Nov. 19, 2024
Filmmaker Finds Redemption in the Pool: Michele Kuvin Kupfer's Journey Back to Swimming, EP 262
What happens when life's challenges pull you away from your passion, only to lead you back years later with a renewed sense of purpose? Michele Kuvin Kupfer, a former member of the 1980 Israeli Olympic swim team and filmmaker, invites us into her world—a world where swimming was once both an escape and a refuge. Despite facing hurdles due to her Jewish background and personal struggles, Michelle's return to the pool as she approached 60 is a story of resilience and transformation.
Her journey back to the Maccabiah Games in 2022 alongside her Israeli teammates highlights the enduring power of sport to heal. Michele is the Co-Director and Executive Producer of the new film Parting the Waters, a Feature-length documentary about trauma, hope, and courage. Besides being a documentary filmmaker Michele is also a behavioral therapist, and educational consultant. She is the co-founder of Difference Diaries, a documentary short film series focused on adolescents and young adults with chronic illness.
We also explore the historical and emotional significance of the Maccabiah Games for Jewish athletes, including the unbreakable bonds forged through shared challenges and triumphs. Michelle’s journey is further amplified through her work in film, where she shares stories of chronic illness and mental health, reflecting her commitment to resilience and community. From overcoming fear to finding joy in new beginnings, this episode celebrates the inclusivity and empowerment swimming offers, inspiring listeners to live fully and embrace life’s possibilities at any stage.
Film website https://www.partingthewatersfilm.com/
Email us at HELLO@ChampionsMojo.com. Opinions discussed are not medical advice, please seek a medical professional for your own health concerns.
Chapters
00:01 - Swimming
12:08 - Returning to the Pool for Redemption
27:05 - Jewish Athletes' Bond Through Swimmers
33:51 - Embracing Master Swimming at Any Age
38:29 - Diving Into Life and Inspiration
45:40 - Discovering the Joy of Master Swimming
Transcript
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I had learning disabilities, I had detention problems, I was all over the place, but when I got in the pool it kind of soothed me and I was able to take my frustrations out in the water and really saved me.
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Then and then, as I tell my story, swimming comes back and saves me again, and then again, and then again comes back and saves me again and then again and then again.
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Welcome to the award-winning Champions Mojo, hosted by two world record-holding athletes.
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Be inspired as you listen to conversations with champions and now your hosts, kelly Pallas and Maria Parker.
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Hello friends, welcome to the Champions Mojo podcast and, as usual, I am co-hosting with Maria Parker.
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Hey, maria.
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Hey Kelly, it's good to be here today.
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Yes, it's great to see you and we have a really amazing show today, as always.
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But our special guest today is Michelle Kuvan Kupfer, a member of the 1980 Israeli Olympic swim team, who also swam collegiately at Indiana University.
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In her youth, Michelle swam all over the world and had left swimming, but recently found her way back.
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As she was heading towards her 60th birthday, she was feeling the world was closing in on her.
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After several of life's obstacles, she found herself in a deep hole.
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She turned back to swimming.
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She thought maybe if she reassembled her Israeli team to swim together 40 years later at the Maccabiah Games in 2022, she could find herself again.
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What else Maria.
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Well, that's when she decided to get back in the pool more seriously and swim at age 60 like she had when she was 18, returning to a lot of work, dedication, aches and pains, but also deciding to tell the story of this comeback in a film for herself and her teammates.
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She's producing a documentary called Parting the Waters, a story about belonging, personal struggles, perseverance and triumph.
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So welcome to Champions Mojo.
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We're so glad to have you, michelle.
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Yeah, I'm really honored to be here and to be with both of you who I grew up with, knowing you guys in the collegiate world.
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Certainly Kelly was swimming and Maria, your accolades in sport is just amazing, so thank you for inviting me.
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Well, we, yeah, we're excited to hear what your life has been like since.
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You know, being a 1980 Olympian for Israel.
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Can you just take us back to maybe your days of growing up I believe it was Palm Beach, florida like how you got into swimming a little bit and then what obstacles were these that got you into this hole that brought you back to swimming so I had a really unusual, I think unusual.
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Everyone has a story and this is just my story.
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But I grew up a little differently.
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My father was a doctor, my mother was a social worker but a survivor of the Holocaust.
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They came to the States and trying to fit in, my father was an infectious disease expert and came to NIH and Miami but was looking for.
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His quote was always I'll have four kids in five years and I need to pay for all this.
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He saw this ad about a doctor being needed on the small island of Palm Beach, florida, and my parents really didn't know much about it.
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It's a small island that's very well known for sort of the rich and famous, but he knew it was a job and he took it.
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So we moved to this little island in Florida, not really knowing much about what it was all about, except that it was beautiful.
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It was the water, and growing up in Florida you better learn how to swim real quick because there's water all around you.
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So my parents were like, threw us in the pool at a really young age, whether we liked it or not, and I loved it.
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I loved it.
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I felt free in the water.
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I'm in between two sisters and then I have a younger brother out of the four of us and I was really good at sports, where they were really good at school and I wasn't.
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So swimming was sort of a haven for me.
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But growing in Palm Beach had its challenges in and out of the pool.
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I couldn't swim on the local swim team, which was only about a five minute bike ride away, because they didn't allow Jews at the time.
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So my mother had to drive me off the island 45 minutes to a different pool where I was allowed to swim, the island 45 minutes to a different pool where I was allowed to swim.
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You know, this was kind of crazy to me.
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I just couldn't understand it.
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It was hard.
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I was the only Jewish person on our swim team for a long time and you know, look, growing up is hard wherever.
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But swimming was that place where I would go during those young days of swimming and not being able to swim on certain teams.
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But then I was beating everybody and they're like ooh, okay, well, they wanted me on their team but I couldn't be on their team.
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So in some ways there was a little bit of payback to that team.
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What year was that that was?
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I started swimming early, like five, six, but really competitively around eight, nine in the youth, and then around 10, 11, 12 is when I really started picking up and getting a little bit more seriously.
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And then, probably like any swimmer, listening, around 12 is when you sort of make that decision Am I going to be really dedicated to swimming and join the AAU teams and swim twice a day and do all that?
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And that happened around 12, 13, when I realized that I was better than most and I thought, wow, I can find my place here in this world Because I was really stuck in between two sisters who were really smart and just did really well in school and I was like I had learning disabilities, I had detention problems, I was all over the place, but when I got in the pool it kind of soothed me and I was able to take my frustrations out in the water and really saved me.
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Then and then, as I tell my story, swimming comes back and saves me again, and then again, and then again.
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So, Maria, I think I'm with you, At least.
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Maybe our list starts what year?
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Years of your age, but like what year was it that you were excluded for being Jewish?
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What year was?
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that.
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Yeah, so that was in the early 1970s.
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So I was born in 1962 and at age eight, nine, 1970, and was wanting to be on the team, not just going to swimming.
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They had a team for like eight 10 year olds, I think the youngest group was and, man, I wanted to be on that team and it was just down the street, I could ride my bike there and that was when I first realized, wow, this world is not as pretty as what I see when I look outside the window, at the water, at the ocean.
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I'm sorry that you had to go through that.
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Obviously, we know that the tough things we go through usually make us the best, the hardest deals formed in the hottest fires.
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How did you end up on the Israeli Olympic team, being a Floridian?
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My father was very famous in infectious diseases.
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He had discovered the fluorescent antibody test for malaria, and so he was invited all over the world to give lectures.
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My mother, as a Holocaust survivor, never really felt she fit in in America.
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She wanted to be in Israel but didn't have the opportunity really to go until my father, who also wanted to go to Israel and had been for work prior to meeting my mother.
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My father was invited to go give a lecture in 1970, and my mother went with him.
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And that trip we did not go.
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We were young kids.
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They left us a call, they went to Israel and my mother came back a different person.
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It changed their lives forever.
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Israel in 1970 then became part of our lives.
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The next year we all went to Israel, and growing up in Palm Beach had its advantages.
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My father was the doctor.
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Palm Beach 50 years ago was really a winter resort.
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People would live there during the winter and everyone would flock to their other homes in the summer, so it allowed my father some freedom.
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He was also a real character.
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He's the doctor you want.
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If you called him up and you didn't feel well and you happened to be 10,000 miles away, he would say no, no, it's okay, I'll be there and he would go.
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He was doctor, he was a medical doctor, he was their psychiatrist.
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He really took care of his patients.
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But it allowed us as a family to go to Israel for three, four months a year and then come back for school.
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I couldn't understand why we ever left and didn't stay in Israel.
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But my father had to make a living.
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This was his best way of doing it.
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So we led this very schizophrenic life of going back and forth.
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And you went to school there at some point.
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I did some schooling there, but most of our schooling was on the island.
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Back then Palm Beach had a little school and there was no air conditioning.
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School ended like the first week of May and my mother would take us out of school.
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I don't know.
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It was a different time and we would study in Israel and do some stuff.
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But my parents weren't so rigid when it came to school until later on in life.
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But when I turned around 12, 13, I said to my father I love being in Israel, it was great, but I can't stop swimming.
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My team's practicing like crazy in the summer and I can't not do that.
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He goes, don't worry, we'll find you a team.
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And sure enough I joined the local YMCA in Jerusalem, which is a famous, actually the oldest Y in the world Amazing, and Jerusalem had this great swim team.
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So I joined and was not so welcomed at first.
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Here was this girl coming in and it was good and I was taking some spots away from other girls who were there 12 months a year and I was only there four, sometimes five months a year.
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But I loved being there.
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I felt much more free there, I just loved it and I kind of brushed it off team would be like what You're swimming in Israel?
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There are no pools there, it's a desert.
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What are you talking about?
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And then I'd go back to Israel and they'd be like, no, no, you just were with your American team and, I'm sure, practicing much harder than us or getting much more coaching than us which wasn't true, but it was sort of a little bit of a battle.
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When I was 15, our coach said to me you know, you're really good and we're putting together the team for 1980.
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And you need to make a decision.
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Do you want to swim for Israel or take your chances to make the American team?
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And in my mind it was not an option.
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I loved being in Israel Then.
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That was that was my first choice.
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And so I became an Israeli citizen at age 15.
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And from that moment on, any international event, my allegiance was to Israel.
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That continues to this day.
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That continues to this day.
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So you're an inspiration for this.
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You were in this kind of dark place and you got back in the pool and I love that.
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You said you trained like you were 18.
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Tell us about that, because our listeners a lot of them are master swimmers.
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What does it look like when a 60-year-old decides they're going to go back and train like they're 18?
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What was your training schedule and what was that like?
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Well, I'll fill in the middle pieces after we talk about this training period, because a lot happened between the time I stopped competitive swimming and got back into it.
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After I stopped swimming competitively, I really stopped, but I'm very active and hyperactive and was biking and walking a lot but wasn't swimming a lot mainly due to having three children very small, two with severe medical issues.
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It was a very difficult start of a family.
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Years later I got back in the pool, but just sort of to escape everything, to get my head under the water and would swim some laps.
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But it wasn't training in any way until I decided to recreate this idea to get back into the pool.
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And the reason I wanted to do it were two reasons.
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I was really not in a good place.
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My best mate from swimming, lior, who was a national swimmer in Israel and really the queen of the crop she became an announcer for swimming.
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She immediately became a master of swimming, was one of the best in the world was diagnosed with colon cancer and was dying and our team wanted to motivate her.
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And the other was our son, who's a brain tumor survivor.
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Yeah, I know, when I read your bio, maria, I just you know it's very difficult.
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He was diagnosed with a brain tumor as a child and it's been a very, very difficult road.
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And as a young adult, he was living with us and I was trapped.
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I was trapped with this sweet, sweet young man but trying to keep him alive and it consumed me.
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It was also during COVID and we were.
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It was just even more amped up than it had been in years past and I felt like it was either going to be him or me.
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I felt like I was really losing myself and it was really my husband who said you got to get back in the water.
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That's where you go when you don't feel well.
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That's when you go when you need to think.
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That's when you go when you just need to be creative.
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Go, get in the water.
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And so I thought oh my God, how am I going to?
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I started looking at the times of master swimmers and Kelly I mean you and I swim the same event.
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I'm thinking, oh my God, you know I can't go and not win.
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I held the records in Israel.
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It was such a great motivator for me and it gave me focus to say can I do this as a almost 60 year old?
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Can I get back in the water and really compete.
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I had no idea how intense master swimming is, so I had to really get back and it hurt.
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I remember getting in the water the first time and I made my husband come with me because I said, oh my God, I need somebody to say get there, just do it.
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And I remember lifting my right shoulder, which I had injured years prior, and thinking, no, this isn't going to work, I can't even do a full thing.
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I've always been in shape.
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I'm an athlete but not at that point, and it took every day just kind of saying no, I can do it.
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A lot of ice, a lot of heat, a lot of physical therapy, really a lot of motivation for my husband, gary.
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But the truth is there was so much deep inside of me that felt like this is my way out.
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Maybe, maybe I can save myself again.
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The swimming saved me so many times.
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I thought this is a big one, this is a big ass.
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I'm 60.
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I want to swim in this big race against swimmers who are like competing all the time.
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But I needed something to save me because I felt like I was being really sucked down trying to keep our son alive.
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My best friend is dying.
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I felt like I was sitting at the bottom of the pool and not seeing what I typically would see when I was young looking up at the bubbles and seeing the light.
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I was feeling like I was just seeing darkness and I needed to recreate that light again.
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So it was hard.
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It took a lot of getting in the pool, hurting but also feeling like every day was a little bit better and a little bit faster.
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What did that look like?
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You know, like was it three days a week, five days a week, 1,000, 5,000?
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.
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What does that look like when an Olympic swimmer comes back and I do want to say you don't have to go to Masters and win, that's just your.
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You are still right and I have a fun story to say why I said that.
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But getting back into swimming for me was very different than when I was a swimmer in my youth, because I was a distance swimmer and back then it was about yardage.
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You know, I'd get up at 430 and swim two hours and go back and swim two hours and it was like you know as many yards as you can get in or meters you can get in.
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That was the goal and I thought, well, first of all, there's no way I can do that.
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I don't want to spend four hours a day in the pool and also I think swimming has evolved that you don't need to do as much yardage.
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So I got that, I sort of wrote that in my head and I don't have to do that type of amount.
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So I started about three days a week just trying to get in about a thousand, just getting comfortable in the water.
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Again I had a real problem, though I couldn't flip.
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It wasn't because I couldn't actually do the flip, but I would get so dizzy that it would ruin my, not just that moment, it would ruin like my whole day.
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I had terrible vertigo and I went to the ear doctor and he says and he kind of laughed at me and he says you know, you're almost 60.
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I mean, most women your age, a lot of women your age, have this problem where they get dizzy more easily.
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And I said okay, well, what can I do to fix it?
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And he goes well, you can try this, you can try that.
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I tried everything and it just didn't work.
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So I got really good at turning fast but I felt like it was slowing me down, and I think it does still slow me down.
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But that always was in my head that I'm not flipping.
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But I did start around three days a week and then within a few months I went to four days a week, around 2000 yards, but I was avoiding looking at the clock and that was my own psyche, like I didn't want to look at the clock and think am I really slow or am I where I should be?
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And I just didn't for a long time.
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Then, slowly, I decided I better look at the clock and see where I'm at and I started pushing.
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But I have not gone over 3,000 meters, but I do swim four to five times a week, always in the morning.
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If I swim late, I don't know, maybe it's my age then.
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I can't sleep all night, so I'd swim in the morning.
00:18:57.371 --> 00:19:01.958
I definitely needed to go to physical therapy, which was something I never needed as a youth.
00:19:01.958 --> 00:19:06.722
That was new to me my back, my shoulders, I would get cramps in my feet.
00:19:06.722 --> 00:19:14.480
I had to learn how to really drink a lot during practice, keep my electrolytes up, which I was not used to as a youth.
00:19:14.480 --> 00:19:20.118
It was a different way of training, but it wasn't unmanageable.
00:19:20.118 --> 00:19:29.057
It felt really manageable and I met a lot of really amazing people in the master's world that.
00:19:29.057 --> 00:19:34.996
It just opened my eyes up and I kind of said, god, why wasn't I doing this all along?
00:19:34.996 --> 00:19:37.701
I felt like I missed out, like why did I stop?
00:19:37.701 --> 00:19:40.314
And this was like a reawakening.
00:19:40.314 --> 00:19:46.884
And now one of the biggest gifts I've gotten out of this whole thing is that I'm a master swimmer and I love it.
00:19:46.884 --> 00:19:48.633
Oh, that's beautiful.
00:19:49.194 --> 00:19:50.239
How's your son?
00:19:50.239 --> 00:19:51.750
Oh, so I'm.
00:19:51.750 --> 00:20:00.061
So you know, I read your bio, maria, and I know you had a sister who died of brain cancer and it's been a hard road.
00:20:00.061 --> 00:20:11.556
My husband happens to be a pediatric hematologist, oncologist, so you can imagine when we go in and they tell us our son has a brain tumor and my husband's one of the doctors on the team.
00:20:11.556 --> 00:20:13.237
You know it's like not right.
00:20:13.237 --> 00:20:17.922
He's alive because of modern medicine, which is amazing that he's alive.
00:20:17.922 --> 00:20:30.463
He's alive and he can stay alive if he is compliant with his medical regimen, which is, as you know, with children, especially when they enter adolescence and young adulthood.
00:20:30.463 --> 00:20:37.103
Being compliant is very hard, and chronic illness and mental health go hand in hand.
00:20:37.994 --> 00:20:39.369
I studied in school.
00:20:39.369 --> 00:20:41.698
I was a behavioral therapist.
00:20:41.698 --> 00:20:51.166
I studied in school, I was a behavioral therapist and before our son got sick, my expertise was working with young adults and adolescents with chronic illness.
00:20:51.166 --> 00:20:51.669
Oh, wow, go figure.
00:20:51.669 --> 00:20:53.296
Yeah, married to an oncologist.
00:20:53.296 --> 00:20:55.701
Everyone thought we were this like dream team.
00:20:55.701 --> 00:20:56.990
Here we are, and we were at Yale.
00:20:57.771 --> 00:21:10.182
I was giving all these lectures about the sake of social issues, about how to care for your kids, and here we are with our own son, and when our son was around 15, 16, everything with him is artificial.
00:21:10.182 --> 00:21:15.141
How he grows, everything about his body is because of modern medicine.
00:21:15.141 --> 00:21:18.680
If he stops taking his medicine, he will not survive.
00:21:18.680 --> 00:21:45.643
He lost vision, he's lost some things, but you know, if you met him, he's this good looking guy and he's smart, but has a lot of limitations due to the mental health side of a chronic illness depression, anxiety living up to what he should be, that he's not Very complicated stuff and he's the first generation to survive and he's a small number.
00:21:45.849 --> 00:21:49.877
You know, brain tumors in children is very rare.
00:21:49.877 --> 00:21:57.319
You know, when my husband decided to go into oncology I said no, what if he had a kid with cancer?
00:21:57.319 --> 00:21:58.481
I mean, don't do that.
00:21:58.481 --> 00:22:01.153
And he's like no, you don't understand.
00:22:01.153 --> 00:22:08.272
We hear about it a lot because the cute little bald kid but it's actually quite rare and that's where his research was his most interest.
00:22:08.272 --> 00:22:10.397
So I'm like cool, am I to say what he should do.
00:22:10.980 --> 00:22:16.574
But it came back to haunt me big time when they told us our son had brain tumor.
00:22:16.574 --> 00:22:34.285
He's an interesting young man, he's sweet and kind and capable, but it's been a lot of keeping him alive, him not wanting to take his medicine, him wanting to fit in like any teenager.
00:22:34.285 --> 00:22:42.641
But it's really hard to understand the depth of how he felt because I don't know how that feels.
00:22:42.641 --> 00:23:00.644
I am not a believer that you have to have cancer to be empathetic and caring and all that, but I didn't know how to understand some of like just go to school, just get there, just go and do it or just take your medicine.
00:23:00.644 --> 00:23:09.767
Lots of periods of time and he's on a huge cocktail of medicine, which is amazing he's alive, but a lot of consequences.
00:23:10.631 --> 00:23:14.320
Sounds like there's lots of trauma in there, not just for him, but for you.
00:23:15.530 --> 00:23:22.237
Well, and I think you get that exactly right Everybody has somebody in their family who has something.
00:23:22.237 --> 00:23:25.695
It doesn't have to be as traumatic as a brain tumor, it can be anything.
00:23:25.695 --> 00:23:34.644
It doesn't just affect that child, it affects the entire family and it infected our family in a very profound way.
00:23:34.644 --> 00:23:47.789
He's wedged in between two girls and it was really hard and it continues to be really hard, but amazingly they all were so happy I'm doing this project.
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