ANAHEIM – Last week, the Road to London turned onto Disneyland’s Main Street.

A marching band decked out in red, white and blue led a parade that included a firetruck carrying U.S. Olympic women’s volleyball coach Hugh McCutcheon and Team USA men’s coach Alan Knipe, with Minnie Mouse riding shot gun. Behind the truck, members of the U.S. men’s and women’s teams marched or rode on a float as the crowd lining Main Street sent the athletes off to the 2012 Olympic Games in London with chants of “USA! USA!” and “We’ll be watching you on TV!”

“Where else in America are you going to see something like this?’ Knipe said.

The scene was entirely fitting given Orange County’s status as an Olympic power.

Orange County has become something of a five-ring theme park where Olympic dreams come true. Every four years, the pools, gyms, fields and beaches of the O.C. produce a cast of Disneyesque characters that seem to appear out of the Southern California imagination ready to take on the world; young and fresh faced heroes like swimming’s Janet Evans, Brian Goodell and Aaron Peirsol, diver Greg Louganis, Misty May Treanor, the queen of beach volleyball; soccer’s Joy Fawcett and Julie Foudy, and now gymnasts Kyla Ross and McKayla Maroney and rower Esther Lofgren. All have local ties, and all seem dipped in gold.

“Orange County has become synonymous with Olympic success,” said San Clemente’s Gabe Gardner, a member of the men’s volleyball team that won gold at Beijing in 2008.

If Orange County was a nation it would have ranked among the top 10 in gold medals at each of the past two Summer Olympics. At the 2004 Games in Athens, Orange County athletes won as many golds (nine) as Great Britain, or one more than Brazil and Spain combined. Four years later, O.C. athletes brought home 19 medals, as many as Ethiopia, the Czech Republic and Argentina combined.

Athletes with O.C. ties also produced two of the most iconic moments of the 2008 Beijing Games. Irvine’s Jason Lezak kept Michael Phelps’ bid for a record eight gold medals alive in the 4×100-meter freestyle relay with what has been called as the greatest anchor ever. Phelps later edged Serbia’s Milorad Cavic, a Tustin High grad, by a mere hundredth of a second to win the 100-meter butterfly to equal Mark Spitz’s then-Olympic record of seven golds.

In London, Orange County athletes could put up even bigger numbers.

A record 79 O.C. athletes will compete in the 2012 Olympic Games in London, more than double the 31 who participated in the Athens Games just eight years ago. And unlike some other Olympic hotbeds like Kenya’s Rift Valley or Australia’s Gold Coast, Orange County’s Olympic success is not limited to just one sport. In London, O.C. athletes could win gold medals in as many as nine sports.

It is a gold rush that is the product of the availability of world-class coaching and facilities, financial support both at the local government and family levels, and a rich Olympic history that continues to add new chapters every four years.

“The Olympics are important in Orange County,” Evans said. “There’s an Olympic tradition in Orange County.”

“In Orange County with the Olympics, you feel like everybody’s behind you,” Knipe said. “There’s this feeling of we’re all in this together.”

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In the spring of 1972, a 22-year-old Ohio swim coach named Mark Schubert tried to convince officials in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, to build a bubble to enclose the city’s outdoor pool. The bubble would allow Schubert to train his swimmers year-round.

“Mark, you’re probably going to be a great coach someday,” Schubert recalled the city’s parks and recreation director telling him, “but it’s never going to be in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.”

Within a few months, Schubert was hired by the Mission Viejo Company to coach a fledgling swim program known as the Mission Viejo Nadadores. Unlike the folks in Cuyahoga Falls, the Mission Viejo Company spared no expense in bankrolling Schubert’s dream of conquering the world.

Fred Kelly was Orange County’s first Olympic champion, winning the 110-meter high hurdles at the 1912 Games in Stockholm. O.C. swimmers like Gary Hall Sr. would continue to win Olympic medals in the 1960s and 1970s.

But it was Schubert more than anyone who made Orange County an Olympic power.

“He had the vision,” Evans said. “It all starts with Mark.”

“He’s still the greatest coach in America. Period,” Hall of Fame swim coach Jon Urbanchek said of Schubert. “I don’t think anybody can challenge that. He’s a legend. He is the best. There is no doubt.”

Four years after Schubert arrived in Mission Viejo, the Nadadores’ Goodell won gold medals in the 400 and 1,500-meter freestyle at the 1976 Games in Montreal. “And after that, there was this domino effect,” said Schubert, who now coaches at Golden West College after a stint as director of the U.S. national team.

Before long swimmers were moving to Mission Viejo from Florida, the Midwest, Northern California to train with Schubert. Nadadores swimmers won 13 medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Games, 10 of them gold. Only the U.S., Romania, Germany, China and Italy won more gold medals in Los Angeles. Heading into London, Nadadores swimmers have won 20 Olympic medals, and set 22 world records and 91 American records.

One of the athletes inspired by the Nadadores’ success was Placentia’s Evans, who would go on to become the sport’s greatest distance swimmer.

“To me, Mission Viejo was just revered,” Evans said. “It’s almost like Mission Viejo was the birthplace of swimming.”

Schubert’s success in Mission Viejo served as a blueprint for other Orange County clubs. Olympic champions Peirsol, Lezak and Amanda Beard and world record-holder Jessica Hardy, a member of the 2012 U.S. Olympic swim team, all broke onto the international scene while training at Irvine Novaquatics under Dave Salo, now coaching at USC and the Trojan Swim Club.

But Schubert not only raised the bar for swimming, his success with the Nadadores also set a gold medal standard for local athletes and coaches in other sports.

“Mission Viejo’s success definitely rubbed off,” Gardner said. “They’re a big reason why Orange County has had so much Olympic success … They were the legacy for anybody growing up with Olympic dreams, even if you weren’t going to be a swimmer.”

Fawcett and Foudy were the heart of a U.S. women’s soccer team that won the 1996 and 2004 Olympic titles as well as the 1991 and 1999 Women’s World Cups. Gold medal-winning U.S. softball teams in 2000 and 2004 were loaded with Orange County players. When the U.S. women won the silver medal in gymnastics’ team competition at the 1984 Olympics – the first U.S. women’s medal in the sport since 1948 – four of the six women on Team USA had trained at SCATS, a Huntington Beach gym.

Gymnasts from SCATS also won an individual gold medal, a silver and bronze at the 1984 Games. (The U.S. team and SCATS were both coached by Don Peters, who was banned for life from the sport by USA Gymnastics last year following a Register investigation in which three women alleged Peters had sexual contact with three teenage gymnasts. He denied the charges.)

And much like swimmers flocked to Mission Viejo in the ’70s, SCATS’ team member triumphs in the ’84 Games prompted gymnasts from all over the country to move near the Huntington Beach club.

In recent years, whole teams have relocated to Orange County. USA Water Polo trains in Los Alamitos. Before the Beijing games, USA Volleyball relocated the men’s national team from Colorado Springs to Anaheim. The move was part of a deal between USA Volleyball, the sport’s national governing body, and Anaheim. In the arrangement, Anaheim and local businesses provide Team USA with financial, housing and logistical support.

“We wouldn’t have won the gold medal in 2008 without moving here,” said McCutcheon, who coached the U.S. men’s team in Beijing.

In 2009 the U.S. women moved to Anaheim and the deal was extended through the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

“(The deal with) Anaheim is such a wonderful program,” McCutcheon said. “It enables our athletes to be the best they can be.”

Athletes training in Orange County also benefit from a number of other factors. Developing a future Olympian requires a significant financial and time commitment from a family. Between expenses such as coaching, facilities, equipment, travel and home schooling, families can spend well into five-figures annually supporting an Olympic hopeful.

“We have the means to give kids opportunities here,” Evans said.

As part of his training regime for the 1968 Olympics, Gary Hall Sr. regularly sneaked into the Disneyland Hotel pool for extra workouts. Today, Orange County athletes train at world-class facilities. And chances are the kid swimming on the other side of the lane marker or other end of the balance beam could end up on a future Olympic team.

“You don’t have to travel to compete against the best in the country,” Schubert said. “There’s so much good competition here.”

When young athletes aren’t going head-to-head on a soccer pitch with the next Joy Fawcett, or swimming against the next Brian Goodell, they’re bumping into the real thing in the grandstands or even training a few lanes away from a current Olympian. Gymnasts Maroney and Ross first met nearly a decade ago at a gym in Orange County.

“There are so many Olympians in Orange County it’s crazy,” Evans said. “You’re always bumping into someone who went to the Olympics.”

“I think that’s really important,” Schubert said. “(Kids) see these (other successful athletes) and it makes them real and not just some legend.”

As Knipe stood on the end of Disneyland’s Main Street last week he couldn’t help wondering if a future gold medalist was out there in the crowd.

“In 2016, 2020; you’re going to read some story about a kid who watched the Olympic team play in Orange County when he was 10 years old,” Knipe said. “And he’s going say ‘That’s when I knew I had to do this.'”

Contact the writer: sreid@ocregister.com