Foxcatcher: The True Story of My Brother's Murder, John du Pont's Madness, and the Quest for Olympic Gold by David Thomas, Mark Schultz

a car into the estate’s swimming pool.
    That prank was one John would replicate later in life, but with a much more sinister purpose.
    —
    D u Pont graduated from high school in 1957 and enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, but he did not finish out his freshman year before leaving. John did earn a college degree, inmarine biology, from the University of Miami, where he competed on the swim team.
    Du Pont dreamed of swimming in the Olympics, and he had the financial resources to train in California with the best swim club in the nation, the Santa Clara Swim Club.
    John bought a home in Atherton, California, to live in during his training. Some twenty years before I would hear du Pont’s name for the first time, John lived less than five miles from Dave and me.
    The Santa Clara Swim Club trained Olympic champion swimmers. At that time, the club’s list of Olympic gold medalists included—and certainly was not limited to—Mark Spitz, Lynn Burke, Donna de Varona, Chris von Saltza, and Steve Clark.
    Du Pont was, at best, a good swimmer. He clearly could not compete at the level necessary to make an Olympic team.
    In 1963, du Pont decided to take up the sport of modern pentathlon, which consisted of five events: cross-country running, fencing, freestyle swimming, pistol shooting, and show jumping.
    I’ve heard two stories of how John reached that decision.
    One said that the Santa Clara swim coach convinced John that he was not cut out for the Olympics in swimming and recommended that if John really wanted to achieve his goal of competing in an Olympic Game, pentathlon could be his best chance.
    According to the second account, which was John’s story, he visited the home of Lynn Burke, the 1960 Olympic backstroke champion, and her father told du Pont that, considering he already knew how to swim, fire pistols, and ride horses, he should try pentathlon and then introduced him to a fencing coach.
    Both stories could be true.
    Pentathlon made sense for John’s Olympic dream because it wasn’t a widely contested sport at the time. It required money to pay coaches to train an athlete in the different disciplines, which limited the number of hopefuls. John could pay for that training, and he also had the financial means to construct training facilities on his mother’s property.
    Du Pont built a pistol range, cleared out a cross-country course, and had an indoor Olympic-size swimming pool installed. Along the wall beside the pool, du Pont paid to have mounted a mosaic of himself performing each of the five disciplines. The tiny pieces of tile for the mosaic were shipped in from Florence, Italy.
    Du Pont could also afford to cover the costs of traveling to other countries to compete. He won a tournament that was reported back home to be the Australian national championship in 1965, when there was very little interest in the sport there.
    But in the United States, as with swimming, he just wasn’t Olympic material. In 1967, he hosted the national championship in his backyard and, despite his home-field advantage, placed in the middle of the pack. The following year, in the competition to determine the US team members for the 1968 Games in Mexico City, du Pont finished next to last.
    John’s money had paid for the best coaching he could find in the United States. His money had allowed him to build practice facilities that allowed him to train without leaving home. But his abilities couldn’t earn him a spot on the team.
    For the 1976 Olympics, as a reward for his financial contributions to modern pentathlon, du Pont was given a manager’s spot on the US team, allowing him to wear the team’s warm-up suit and pose in the team photo.
    But du Pont never possessed what it took to make it to the Olympics without buying his way in as a noncompetitor. The determination was there, along with more than enough resources, but the skills were not.
    John was approaching thirty when he failed to make the Olympic team in modern