The only two ways to view Lilly King’s multicolored tattoo of the Olympic rings on the outside of her right thigh is to be someone who is very close to her or to be one of millions who see her swim on television.
She earned the decoration by capturing two gold medals at the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. If she had it etched on before the action, it might have been construed as arrogance.
“About a month later,” King said of when she added the markings.
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Click here to purchase photos from this gallery
The timing of pride was just right because winning gold is forever.
Now, King is going for more in the 2021 Tokyo Summer Games, delayed from 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and probably in 2024, too.
On a quiet morning, last Saturday, at Shields Park Pool in Seymour, King and another eight members of the Indiana University Pro Swim Group filled four lanes of the 50-meter, long-course pool for workouts in the sunshine.
Since March, the swimmers have learned the American trials were called off, the Tokyo Games would be postponed for a year and their usual IU Natatorium training grounds were closed, leaving them waterless. All of it due to the coronavirus, so it is not unfair to say they have been drifting.
Now, they are starting over, and part of their training base plays out in the Seymour pool.
“I’d heard through a friend Seymour was opening,” coach Ray Looze said. “This is the only Olympic pool we could be at.”
So the swimmers are committed to Saturday mornings through June in Seymour while they also swim on weekdays in Martinsville at a 25-meter pool.
A lot of driving. A lot of carpooling.
Before Looze found the pools, the squad dabbled in a private suburban Bloomington pond and had to elude snakes and extra-large snapping turtles.
“They didn’t really care for it,” Looze said, apparently referring to the swimmers, but possibly the reptiles, or both.
Looze said he hopes to be able to tell that story next year to fellow coaches at the Games.
“I hope so,” he said. “They didn’t get bit, but this is the cat’s meow here.”
In almost every sport, Olympians develop a rhythm of training and peaking their bodies for the perfect moment in competition, the swimmers planning their thousands of meters in workouts, their nutrition, their calorie intake.
Most of those in the pro group is an IU graduate. Not everyone wants to continue swimming indefinitely. It was not so long ago under amateurism rules, it was not terribly practical to do so.
Looze said he has been coaching Cody Miller since 2009, his longest affiliation with any swimmer, first as an undergraduate and also as a professional.
Miller, said Looze “is an influencer,” someone who may have 130,000 social media contacts to whom he sells swim products as a way to make a living. Miller, 28, won a bronze medal in Rio in the 100-meter breaststroke and a gold medal for the United States in a relay. He has also won medals in world championships.
This day, Looze let Miller write the workout plan. Looze paced the pool deck reading each segment of the practice.
“Your first series is your most challenging one,” Looze lectured as a warning after the group’s initial warmup. “Make it hurt.” As an aside, Looze said, “It tells ‘em where they’re really at.”
Miller endorses supplements, swim gear and other relevant swim equipment. He also is an avid follower of films, even if Hollywood has not been terribly kind to the swimming genre since A) Johnny Weissmuller was a five-time Olympic gold-medal swimmer and B) played Tarzan.
“I like science fiction,” Miller said.
He gave five stars to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” but also gave props to “The Lord of the Rings” while not downgrading any style of movie.
Annie Lazor, 25, did not attend school at IU. She is from Detroit originally and competed for Auburn in Alabama and had competed with mixed results in championship meets. More recently, she switched gears to join this swim group, partly at the behest of King, who is queen of the breaststroke.
Lazor is now churning out the best results of her career, hungry for the trials. Lazor, who won a short course world championship in China in December and is on the all-time American breaststroke time lists, said there is nothing like a 50-meter pool to reveal the reality of conditioning.
“It definitely humbles you, for sure,” Lazor said. “You can fake it at short course.”
It was easy enough to tell the swimmers were not poised for a major competition. That’s because several of the men sported long hair and beards.
Ordinarily, when a big-deal race looms, guys shave their facial hair, keep on-head hair short and shave even chests and legs, the point being that any little fragment of hair can cost time in the water and every tenth of a second matters.
“It’s what you signed up for,” said Blake Pieroni, 24, whom Looze called one of the best Indiana University swimmers ever.
Pieroni, a freestyle specialist, won two gold medals and a bronze at the 2019 world championships in South Korea. In 2018, he won three gold medals in the world championships in China. He also set American records in the NCAA championships and in the 2016 Olympics took home a gold medal as part of the 4×400-meter relay.
Rather than planning his training for the trials, which would have been this week, Pieroni and his pro teammates had their emotions tangled by offshoots of COVID-19.
First, sports were cut off across the United States in March. The team was at a big meet in Des Moines, Iowa, and had to return to Indiana. Then pools closed to prevent virus spread. There was a two-week gap before the Olympics were postponed, so there was panic the athletes were losing out on critical training. Then the Games were postponed for a year.
“We were 10 or 11 weeks out of the water,” Pieroni said.
No swimming but weightlifting to build those shoulder and leg muscles and other dryland training were useful. Finally, knowing there will be no Olympics this July, everyone made choices, either retiring or extending training for another year.
“That is nice water,” Pieroni said of the Seymour pool. “You forget how tired you get. It’s just you’re tired all of the time.”
The pool opens to the public at noon. Manager Dave Boggs is renting lanes to teams from 9 to 11 a.m., making deals for squads that usually have regular places, either aren’t reopening at all this summer or for now. Donner Pool in Columbus is one of those, and the club team there used four lanes adjacent to the IU pro group.
Members of the Seymour club and school teams filtered in at one side of the pool to watch the pros train and then pose for pictures.
“They knew we were open,” Boggs said of how the Olympic hopefuls came to be in Seymour. “They’re Olympic medalists and world record-holders. It’s good for the community.”
Boggs said he and the area youth swimmers will root for these athletes when the Olympic trials come around next year and in the Olympic Games.
“You’ve got some of the best in the world here,” he said. “They’re some of the most exceptional talent.”
For swimmers who were described as not being in shape, there did not appear to be more than 1% body fat on display among the whole group. They may not have been regulars in the water in recent months, but they didn’t overdo the cupcakes in breaking bad from the diet.
“This has been a very chaotic year,” Looze said.
All of them were keenly aware of that.
“We were without a pool for two months,” said Zach Apple, 23, who won two golds and a bronze at the world championships in South Korea last year after winning seven All-American citations at the NCAAs for IU.
He was perfectly positioned for the Olympics, and then there were no Olympics.
“It was definitely a bummer,” Apple said. “It was what we were all working for. It’s definitely still a change.”
Now, the swimmers are trying to tame their lives, push the train back on the tracks to travel at its normal rate of speed and start all over again, looking ahead a year, basically with a do-over for the U.S. trials and the Olympics.
King, born in Evansville, previously competed at the Seymour pool as a youth in USA Swimming competition, so these training sessions are more deja vu as a site for her.
“It’s kind of weird,” King said.
Athletes’ Olympic clocks are always ticking. They age and the four-year gap between Games is often seen as insurmountable. Not for King. She plans to continue competing for years.
“I was never in a position where I was going to be done,” King said of post-Tokyo life. “I plan to be swimming in 2024.”
By then, King may have a newer Olympic rings tattoo.