You don't have to swim against Elaine Breeden, the 19-year-old Olympian from Kentucky, to be blown away by her.

Just hearing about her should be enough.

Breeden broke Mary T. Meagher's 24-year-old meet record in the 200-meter butterfly -- twice in two nights -- at the U.S. Olympic Trials early this month in Omaha, Neb.

She's majoring in classics. At Stanford. She got there after taking two years of high school in the same year. When an interviewer asked her the difference between high school and college, she replied that college was easier.

She seriously sprained both ankles during the long run-up to the Olympics but said: "Ankles are important in swimming, but they're not crucial. It wasn't a shoulder, which would have been a lot worse."

The second ankle injury happened in the Stanford weight room, where the pop of twisting tissue allegedly caused the blood to drain from the faces of the football players nearby. The next day Breeden headed for Rome with her sister and was photographed limping on the Appian Way.

She has backpacked around Europe and been to more than 25 countries and all 50 states. Best trip ever?

"I don't think I could narrow it down," she said. "… It's hard to compare a road trip all around the American West to a week on a Greek island."

Breeden's alma mater, Trinity Christian Academy in Lexington, has no swim team, so she competed for Wildcat Aquatics. But she's used to going through back channels: She was home-schooled by her mother, Lenore, through seventh grade.

She's kin to Diane Sawyer -- Breeden's grandmother, Shirley Dougherty, is Sawyer's first cousin. Breeden also apparently is related to Johnny Depp, but in such a distant, technical way that it's not worth mentioning, her mother said.

In high school Breeden composed a 30-page paper comparing Odysseus and Achilles in light of contemporary ideas about heroes.

"Few students tend to deal with classic literature at that abstract of a level," said Shelly Johnson, her teacher.

Said Breeden: "I think that Achilles … would have been the bigger hero to the ancient Greeks but that the hero qualities of Odysseus are more along the lines of what a modern hero would be like."

With Trojan horses, lotus-eaters, fatal beauties and epic voyages full of mortal peril at every turn, Odysseus had his hands full, all right. But his calendar couldn't have been any more crowded than Breeden's was during the year that she held down three jobs: high school junior, high school senior and aspiring Olympic swimmer.

"I swam in the morning before school and then immediately after school," she said. "I had to work my school schedule around my swimming."

While her classmates were taking seven courses, she took a dozen. Since school wasn't actually open long enough to accommodate her arduous schedule, she did some classes at home: American history, American literature and math.

"I was doing geometry at home, and I'm not a mathematician," she said. "That was difficult for me, just to have the discipline to do it."

"Nobody but Elaine could have probably done that," said Paula McGuire, the athletic director and counselor at Trinity Christian. "That's how driven that she is in everything that she does."

Science teacher Stephanie Logan echoed that in glorious understatement: "Elaine had a very rare work ethic."

During that challenging year, Breeden's mother said, "She slept four or five hours a night."

Breeden doesn't recall ever falling asleep in class, but she does remember "several days where I would skip lunch at school and I would just go into a classroom and sleep, and I would have my friends wake me up before the next class."

She went through all that so she wouldn't have to go through a different kind of hell year: leaving home for college, adjusting to a new program and coach and trying to qualify for the Olympics.

"She felt as if being a freshman in college going into the Olympic year, that might be something that was more difficult than necessary," Stanford coach Lea Maurer said.

Breeden had first seen Stanford on a childhood trip to California with her grandparents, and she kept it in her heart and mind as she considered colleges.

"Elaine … read a review of Stanford once when she was looking at schools," her mother recalled, "and it said the students there look kind of like ducks on the water; they look like they're calm on the surface, floating around, but under the surface they're paddling like mad. And she said, 'That's me.' She thought that was a perfect fit for her. She has this calm demeanor, but she is a very hard worker under the surface."

Early in her sophomore year she went to a "majors fair" to check out her options.

"I was getting a little discouraged," she said, "until I came to the classics table. They had classes like Greek mythology, ancient Greek athletics, Roman art and archaeology … and I knew right then and there that that was going to be the major for me."

Whereupon she called her mother and announced she wanted to take every class in the classics department.

"That has been her passion," Lenore said. "She's loved it, absolutely loved it. … She was going to get a master's in business when she finished -- to be practical -- but now she's talking about getting a master's in classics."

She's the only classics major on the swim team.

"The only other classics major my age that I know is actually a football player," Breeden said.

It must be hard enough to study classics at Stanford and do nothing else, much less be a world-class swimmer.

"I think she thrives on it, so that's her gift," Maurer said. "She's a nine-cylinder engine, and part of it is her great love of learning, and part of it is her great love of her classmates and her dorm mates and her church group and her swim team. I think there were a lot of people pulling for her, and she uses it as a source of energy and fuel rather than feeling like it's draining her."

Back home in Lexington, they certainly were pulling for her at the Olympic Trials.

"My guess is that everybody is overjoyed and nobody is surprised," said Johnson, the Trinity Christian teacher. "Elaine is just a really sweet, humble but very ambitious girl."

They were overjoyed for her in Omaha, too.

"When she made the team (in the 100 fly as well as the 200) it was like she was just totally shocked, and it almost brought tears to my eyes," said Olympic teammate Caroline Burckle of Louisville.

Breeden was shocked.

"I was completely stunned to have made the team in that event," she said. "Right after… I was warming down in the warmdown pool, and I just remember I was like yelling underwater, trying to convince myself that I had just made the Olympic team."

Isn't it dangerous yelling underwater?

"Oh, we sing underwater," she said. "It's not that unusual."

Elaine isn't the only multitasking, high-achieving singer in the family. Her 17-year-old sister, Caroline, was a swimmer, too.

"She just gave it up this year," Breeden said. "She's actually focusing on singing."

Then there's 21-year-old sister Kathleen, a club swimmer and senior at Harvard.

"We always teased that she was the smart one in the family," Elaine said. "I can honestly say I don't know anyone smarter or harder-working than my older sister. She's been a huge inspiration to me. And my older sister is the best artist I've ever, ever seen."

All of which helps explain Elaine.

"Got to do something," she said, "to keep up with my singing, painting sisters."