There are many roads to the Beijing Games, and I stumbled onto an unlikely pathway during a recent visit home to the small town of Kapa’au on the north shore of Hawaii’s Big Island.

There, against the backdrop of the Pacific Ocean and under towering Norfolk pines, the community’s sun-heated 25-yard pool is not the sort of place you’d expect Olympic ambitions to take root. 

But 18-year-old Daniel Coakley, a dual Philippine-US citizen from the North Kohala community, has defied the odds by qualifying for the Olympics. In doing so, he has sparked dreams among the town’s roughly 1,200 residents that a local boy might become a medal winner in an aquatic discipline — the first in nearly 40 years from the entire state of Hawaii.

In December Daniel set a record 22.80 seconds for the 50 meter freestyle at the Southeast Asian Games in Thailand, securing a berth to the Beijing Olympics as a member of the Philippine National Team.

“Who would have ever thought he could reach the Olympics by training in this pool, with no equipment and just his dad as a coach,” mused Daniel’s father Jeff, who was working as a life guard on the day I visited. “For nine years, we had to improvise and make our own training equipment. He’s never done any weight training. He just swam.”

Daniel Coakley’s story is not one of tireless effort and perseverance. In fact, Jeff says his relations with his son were more typical of a rebellious teen than of coach nurturing a star athlete.

“I remember so many times it was a struggle just to get him to the pool to practice. Then once he was in the pool, he’d duck underwater every time I tried to tell him what to swim. I’d be lucky to get 1,500 yards out of him in a practice.”

But Daniel had a knack for focusing and pouring it on when it counted.

“A week or so before a race, he’d say “Dad, I want to break the record. What is it? Then he’d work hard and sure enough, most often he’d go out there and break the record.”

Like many kids, Daniel dreamed of going to the Olympics when he first started swimming at the age of 8. Like many kids, it seemed just a dream until the age of 15 when he started winning and breaking records.

“If I’d known then that he could really do it, I would have worked him harder,” laughs Jeff Coakley.

After Daniel qualified for the Olympics, local residents raised money to help send him to Florida where he will be training for the Olympics with some of the top U.S. contenders and under the guidance of some of the best coaches.

“The other day he called and said, “Dad, what’s tapering?” referring to the training technique of slowly easing off hard workouts to allow the body to gain maximum strength in the lead-up to important races.

“I laughed and said, don’t worry, Daniel, you’ve been tapering you’re whole life.”

Picture of Jeff Coakley at the Kapa’au pool by Ken Wills