Making Waves

“Making Waves is a fascinating, complete testament to a true Olympian who showed extraordinary skills in the pool and raw courage outside it, and was years ahead of her time to realize that something was very wrong with the way athletes in certain countries were being prepared to compete on the world stage.”—Montreal Times

“Babashoff is a pioneer of the most painful kind: one of the first athletes to be cheated because the competition was using performance-enhancing drugs. . . . The IOC doesn’t have a time machine. It can’t take Babashoff and other athletes back four decades and give them the golden moment they deserved. They can, however, give her the gold. And they should.”—Newsday

“Doping remains the scourge of sports, poisoning the concept of clean competition. . . . In contrast to athletes in other sports, Babashoff and other swimmers beaten by competitors who doped have not received the medals they earned. Many wrongs were perpetrated on them that have never been made right.”—New York Times

“After four years of swimming twenty miles a day, seven days a week, training with a men’s team to push herself, Babashoff was branded a disappointment and a poor sport. All because the nineteen-year-old was smart enough to see the East Germans for what they were—and audacious enough to call them on it when no one else would.”—USA Today

“Shirley Babashoff was our star going into those games, possibly the greatest female American swimmer ever. . . . She was as competitive, talented and relentless an athlete as America has ever produced. She received one gold medal (a relay), five silvers, a thousand taunts and insults and many death threats.”—Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle

“In hindsight, the coaches should have been the ones speaking out, but it was considered ‘unsportsmanlike.’ Shirley paid the price for having the courage to tell the truth. . . . She’ll be remembered as the victim of cheating that never got the timely recognition that she deserved. I believe the records should be adjusted, as there is definitive proof of systematic East German cheating.”—Mark Schubert, former Babashoff coach and current head coach and general manager of USA Swimming’s national team

“In 1976, Olympic swimmer Shirley Babashoff had the ability to equal Mark Spitz’s legendary seven gold medals, had she been competing on an even playing field. Sadly, the competition was not fair and the media chose to ignore the truth, and Shirley’s inability to conceal her disappointment made her the biggest victim of those Games. In Making Waves, she gets to balance those scales with a poignant and revealing memoir. Shirley deserves this hearing and through her insights and observations, you’ll learn more about this remarkable heroine than has ever been revealed before.”—John Naber, 1976 Olympic swimming teammate

“Shirley Babashoff was visibly robbed of Olympic gold medals in 1976 and publicly humiliated in the media. She was the first athlete to accuse the East Germans of doping, but the world was not ready listen. Forty years later, Chris Epting finally tells the truth for the world to hear.”—Brent Rutemiller, publisher of Swimming World

“Shirley should have the gold medals—she’s one of America’s greatest athletes ever and she had a lot of guts. Even today, athletes won’t speak up for fear of being called a sore loser, but that didn’t stop Shirley.”—Jill Sterkel, part of the storied 1976 relay team that defeated the East Germans, now coordinator of athletics at the University of Texas

“I totally applaud what Shirley Babashoff did. It was the right thing at the right time, and looking back, it had a tremendous effect.”—John Carlos, U.S. sprinter who, along with Tommie Smith, raised a black-power salute on the medal podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City