A swimmer, a coach and two crushed Olympic dreams

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Chad La Tourette is five laps away from making the Olympics.

It’s the 1,500-meter freestyle finals on the last day of the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials in Omaha, Neb., where the nation’s top 2,000 swimmers have gathered to compete for just a handful of spots on the U.S. Olympic team. […]

But he won’t. La Tourette has led the field for the first 12 minutes of the race, but in the next three, his dream turns into a nightmare — the very same one he lived in 2008.

La Tourette climbs out of the pool, a third-place finisher once again. The first person he finds is Bill Rose, his coach.

“It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my 45 years of coaching,” Rose will later remember. La Tourette will have trouble forgetting, too.

For now, all he does is stare at his coach.