26 PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM COPYRIGHT © 2024 {punchline} It took going broke in Australia for former Olympian Dana Kirk to rediscover her competitive fire. An All-American swimmer for Stanford Cardinal who competed in the 200-meter butterfly at the 2004 Athens Games, Dana had undergone back surgery after graduating in 2006 and decided to quit the sport—“nailed my suit to the wall,” as she puts it. The timing was right for a long break, so in 2007 she bought a plane ticket and was knocking about Down Under while her savings dwindled—to the point that she was swapping tips about cheap eats with a homeless man. “We’d find each other and figure out which Subway location was having a $2 deal that day,” Dana says, laughing at the memory. All she wanted was to get by long enough to meet up in Sydney with her sister Tara, a member of the U.S. team coming to compete with the rival Australians in a friendly meet called “Duel in the Pool.” That was when Dana got a lucky break. While she was swimming laps one day, an Aussie swimmer recognized her and introduced Dana to her coach. The coach, hearing about Dana’s dire straits, set her up with a job coaching and giving swim lessons. It was enough to keep Dana fed and cover the drop-in fee at the pool, where she could practice alongside Australian National Team swimmers. She found she was doing surprisingly well, and her competitive drive was rekindled. “I love luck,” Dana declares. Dana and her older sister Tara were teenagers when they made their debut at the 2000 U.S. Olympic Trials. Four years later, they were the first sisters to earn spots on the same American swim team. Tara left the sport for good after a heartbreaker at the 2008 trials kept her off the Olympic squad, and while Dana didn’t do well at those trials (“I did not train for it the way I should have,” she says.), she’s never strayed far from the water. These days, Dana’s the director of aquatics at Fremont Hills Country Club in Los Altos Hills, where you can find her on the pool deck overseeing the Masters swimmers, in the water teaching a four-year-old beginner or coaching promising teens with their own Olympic dreams on the Barracudas swim team.
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