Wheaton's Swider-Peltz team has experience on its side at Vancouver

If you think it would be a blast to try to stump Nancy Swider-Peltz Sr. and Nancy Jr. while coach and daughter are training for speedskating events at the upcoming Vancouver Olympics, go ahead and yell out "Hey, Nancy."

It probably won't work.

"We can tell by the inflection of a person's voice which Nancy they're talking to," Swider-Peltz said. "We rarely turn around at the same time when someone calls."

That's what the mother-daughter duo from Wheaton get for being together 24/7 for months at a time and working side by side as coach-athlete for nine years.

"Some people say Nancy Jr. and Nancy Sr., some say Little Nancy and Big Nancy," coach Swider-Peltz said. "Generally speaking it's Nancy or Junior, and I'm Nancy or Senior. It's really kind of fun because everyone has their own way of calling us and it's several different things."

"It's usually Nancy Jr. or Little Nancy even though I'm not as little," the younger Nancy said with a laugh. "They call her Big Nancy. She hates that, but she takes it in stride, though."

Now, you can also call them Olympian and Olympic coach after Nancy Jr. qualified for the 2010 Vancouver Games, where she will compete in the 3000-meter race and the team pursuit with a chance that she could also skate in the 5000-meter race when the international rosters are finalized. It makes her the second Olympian in the Peltz family.

They are together so much, whether it's summer training at rinks in the Chicago area or their main practice facility in Milwaukee, or traveling across the country and around the world competing in major events, it's no wonder Nancy Sr. has rubbed off big-time on her daughter.

"That's what I hear from everybody," said Nancy Jr., a Wheaton native who graduated from Wheaton North in 2005. "Just the way I carry myself, people are like, 'You are becoming your mom.'"

For a soon-to-be Olympic athlete, that's a good thing, because her mom was quite the Olympian, making it to four consecutive Games beginning with Montreal in 1976 and winding up at Calgary in 1988, where she competed shortly after giving birth to Nancy.

"It was an anomaly. It was interesting, fun," Swider-Peltz, a Park Ridge native who graduated from Maine South, said of her Olympic experiences. "I was the first American to make four Olympic teams."

The thing is, that fourth one was never part of the plan.

"The year before she was born I was training junior skaters," Swider-Peltz said. "I was pregnant with Nancy during their trials for the junior world team. She was born in January and I continued coaching that summer.

"Sometime in June or July I did some running and thought, wow, I feel pretty good, maybe I could make the Olympic team. I decided in October to go to Calgary to train. My dad quit teaching and lost his pension and he went with me to Calgary. I trained in September, October, November and made the team in December.

"I was nursing her between races (laughs). Everything happened fast."

Just seeing her 23-year-old daughter qualify as an Olympian takes Swider-Peltz back to the Calgary Games in 1988.

"When I made the '88 team she was with me and the newspaper took a picture of me pushing her on the ice with her shoes - that was the first time I ever thought about it," Swider-Peltz said. "I said to myself, 'Oh yeah, one day, maybe one day, maybe Nancy will skate and they'll love this picture.'"

That day came in 2002 in Salt Lake City when mother and daughter competed against each other at the Olympic trials.

"The craziest thing is that she and I were randomly pulled out of a hat to race each other," Swider-Peltz said. "Racing against her was funny. I went over the line and gave her a kiss on the cheek. We raced, and I beat her by a tenth of a second, but I was 44 and she was 14. The year after that, she sailed."

Nancy Jr. just missed qualifying for the 2006 Olympics, but now that she has secured a spot in Vancouver, a grueling pre-Olympic schedule has left mom and daughter with high but realistic expectations.

"I think as the Olympics go on, her best performances will be as time goes on," said Swider-Peltz, who admitted the "anxiety the last two months is the worst I've felt" trying to train her daughter and another Olympic skater, Ben Hansen of Glenview.

"The biggest race for me was the Olympic trials," Nancy Jr. said. "I was so nervous for that. This year, yes, there are medals at stake. I know winning would be amazing, but I'm not quite there yet in my potential.

"I know that for this Olympics I've not peaked. I know the next two Olympics there will be more potential for me. Not that I'm not going for winning (in Vancouver); that's always what you strive for."

She'll race in the 3,000-meters on Sunday, with the Team Pursuit competition on Feb. 26. If she follows in her mom's footsteps she'll have three more chances to win medals after Vancouver, right?

"I'm not going to say definitely four," Nancy Jr. said. "I know I'll shoot for three.

"I don't know what life will throw at me, so I'm not guaranteeing four. But my mom thought she was going to do one and then go to school and that was that, but she made those comebacks."

Whether it's one, two, three or four Olympic experiences for her daughter, just being on the journey together is the key for coach Swider-Peltz.

"We feel we'll get there," she said. "It might take a little more time of figuring it out, but she'll become a better person and I'll become a better person - and she'll be a better parent someday.

"To us it's worth the effort. The thrill and the fun of it being mother-daughter way outweighs the negative.

"It's worth the struggle."

Team: Mom and daughter raced against each other in 2002 Olympic trials