Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [134]
Bob Walsh, the man who was organizing the Goodwill Games, and who had spoken to the Soviet Sports Committee and to high-ranking people at the Kremlin to secure Soviet permission, invited me to travel to Moscow with him and a couple of other people from Seattle. We stayed in the Soviet Sports Committee hotel, a dormlike building that had been built for the Moscow Olympics, the ones the United States had boycotted because of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Staying in Moscow was like being a character in a bad spy novel. The phone in my hotel room was tapped, the room was bugged, and I was followed wherever I went. This was standard operating procedure, according to Peter Kassander, Walsh’s assistant in Washington, D.C.
The night I arrived in the Soviet Union, the country was celebrating Yuri Gagarin Day. It was a very strange sensation; I felt like I was at home in the States on the Fourth of July. Yet, in reality, I was looking out across Moscow’s enormous skyline, watching fireworks exploding like blazing flowers and stars, celebrating Gagarin, the first Soviet cosmonaut and person to fly into space. Gagarin’s spaceflight, along with the launch of Sputnik—the first satellite in space—would ignite the U.S. space race and lead up to the start of the nuclear missile buildup. Gagarin’s historic flight had not only changed Russia; it had changed the United States and the world. It was not by chance that I had been invited to be in the Soviet Union on this historic day. Bob Walsh told me that when the Soviets had decided to invite me to their country, they’d chosen this date to celebrate the Bering Strait crossing as well.
It was very strange to be treated like a celebrity in the Soviet Union, to have people stopping me and handing me flowers or pins or asking for autographs. It was even stranger when I was inside the Kremlin gates, viewing the historic churches, and a man from Armenia recognized me and gave me a key chain with some rubles—an Armenian custom, he said.
When I spoke with officials of the Soviet Sports Committee, I told them about my next three goals. The first was to swim across Lake Baikal. When I said that, the eyes of the members of the committee lit up. Yes, they said, that is exactly what you have to do next. And they became very enthusiastic. They told me that Lake Baikal was the most beautiful lake in all of the Soviet Union. It was the deepest lake in the world, more than a mile deep, and at twenty-five million years old, one of the oldest lakes in the world. The lake was pristine and clear; it contained one-fifth of the world’s freshwater. They knew all the statistics: the lake was four hundred miles long, and averaged between eighteen and fifty miles wide. There were twelve hundred creatures unique to the lake, including freshwater seals. To Russians, Lake Baikal was the gem of Siberia, a sort of mecca that everyone in the Soviet Union dreamed of visiting one day in their lives. Once I saw their reverence for the lake, I couldn’t wait to see it either, or to swim across it.
During that same meeting, I proposed two successive swims. One would go from Hokkaido, Japan, to Kunashir, one of the Kuril Islands to the north, controlled by the Soviet Union. The other proposed swim was across the Heilong Jiang–Amur River border, from the Soviet Union to China. The reason for these swims was to promote further cooperation and understanding between these countries.
The Soviet Sports Committee immediately began working with me on all three projects and set up meetings for me with embassy representatives from Japan and China. For the next few years I worked on gaining Japanese and Chinese support, but because of political complications between the Soviet Union and