"Everybody overlooked this girl," said Anthony McCleary, her coach since she was 16. "I just told her: 'You're on the back burner, you are the dark horse. Step out into the light. Change it all.' "

"We were the underdogs. Nobody expected anything out of all three of us," [Priscilla Lopes-Schliep] said, a bright grin stretched across her face. "And for us to go out there and place 1, 2, 3 and prove to the world that we are here and we are competitors, it's such an exciting feeling.

"It was so close from my angle, I couldn't really tell," said husband Bronsen Schliep, who was sitting in the stands with McCleary, clad in a red T-shirt with his wife's photo displayed on the front. "It just started flashing 'photo finish, photo finish, photo finish' for what seemed like about 10 days.