Craig Beardsley
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| Full name | Craig Russell Beardsley | |||||||||||||||||||||
| National team |
 United States
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| Born | 1960 New York, New York |
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| Sport | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Sport | Swimming | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Strokes | Butterfly | |||||||||||||||||||||
| College team | University of Florida | |||||||||||||||||||||
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Medal record
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Craig Russell Beardsley (born 1960) is an American former competition swimmer who was a world record-holder in the 200-meter butterfly for three years in the early 1980s. Although he qualified as a member of the ill-fated 1980 U.S. Olympic Team, Beardsley could not compete in the Olympics because of the U.S. boycott of the Moscow Summer Olympic Games.
Craig Beardsley was born in New York City in 1960, the son of an American father, Russell Beardsley, and a Chinese American immigrant mother, Jeanne Loh. He attended the United Nations International School in the city, where he was a stand-out cello player, and graduated from Northern Valley Regional High School at Old Tappan after his family moved to Harrington Park, New Jersey. Prior to attending college, Beardsley never had an opportunity to swim for a school team because none of his schools sponsored an organized swim team.
Beardsley won the gold medal in his signature event, the 200-meter butterfly, at the 1979 Pan American Games in San Juan, Puerto Rico. After high school, he received an athletic scholarship to attend the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida, where he swam for coach Randy Reese's Florida Gators swimming and diving team in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) competition from 1979 to 1982. Beardsley qualified for the star-crossed U.S. Olympic team in 1980, but could not participate when, at the behest of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, the U.S. Olympic Committee voted to boycott the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, Russia after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979. Like many of the best American athletes of 1980, he was denied the opportunity to participate on the largest stage in international sports. At the 1980 U.S. Olympic Trials held the month before the Olympics, Beardsley set a new world record of 1:58.21 in the 200-meter butterfly—a time that was over a second faster than Soviet swimmer Sergey Fesenko's gold medal time in the 1980 Olympic finals.
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