The Dakota Pool Shark

Dagny Knutson Is Taking the Really Long Way to the Top

MINOT, N.D. -- The fastest-rising, most jaw-dropping teenage swimmer in the United States trains virtually alone in this frigid, working-class city about 55 miles from the Canadian border, where snowbanks as tall as SUVs line neighborhood streets, rim parking lots and force residents to dig out their mailboxes.

Under milky white skies that cloak the town's low-slung, cinderblock buildings, only a handful more than a few stories high, Dagny Knutson races from workout to workout in a grime-streaked 1998 Ford Expedition with 187,000 miles on it, faithfully following an unorthodox and multifaceted training regimen that involves a private swim coach and personal trainer.

Her emergence from a town swamped with 60 inches of snowfall since November and steeled to sub-zero temperatures has excited USA Swimming officials, two of whom traveled here recently to observe her training. Though they arrived skeptical that anyone so far from an elite swimming center could have the faintest idea how to build a swim champion, they left impressed with the sophistication and quality of Knutson's personal program and coaching, National Team Director Mark Schubert said.

And they offered this piece of advice: Keep doing what you're doing.

"It's just so different than the typical path," Schubert said. "It kind of gives everybody hope."

Knutson (pronounced Kah-NUTE-son), 17, won seven gold medals in January during the Junior Pan Pacific Championships in Guam, where she swam the 200-meter individual medley in a time (2 minutes 10.79 seconds) that would have earned her fifth place at the Beijing Olympics. Her times in the 200 freestyle (1:57.73) and 400 individual medley (4:40.10) would have ranked her seventh and eighth, respectively.

A month earlier at the U.S. national short-course championships in Atlanta, she beat Olympic star Katie Hoff's one-year-old American record in the 400-yard individual medley by .04 of a second with a time of 4:00.62. A month before that, Knutson, a junior at Minot High, broke three national high school records, including one set in 1988 by Janet Evans.

"I didn't see this coming," Knutson said. "I've been really focused, really just working hard to reach the goals I have in mind."

In January, the U.S. Olympic Committee awarded Knutson funding it usually reserves for members of national teams.

"She doesn't seem to be afraid to race anybody or intimidated by anybody," Schubert said. "Those are really spectacular times. You always wonder if somebody who can swim times like that can do it against really good competition. . . . She answered all of those questions at the nationals [in Atlanta]. She answered all of them."

To Knutson, more remain. Thanks in part to the USOC funding, she will travel to several grand prix events in the coming months, the first the USA Swimming Austin Grand Prix, which begins Thursday. She will fly to Indianapolis in July for the U.S. championships, the qualifying event for the world championships in Rome later that month.

"I don't have any limits," Knutson said. "I think if I just keep going like I've been going, I can probably achieve anything I want."