From ASU to the Olympics, twice

Imagine it: the roar of the crowd flattening into white noise, the medal cool and improbably heavy against your chest, and a flag rising above your eyeline. When Mikael Örn is asked whether the real experience lives up to the movie version — whether standing on that Olympic podium in Los Angeles in 1984 felt as cinematic as people imagine — he doesn’t undercut the fantasy.

“It was like that,” he says, with a smile. “It was unbelievable.”

Örn is an alumnus of the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. His bronze medal in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay is is only the beginning of a story that continues decades later. Olympian. Engineer. IBM executive. Aquatics entrepreneur. 

In 2028, Örn will return to Los Angeles for the Olympic Games not as a swimmer, but to help engineer the water conditions for competition on the world stage.

“It’s full circle for me,” he says. “I get to go back to the Los Angeles Olympics for a second time, and now I get to go back and deliver the equipment.”

Örn didn’t arrive at ASU as a prodigy. Born in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1961, he moved south with his family at the age of 10. A local swim standout nudged Örn’s father to suggest the sport.

“My father thought I was a great swimmer. Turned out I wasn’t,” Örn says.

Örn started near the bottom of the rankings and climbed steadily. He was a late bloomer with an appetite for incremental gains. By the end of high school, he had improved enough to earn a scholarship to an American university. The U.S. offered a strong collegiate pipeline for athletes, and Örn chose ASU over Stanford. He intended to stay one year.

He stayed for four.

At ASU, he swam under Hall of Fame coach Ron Johnson and majored in computer engineering, earning both undergraduate and graduate degrees in the discipline. He was the 1983 NCAA champion in the 200-yard freestyle, a two-time Academic All-American, and ASU’s 1984 Athlete of the Year. Örn graduated with a 3.43 GPA, no small feat in a program known for its rigor. His schedule bordered on mechanical precision.

“If I had 15 minutes between classes, I would sit down on the floor and I would sleep for 12 minutes and then go to the next class,” he says.

Days began at 5 a.m. in the pool and often ended at midnight in the library. Being a varsity athlete in a demanding engineering program came with expectations, and Örn felt them. Instead of pushing back, he went directly to his professors, asking for flexibility when competitions took him out of town and taking responsibility to catch up.

One of those professors, James Collofello, became a pivotal mentor, helping Örn land his first role at the telecommunications company GTE and later collaborating with him after graduate school.

“Mikael carried his passion for swimming into his academic pursuits, excelling in the classroom as he did in the pool,” Collofello says. “Decades later, he still embodies the same qualities I saw in him as a student and athlete: hard work, humility and kindness.”

After ASU, Örn stayed in Arizona, entering industry during a period of rapid technological acceleration. At GTE, and later in two startups, he worked on embedded systems, writing software that ran on Nokia, Ericsson and Samsung phones. Some of that code, he notes, still operates in Nissan and Toyota telematics systems.

Örn moved into management, then executive leadership. In his final decade at IBM, he ran cloud services and high-stakes infrastructure at global scale.

“As much as I loved that career, it was 24/7,” he says.

When he retired in 2020, he had the option to step away from work completely. Instead, swimming resurfaced.

The seed for Örn’s second act was planted the day he landed in Tempe in 1980 carrying two suitcases. One of them was half-filled with a then-obscure Swedish invention: minimalist racing goggles designed by his coach, Tommy Malmsten.

They weren’t sold in American stores. So Örn became a distributor.

“I was selling these to my teammates here,” he says. “The $3 going rate for Sun Devils was reasonable. Visiting teams paid a little more.”

And when the Wildcats came to town?

“If the University of Arizona came,” he says. “I sold them for eight bucks.”

Call it early-stage dynamic pricing. The goggles are now known worldwide simply as “the Swedes” and have become one of the most iconic pieces of equipment in competitive swimming. Decades later, Malmsten asked Örn about his retirement plans.

“Why not bring the company’s pool equipment to North America?” Malmsten asked.

Malmsten Inc. launched in 2020, producing competition-grade lane lines and aquatic equipment to original Swedish specifications. The engineering focus is exacting. A lane line does more than divide water. It manages it.

“The number one job is to divide lanes. The real job is to calm the chaos,” Örn says. “Every stroke creates waves. If those waves bounce back, they slow you down. If we can dampen that energy, we’re effectively giving swimmers faster water.”

His company’s Gold PRO Racing Lane Line achieves 90.5% wave energy dampening, a marginal gain that matters at Olympic scale. At the next Games in Los Angeles, Örn won’t be calculating his split times. He’ll be checking installation specs five miles from the 1984 Olympic Village where he once lived among the world’s fastest swimmers.

Örn’s story arcs through elite sport, enterprise software and manufacturing logistics. The common denominator, he argues, isn’t swimming or silicon. It’s thinking.

“Now more than ever, the fundamentals — the science, the mathematics, the liberal arts — is super important,” he says. “Learn the fundamentals, and find a way to apply them.”

That advice might have resonance for computer science students navigating artificial intelligence and automation. Tools will change, Örn suggests. Core principles endure.

In 1984, Mikael Örn stood on a podium in Los Angeles, bronze medal at his chest, the water behind him still rippling. Four decades later, he will return to the same city to quiet the water for someone else’s race.

Same Games. Different lane.