Forged in triumph and tragedy, UCLA's Adam Krikorian keeps Olympic loss in perspective

All things being equal, Adam Krikorian would rather win than lose.

“It is much easier,” he said.

And Krikorian would know since he’s won a lot, capturing 15 national championships as a water polo player and coach at UCLA and 24 world and Olympic titles as coach of the U.S. women’s team.

But if winning is easier, losing, Krikorian believes, is more revealing.

“Adversity is a test of character more than anything,” he said. “It’s easy to be the person you aspire to be when you’re winning and when you’re having success. Trying to be that person when you’re not at the top of the mountain is a much more difficult thing to do.

“Much more honorable as well.”

That philosophy was put to the test on the biggest stage and under some of the cruelest circumstances of Krikorian’s career last month at the Paris Olympics. The U.S. women, heavily favored to win an unprecedented fourth consecutive gold medal, lost their last two games despite trailing for just one second of those final 64 minutes.

In the blink of an eye, the team had gone from a spot on the medal podium to leaving the Summer Games empty-handed for the first time. Years of sacrifice, dedication and training had gone unrewarded.

“A lot of tears,” Krikorian said of the moment. “The feelings and emotions are endless. There’s anger, there’s frustration, there’s a ton of sadness.”

But there was also opportunity because Krikorian has never seen himself as just a coach. He’s also a leader. And that’s exactly what the 13 sobbing women gathered around him on the pool deck needed.

So they closed ranks, took responsibility and, through the tears, saluted the women who beat them. Winning isn’t always about the final score; sometimes it’s how you react to that result.

“This is what life is; the reality of life,” he said then. “You don’t stand on top of the podium every single time. We lost to a better team. In these heartbreaking moments, you’ve got to learn from it. You’ve got to put it in perspective.”

Krikorian’s approach has become rare. That makes the lessons he’s teaching of grace, sportsmanship and humility even more important, said Richard Lapchick, president of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

“In an era when ethics and values are often forgotten in the pursuit of victory, Coach Krikorian told his team that they had an opportunity to show greatness in defeat. He told him to show their character and the players followed their coach. He told them that they could rise above the loss and show that it was OK to lose as long as you play hard and show class in defeat,” Lapchick said. “Hopefully, all of his players will remember that lesson as they go through life after sports.”

Like the fictional soccer coach Ted Lasso, Krikorian speaks in inspirational aphorisms as often as he does in complete sentences and many of those maxims come from John Wooden, the legendary UCLA basketball coach and Krikorian’s mentor, who also put character above victory.

“He’s got this great quote,” Krikorian begins before reciting one of Wooden’s favorite lessons.

No written word nor spoken plea can teach our youth what they should be. Nor all the books on all the shelves. It’s what the teachers are themselves.

“One of my goals when I started coaching was to inspire people, to be someone that could bring the best out of others,” Krikorian continued. “And I have a set of values that I try to follow. When you have those things that are your guiding light, it makes it pretty easy.”

Goalie Ashleigh Johnson, a three-time Olympian, said the U.S. team has long fed off Krikorian’s convictions.

“Adam’s leadership shines through,” said Johnson, a two-time gold medalist and winner of multiple world championships.

“We have a lot of discussions about perspective, about what we want, where we want to go. And a lot of that isn’t just how we want to be seen as athletes, how we want to be as people and who we represent. Just realizing we’re getting to have fun for our career, not many people get to do that. So even the disappointing moments are things that you face with perspective and joy.”

Krikorian learned about perspective the hard way. The coach saw his brother, Blake, die of a heart attack at 48, just before the start of the 2016 Rio Games, and his father, Gary, at 81, two months before the Tokyo Olympics. He also lost four of his college teammates and one of his UCLA players at young ages.

Jim Toring was 23 when he was hit by a bus in Paris on a national team trip. Brett Stern was 31 when he was killed in a car accident in Irvine. Brian Bent died of sleep apnea at 29 and Terry Baker of cancer at 43. Marco Santos, whom Krikorian coached to a national team, died of ALS three weeks shy of his 29th birthday.

If anyone had reason to be bitter about fate it was Krikorian. But he channeled that grief in a different direction.

“It just made me — I can’t explain why — appreciate my life even more,” said Krikorian, who keeps a journal and talks regularly with Peter Haberl, the team’s sports psychologist. “I’m grateful for all that I have and the health and the life I’ve been able to live.”

U.S. women’s water polo coach Adam Krikorian celebrates with his players after the team’s gold-medal win over Spain at the Tokyo Olympic Games in August 2021.

(Gary Ambrose / For the Times)

His players have had their perspective tested as well. In the lead-up to this summer’s Olympics, team leader Maddie Musselman learned her husband, Patrick Woepse, had stage 4 lung cancer. Then days before the opening ceremony, Lulu Conner, the sister-in-law of U.S. captain Maggie Steffens, suffered a fatal medical emergency in Paris.

Before that three players survived a deadly shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas, another narrowly escaped a terrorist bombing in a Belgian train station and two more were injured in a balcony collapse at a hotel in South Korea.

Given those real-life tragedies, it was easy for Krikorian and his players to look at what happened in the pool in Paris — where the U.S. lost its semifinal to Australia in a penalty shootout, then fell to the Netherlands in the bronze-medal match on a goal in the final second — as just games.

And in every game, there’s a winner and a loser.

A couple of weeks after returning from Paris, over a late breakfast of scrambled eggs and bacon at a cafe near his South Bay home, Krikorian acknowledged the two losses still haunt him. But he continues to embrace the lessons of those losses.

“Success in life is usually defined by not how you respond to the wins but how you respond to the losses and how you deal with adversity,” he said.

“I would love, as we all would, not to have to deal with adversity. But it’s a reminder that it’s just part of life. There’s an acronym, FEAR, that I heard once. It’s either Fear Everything And Run or Face Everything And Rise. That’s my choice.”

Krikorian didn’t learn that from Wooden. That perspective, he said, came from life experiences as well as from his father, who played football at Occidental with future NFL coach Jim Mora and future AFL champion quarterback Jack Kemp.

“I’m 50 years old, so I’d like to think I’ve matured,” Krikorian said. “I don’t know if I had the same perspective when I was 20. I’m a product of my parents, understanding kind of where this whole thing fits in life. And I think about my father quite a bit.

“The one thing that he was always instilling in us as children was just to be able to handle defeat in a classy way. So for me, in some ways, it’s about honoring my father.”

Krikorian’s two children — Annabel, a 15-year-old track athlete at Mira Costa High and Jack, an 18-year-old swimmer — have also adopted their grandfather’s philosophy about sportsmanship.

“I’m always impressed with how encouraging and respectful my son is, complimenting even his biggest rivals,” Krikorian said. “Always shaking hands and wishing them luck. I think it catches some kids off guard at times.”

With the L.A. Games four years away, Krikorian’s future with the U.S. team remains uncertain. He nearly stepped down after winning a third straight gold medal in Tokyo but now acknowledges he’s excited about the possibility of coaching in the Olympics in his adopted hometown.

It’s unclear if Adam Krikorian will be coaching the U.S. women’s water polo team at the Los Angeles Summer Olympic Games in 2028.

(Luca Bruno / Associated Press)

The decision, however, may not be his. Jamie Davis, the CEO of USA volleyball the past eight years, will assume a similar role with USA Water Polo on Oct. 1, replacing Christopher Ramsey, the man who first hired Krikorian out of UCLA in 2009.

Given the tragic history that has surrounded Krikorian’s teams, however, the coach said he’s questioned the wisdom of returning.

“This sounds ridiculous, but it’s like I don’t want to coach in 2028 because I’m fearful of someone else dying,” he said. “It’s an irrational thought to have but it’s a thought that’s come up.”

Johnson, who became the only Black woman to play on a U.S. Olympic water polo team when Krikorian named her to the roster in 2016, said the program would be different without him.

“I love playing under Adam,” said Johnson, the most decorated goalkeeper in women’s water polo history.

“The attitude that you see and the wins, the successes that we’ve had, the development that you’ve seen, is a reflection of Adam’s influence on us. I’m sure he’s influenced a lot of people. The empathy, the leadership, he’s definitely transformed this program for the better.”

And those last things, not the wins and the titles, are what Krikorian wants to be remembered for.

“A lot of people, when they introduce me to friends, they introduce me as, ‘Oh this guy is a three-time gold medalist and he won 15 national championships at UCLA’,” Krikorian said. “Although it makes me feel good as I appreciate it, there’s always been a part of that that’s been slightly annoying. I don’t want anything that has to do with water polo on my tombstone. That’s not how I wanted to be remembered.

“Ultimately, you’re judged on who you are as a person.”