toilet. At the 2016 Games, the rivers of Rio de Janeiro were contaminated with garbage and human waste. After the 2008 Summer Olympics, researchers found that Beijing’s air pollution was far higher than levels that the World Health Organization considered excessive.

The Paris Games have had their own problems in this regard. The open-water events are supposed to take place in the Seine River, where swimming has been illegal for more than 100 years. “Everyone knows what that water’s like,” Puskovitch said, “a lot of sewage.” The city poured a reported $1.5 billion (in American dollars) into trying to stop rainwater and wastewater from turning the triathlon and open-water events into E. coli conventions. Even as the Olympics officially opened Friday, it’s still possible that the Seine will be so unsafe that the marathon-swimming competition, scheduled for Aug. 9, will have to be moved indoors.

“I think about that a lot,” Puskovitch said. “I would really love to race in the Seine. It’s so iconic. That said, I’m a little bit disappointed they’ve had so much time to get this thing cleaned up, and there’s still no certainty.”

His mother simply wants a safe race. That’s all. After every open-water race he swims, Puskovitch texts or calls Rabinovitch to let her know that he’s all right. “Just give me some communication that you made it through that race,” she said. “I expect every swimmer going into that water is coming out of that water.”

Khadembashi, known as “Coach Mo,” was a self-taught swimmer and self-made swimming guru. Growing up in Iran, he waded into the Caspian Sea and used a crude facsimile of the breaststroke to propel himself through the water. When he was 15, in 2002, he and parents moved to Southern California. “They wanted out of Iran,” said Khadembashi, who turns 37 in September, and his father had cousins who lived near Los Angeles. He spoke no English. He learned the language at home by watching subtitled episodes of the sitcom Friends. “My mom was worried we’d pick up a horrible fake accent,” he said. He still speaks Farsi exclusively whenever he’s in his parents’ home.

While at Santa Monica College, he got a job teaching swimming lessons at a local YMCA to kids as young as 3. A coach invited him to help him compile splits at a meet. “That’s where it started,” he said. “I became passionate about coaching.” He worked his way up from the YMCA to a bigger club to Team Santa Monica in October 2015. Four years later, he was offered the team’s head-coaching job.

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“It was always my dream,” he said, “to have an Olympian.”

He got one when Puskovitch, who had met him through the open-water circles, contacted him. Hey, man, Puskovitch told him, you’ve seen me train and compete when I’m at my best. I’m not at my best right now. I am faced with the mortality of my career. I’d like to give it another try. I don’t want to live life with regret. I’m not asking for anything but a place to swim over the summer. Khadembashi gave him one … and something more.

“He gave me a new lease on life as a whole,” said Puskovitch, who after majoring in psychology at USC used the rest of his NCAA eligibility to swim and pursue a master’s degree at West Virginia. “He did so much more for me than revive my career. He’s so much more to me than just a coach. He’s a father figure, a mentor. If I get married, he’ll be in the wedding.”

To fund his swimming career, Puskovitch took a part-time job last year for a food-delivery company, riding his bike along the streets in and around USC’s campus to complete his routes. On June 19, 2023 — having just made the U.S. national team, with the Olympic-qualifying race at the World Aquatics Championships less than eight months away — he was hit by a car while making deliveries.

The impact knocked him unconscious and concussed him, and his injuries required emergency facial reconstructive surgery and kept him out of the water for two months. “Saying I was scared and uncertain,” he posted on Instagram, “would be an understatement.”

He was, in a way, quite fortunate, though. Even his mother had to acknowledge that there are worse places to suffer massive facial injuries than the plastic surgery capital of the world. “If this is going to happen,” Rabinovitch said, “LA is the place for it to happen.” Dr. Reza Jarrahy, who operated on Puskovitch, is, according to his official biography for UCLA Health Systems, “one of the most experienced and well-regarded craniofacial surgeons in Southern California.” He’s also the ex-husband of Geena Davis, the Academy Award-winning actress.

Puskovitch had five months, once he could train again, to prepare for the World Aquatic Championships. “We had to rebuild,” Khadembashi said, “but we never lost hope, never doubted that he was able.”

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Puskovitch completed the Doha race, a 10K, in 1 hour, 48 minutes, and 54.40 seconds. He knew immediately that he was among either the last five competitors to qualify for Paris or the first five not to, so he did the natural thing: Once he passed through the closing chute and crossed the finish line, he started counting swimmers. “I’m delirious at this point,” he said, “so exhausted. I got up to five, and I just let my head hang down. ‘I don’t care.’ I felt satisfaction and pride that I didn’t leave anything out there.” Ten minutes passed before the race results came in, and “for those 10 minutes,” he said, “I didn’t care because I was so at peace. If I didn’t make it, it was just not my day, but there was nothing else I could have done.”

When he realized he had made it, his first reaction was denial. There’s no way. There’s. No. Way. “It’s difficult to find words for that moment,” he said. “Such a small fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population gets ‘Olympian’ attached to their name. When I finally accepted it, I looked over at Coach Mo, and we embraced in a passionate and grateful hug.” He cried without producing a single tear. The saltwater had dried out his eyes.

Rabinovitch has suffered from chronic kidney disease for most of her life. It has limited her ability to work for any lengthy period of time, and after she, Ivan, and Vlad moved into a modest apartment in West Chester, she did what she could, giving swimming lessons, cleaning people’s pools, bartering for a couple of bucks here and there just so she could pay for gas.

Ivan had received a terrific financial-aid package from Episcopal; its annual tuition, as of last year, rises steadily from more than $25,000 for pre-K to more than $43,000 for its upper school. But he wasn’t on a full ride, so Rabinovitch tapped into what little savings she had. Public school? She’d tried that in Scranton. Both boys were in their school’s academically gifted program there, and it hadn’t gone well: few peers, no socialization, bullying. “I made the decision,” she said, “that I had to figure out how to get them to private school.” And how to keep them there. She’d tell Ivan, for instance, to be mindful about the condition of his school uniform — his shirt, his slacks, his blazer — because he’d be handing down the clothes to his younger brother.

In the summer of 2017, not long before Ivan began his junior year at Episcopal, Rabinovitch woke up one morning “without the vision in my right eye,” she said. Retinal abnormalities are a common side effect of chronic kidney disease, and this one meant that she could no longer drive. Which meant that she could no longer work. Which meant that she could no longer afford to pay her rent.

“We ended up homeless,” she said.

For more than a year, including Ivan’s entire junior year at Episcopal, he, Vlad, and Rabinovitch ricocheted from the basements and attics of friendly families to the occasional cheap motel to shopping-center parking lots to the King of Prussia rest stop along the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Usually, they looked for any place with decent lighting at night, any place where she and Ivan, once he passed his driver’s exam, could park their two used cars — a Subaru Forester and a 2006 gold Honda Pilot with more than 400,000 miles on it — and sleep in the front and backseats. A women’s resource center paid for their food. Ivan would drive the Pilot to and from Episcopal each day, leaving just after 5 a.m. for those early practices, leaving school after 9 p.m. once he’d finished his workouts and schoolwork. His intense schedule was not a burden but a benefit. At Episcopal, he had WiFi access. He had the library. He was safe.

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“I try not to think about it a lot,” he said. “It brings up a lot of bad memories and emotions.”

Their struggles were a secret, mostly. Lear and Brian Kline, the director of the Episcopal Aquatics Club and a health/physical education teacher at the school, were among those aware of Ivan’s tenuous situation away from the pool. Kline declined to speak on the record, but Lear said: “We would talk amongst each other. Coach Kline did quite a lot for Ivan behind the scenes, making sure that he had what he needed. I just tried to be there for him and take care of him.” Word of what Puskovitch was dealing with and what Kline and Lear were doing to help, such as covering the cost of his travel to a big-time meet, never spread far.

“It’s an ugly situation, right?” Rabinovitch said. “You don’t want to get involved in something ugly in someone else’s stuff. Some of the people at Episcopal knew, and the attitude we were given was, ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell, as long as the kids show up and score points.’ There’s some bitterness there, but again, my family, my problem, right? This was our dirty little secret. It was really hard for us to be the dirt-poor family at Episcopal, anyway, and now we’re the dirt-poor homeless family at Episcopal. You don’t want people to know you’re homeless. There’s always stigma to it and assumptions, and everybody’s story is different, and other people have gotten into similar situations as me in a different way. So we tried to keep that quiet.”

Rabinovitch has since obtained a massage-therapist license and now lives in a rental property in Berwyn. A Go Fund Me campaign, initiated by a friend of hers in South Carolina, has raised more than $28,000 to cover some of her medical bills and fly her to Paris to see Ivan compete. “My goal,” Puskovitch said, “is not just to compete.” He is just the fifth American to qualify for the Games in open-water swimming, and the U.S. has never won a gold medal in the event, and it would be a hell of a thing to contemplate that scene — a future Olympian sleeping under the soft glow of Sunoco-station lights — and then have all of Ivan Puskovitch’s stories end in victory.