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 Ready for Anything
Hard work on and off the water has paid off for Johnson & Johnson’s
Brett Sickler
For the past three years, ever since she graduated from the University of Michigan following a career as an All-American rower, Brett Sickler has devoted her life to the U.S. women’s senior national team. She’s trained up to seven days a week, bouncing from coast to coast — to the team’s training center near San Diego each winter, then back to Princeton, N.J., home of the team’s headquarters, in the spring. She’s competed in international events across the globe, helping to bring home a pair of world championships in the women’s eight, including a world record for a 2,000-meter race, set in 2006.
But even as she’s pursued her dream of making the U.S. Olympic women’s rowing team and representing her country in this month’s games in Beijing, she hasn’t lost sight of the inevitable day when she will walk away from the sport that has driven her since high school and enter an entirely different brand of competition, the 40-hour workweek.
So in April 2007, when Sickler was offered a part-time position in the marketing department at Johnson & Johnson, she jumped at the opportunity. After all, even 25-year-old Olympic hopefuls have bills to pay. “I can work at home a lot,” Sickler says. “It’s a great arrangement, because of the flexible hours.”
Sickler’s part-time gig — she’s an analyst with Johnson & Johnson’s Olympic marketing group — was a result of the firm’s multifaceted campaign to support the Olympic team. The company is one of the International Olympic Committee’s 12 TOP (for “The Olympic Programme”) sponsors, the highest level of Olympic corporate sponsorship. Meanwhile, Johnson & Johnson’s U.S. branch has nurtured an affiliation with US Rowing, the sport’s national governing body, donating funds and supplying team members with its signature health care products, from moisturizing lotion and sunscreen to Band-Aids.
The parent company encourages its subsidiaries to get involved in their local communities, according to Owen Rankin, J&J’s vice president of corporate equity and Olympic sponsorship. The company’s global corporate headquarters are based in New Brunswick, N.J., just 15 miles from Princeton, so a sponsorship of the rowing team was a perfect fit. “The rowing team is the only Olympic team that trains in New Jersey,” Rankin says. “We have a philosophy that we like to support our communities, and that’s why we’re supporting them.”
Sickler is not the only rower on the Johnson & Johnson payroll. Chris Liwski, a four-time member of the men’s national team and an alternate for the 2004 and 2008 Olympic teams, has worked as a clerk in the company’s legal department. Rankin says having world-class athletes on staff, even part-time, has its advantages. “Talk to Brett and she would say, ‘I was up at five and on the water this morning,’” he explains. “It just reminds you of the commitment and the passion and this drive to see something that’s over the horizon and say, ‘I really want to get myself there.’ We’re very cognizant of giving her projects that she can fit into her schedule. She’s smart and a valuable part of the team, and she’s done great work for us.” The hard work has paid off; Sickler is in Beijing this month as an alternate with the U.S. rowing team.
For Sickler, the arrangement has helped her prepare for what she hopes will be a career in sports marketing. “The biggest thing for me is the experience. I want to build my resume,” she says. “The opportunity to work for a Fortune 500 company like J&J is priceless.”
— Christopher Hann 
Great Return
For Lindsay Davenport, court is back in session
Her powerful groundstrokes, devastating serves, and unerring service returns have earned Lindsay Davenport three Grand Slam tournament titles, Olympic gold, and more than 50 career championships, surpassing such contemporaries as Martina Hingis and Monica Seles. In the 15 years since she turned pro, the tall Californian has earned more than $22 million in WTA Tour winnings, and millions more in endorsements. But after giving birth to her first child last year, son Jagger Jonathan Leach, the 32-year-old has a new perspective on her professional life.
“My approach to the game is completely different,” says Davenport. “Tennis and my career are really important, but it’s so funny that they’re now not the most important things in my life, after so many years. It’s been kind of a weird transition.”
Weird, perhaps, but successful for sure. In 2008, Davenport has served notice that she remains a force, winning two WTA events and a spot on the U.S. women’s Olympic team. In a sport known for teen sensations, Davenport is a model of endurance. “I had success young, but I didn’t have the breakout Grand Slam champion success, or the publicity or notoriety of a Jennifer [Capriati], Andrea [Jaeger], or Tracy [Austin],” she says. “But I’ve managed to be one of the most consistent players over the 15 years I’ve played. Obviously, I don’t think anyone would have thought that longevity would have been my strong suit, based on my history.”
In fact, Davenport’s hard work has made her a “sure shot” for the International Tennis Hall of Fame, according to Arthur “Bud” Collins Jr., a longtime tennis columnist and commentator and a Hall member himself. Along the way, she battled through a litany of injuries, developing the mental toughness that helped her return to competition following pregnancy. “She’s a paragon of hard work,” says Collins. “When she came on the scene, she was strong and big. But she was overweight and really had to work to get down to the playing weight she is at now.”
Davenport turned professional in 1993 and turned a corner in 1996, when she captured Olympic gold in the women’s singles in Atlanta. Two years later, she reached the pinnacle of her sport, defeating Hingis to capture the 1998 US Open title, her first Grand Slam victory. “To get that first one was a dream,” she says. “Anyone who has ever played tennis thinks, ‘Oh, I’d love to win a Grand Slam.’ For me, it was always the US Open because I’m an American and I grew up watching it. That’s my tournament.”
Today, Davenport is a throwback of sorts, the first tennis-playing mom to make such a splash since Evonne Goolagong, the Australian who won her second Wimbledon title in 1980 after giving birth. “Ten years is a crazy amount of time,” Davenport says. “When I found out I was pregnant, shortly after the ’06 Open, I never thought I’d be back. So the opportunity to play there again and relive that experience is so exciting, and one of the main reasons I came back.
“I’m proud to be here, still playing. And I’m extremely proud to be playing now as a mother. It’s something I never thought I’d be the one to do,” she says, laughing. “But when you look back on my career, nothing has gone the way I thought it would go. So I’m constantly amazed at the position I’m in.”
— Brion O’Connor
Continental is the official airline of the US Open, which begins this year on August 25.
Out of this World
John Grunsfeld has his spacewalking shoes ready
Next July will mark the 40th anniversary of Apollo XI, the space flight that brought men to the moon for the first time. It’s been 36 years since the most recent manned lunar landing. But according to astronaut John Grunsfeld, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) still has its eyes on the moon, and beyond. “Everybody believes NASA should bring people to Mars, build colonies on the moon,” he says. “I think that’s the vision everybody has for space.”
In the years following the moon landings, NASA’s focus turned closer to Earth, and initiatives like the International Space Station. But today, Grunsfeld says, NASA’s Constellation Program is devoted to developing the vehicles that the agency hopes will one day enable astronauts to visit Mars and the asteroid belt, and possibly travel even farther. “The core of NASA’s vision is exploration,” he says.
In recent years, the Hubble Space Telescope has played a major role in the exploration of deep space. Launched into orbit in 1990, Hubble was plagued with problems at first, but since a servicing mission in 1993, it has enabled astronomers to gather extensive knowledge about the early history of the universe. The Hubble photographs have also captured the public’s imagination.
This October, Grunsfeld will be part of a team of seven NASA astronauts who will fly to Hubble on the space shuttle Atlantis for the latest round of repairs and adjustments. The mission will be the fifth space flight for Grunsfeld, 49, who joined NASA in 1992. He’ll serve as lead spacewalker on the mission.
Grunsfeld says that in addition to extending Hubble’s visual range, the mission will also prepare the telescope for several more years of service. By 2013, the James Webb Telescope, Hubble’s planned successor, should be ready to look even farther into space.
A physicist by training, Grunsfeld says the knowledge gained through looking into deep space has had an effect far beyond astronomy, including contributions to air travel and even medicine. “People who were trying to find planets in telescope images realized they’re facing the same problem as oncologists [viewing] a mammogram,” he says. “Scientists applied the imaging problem to oncology, and that’s now the standard technique for analyzing images from mammography.”
Grunsfeld says he was always attracted to scientific investigation. “Growing up, I loved science, trying to figure out how nature works. Being a scientist is a great thing, but being a scientist in space is even better.”
— David Plunkett
Photographs: Peter Murphy (Sickler); Felix Sanchez (Davenport); Jeffrey Salter (Grunsfeld) |
