Anyone scanning the list of Friday’s Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients would find the usual parade of senior government officials: 76-year-old former Vice President Al Gore, 80-year-old former Secretary of State John Kerry, and 84-year-old former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, to name just a few.
And then there was swimmer Katie Ledecky, 27, who the nation “watches … in awe” as a White House release phrased it.
“It was pretty surreal,” Ledecky told Sports Illustrated of the honor bestowed upon her Friday by President Joe Biden. “Just listening to all the accomplishments and all the impact that all of these individuals have made on our country was pretty inspiring. I think being young still, it does inspire me to continue to work really hard, both in the pool and out.”
Ledecky is believed to be the first swimmer ever to receive the honor. A consensus choice on any list of the greatest American Olympians, the Bethesda, Md., native has won seven Olympic gold medals and three silvers across her decorated career. Many of her greatest races have been comically lopsided, and she has long- and short-course world records in the 800- and 1500-meter freestyles to her name.
The 21-time world champion brought her parents, brother, uncle, former coach, two family friends and the head of her high school to collect her medal—which she said rendered her “speechless.”
“I never would’ve imagined I would receive this recognition,” Ledecky said. “It was a thrill to be able to be here. Just a really incredible day meeting some extraordinary people.”
Over a decade after bursting onto the scene as a 15-year-old at the London Olympics in 2012, Ledecky has gradually embraced an ambassadorial role in the swimming world. She has a memoir out in June, and appears likely to figure among the seasoned veterans on the American swimming team in Paris this summer.
If a four-medal haul at last year’s world championships in Fukuoka is any indication, though, she remains firmly at the top of her game in a sport with famously cruel patterns of aging. Beyond Paris, she’s told various outlets she’s eyeing the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles as well.
“I want to represent our team well in the pool and also help the younger swimmers coming up on these teams, make sure that they’re feeling comfortable and confident. I’m really excited for this summer,” Ledecky said. “(I’m) continuing to put in the work. I got my swim in this morning.”
Ledecky’s fourth Olympics comes amid a watershed year for women’s sports. Women’s college basketball, professional soccer and professional hockey have all hit cultural milestones over the last year.
That’s a testament to the strength of the athletes in those sports, according to Ledecky—and American Olympians have a chance to carry that torch in Paris.
“It’s our responsibility to be great ambassadors for our country when we go compete—to show good sportsmanship, to compete with great respect for our competitors and to be leaders in our communities and in our country,” Ledecky said. “We know young kids look up to us and we have to be good role models because we want the next generation to do great things, whether that’s in athletics or in government or in music or in the arts.”
In Fukuoka, Ledecky broke icon and fellow Maryland native Michael Phelps’s record for individual world titles. But because she lags behind him in a crucial statistic, she has no plans to rub in the fact she received presidential decoration first to Phelps.
“He still has way more (Olympic) medals than I do,” Ledecky said.
What does American swimming icon Katie Ledecky have left to prove? Not much.
Her medal record is eye-popping: seven Olympics golds and three Olympic silvers to go with 21 world golds and five silvers. She owns the world long- and short-course records in the 800-meter freestyle and 1500-meter freestyle. No conversation attempting to rank the greatest North American athletes of the 21st century is complete without her.
And yet, not only is Ledecky primed for another big Olympics this summer in Paris, she also indicated to NBC recently that she might not be done after that.
"The (2028) Olympics being in LA is very appealing. Not very many athletes get an opportunity to compete in a home Games," Ledecky said. "I definitely at this point am planning on going through 2028... whether I compete in one event, multiple events, a relay, whatever."
Ledecky turned 27 on St. Patrick's Day, and will be 31 by the time Los Angeles rolls around. Only three women—the United States's Dara Torres in 2000, the Netherlands' Inge de Bruijn in 2004, and West Germany's Ursula Happe in 1956—have ever won a swimming gold past the age of 30.
If there's anyone in swimming unbound by the sport's history, however, it's Ledecky.
INDIANAPOLIS—It’s so huge you can’t smell the chlorine.
The dominant sensory experience upon entering any pool area is the olfactory assault of chlorine, the chemical that keeps the water clean. More than the sight of the blue water or the sound of splashing, the smell of a pool is pungent and universal. But that’s not the case in Lucas Oil Stadium, which has been repurposed for the next 10 days as the world’s largest indoor swimming venue.
The space is sufficiently vast that unless you’re on the pool deck or in the water, the whiff of chlorine is not part of the package for these U.S. Olympic Trials.
USA Swimming has seen its signature event outgrow the conventional pools that once hosted Trials, like the Jamail Texas Swim Center in Austin or the IUPUI Natatorium, just a few blocks from Lucas Oil. It has outgrown a basketball venue, after a run of four Trials from 2008 to ’21 in Omaha. Now, it’s time to try an NFL stadium on for size.
“We’re taking a swing,” acknowledged USA Swimming CEO Tim Hinchey, as he gave Sports Illustrated a tour of the venue last week. “We’re seizing the opportunity to amplify our sport.”
America has a long history of thinking big in terms of staging non-football competitions in football stadiums. From the UCLA–Houston men’s basketball game in the Astrodome in 1968 to the NHL’s annual Winter Classic to Nebraska playing a women’s volleyball game in front of 92,000 fans last year, we as a nation love creating massive sports spectacles. But this is a new one.
It took some grand gumption to put swimming—one of the centerpiece Olympic competitions every four years, but otherwise a fringe sport—in a place like this.
The idea took root over steak and red wine at Harry & Izzy’s in downtown Indy in 2018. Local business mogul Scott Davison and Hinchey, a pair of old swimmers, were getting aspirational about how to take their favorite sport to another level.
“Are you serious about hosting Olympic Trials in a football stadium?” Hinchey asked Davison.
“I’m dead serious about it,” Davison replied.
Driving home after dinner, Davison called then-president of Indiana Sports Corporation, Ryan Vaughn. Davison, CEO of OneAmerica Financial, was worried he might have over-promised on behalf of civic leaders.
“Hey, Ryan,” Davison said. “Are we serious about hosting Olympic Trials in a football stadium? Because I just said we are.”
“Damn right we are,” Vaughn said.
So the path toward this event was set. Recent published reports attributed the notion to some blue-sky thinking by USA Swimming chief commercial officer Shana Ferguson during the 2021 Trials in Omaha, but in reality this plan preceded that moment by several years.
(In April 2021, during the pandemic-altered Final Four in Lucas Oil, local sources pointed out the setup of two courts separated by a giant curtain and said the same design was in play for swim Trials. In June of that year, SI was the first to report about plans to move the event out of Omaha and into Indy’s NFL stadium.)
Davison swam collegiately and even coached for a while. He’s still immersed in the sport. He has a two-lane lap pool in his backyard and routinely has Masters swimmers traipsing in and out in the mornings. (“I would have built a one-lane pool, but I like people,” he says.) Hinchey is among those who have gotten in some laps in the backyard.
With those two leading the way and Indy Sports Corp. onboard, plans proceeded and crystalized. USA Swimming took bids from four cities to host this year’s Trials— Omaha, St. Louis and Minneapolis were the other three—and Indy won out.
The city’s centralized geography and hosting history were major factors. Indy has hosted or co-hosted Olympic Trials six other times, and this marks the 100th anniversary of the first one. (Then, like now, the Trials selected a team that would go on to compete in Paris.) The 1987 Pan American Games were in the city, as was the 2002 FIBA World Championship. It also has become an anchor Final Four location, in addition to hosting the 2022 College Football Playoff championship game and the 2012 Super Bowl.
“The Olympic Trials will bolster our reputation as a world-class sports city,” said current Indiana Sports Corporation CEO Patrick Talty.
The Colts, clearly, had to be onboard with the concept. So did the operators of the stadium. The latter was an easy sell.
The construction of the pool in Indianapolis was still ongoing in late May. / Joe Timmerman/IndyStar / USA TODAY
Stadium director Eric Neuburger is the son of Dale Neuburger, who was the vice president of World Aquatics for 21 years and previously worked with USA Track & Field and the IUPUI Natatorium. Eric was one of the “basket kids” at the 1992 Trials, tasked with carrying swimmers’ sweats, shoes and other belongings off the pool deck after races.
His reaction to the idea of building a pool in his stadium: “Bring it on. I live for this stuff. Swimming has been an important part of my life, so I was all for trying to make this happen. … The emerald-green turf is now diamond-blue water.”
Ferguson relocated from USA Swimming headquarters in Colorado Springs to Indy more than a month ago to oversee construction and sweat the details. While Hinchey has worked the marketing and promotion angles, Ferguson has been the logistical driver.
A few weeks ago, she watched as a fire hydrant on Capitol Avenue was cranked open, sending a million gallons of water gushing into Lucas Oil via pipes to fill the competition pool. Then another million went into the warmup and warmdown pool. Everything else has come together around that most vital element.
“We’re almost there,” Ferguson said last week.
Barring logistical mishaps or complete fan apathy, USA Swimming’s vault into football venues may well re-set the bar for the sport’s Olympic Trials in the future. This could be more than just a one-off big swing; it could be the norm.
“It’s going to be hard to go back,” Davison says.
They’ve built it, using the same technology that created a temporary pool in the CHI Health Center in Omaha, where the Creighton Bluejays play home basketball games. Now will the fans come?
That remains to be seen. With a capacity of 70,000 for football, the Lucas Oil swimming venue was ambitiously constructed with up to 30,000 seats. Reach exceeded grasp. In truth, USA Swimming would be happy to average half that over nine days and nights of competition.
The stated goal is to break a world indoor attendance record on opening night Saturday, with the 2016 Rio Olympics credited with maximum crowds of about 16,000, according to Hinchey. (The venue for that meet had a listed capacity of 14,997.)
Even a record crowd could look and sound a bit sparse in this setup. The hope for USA Swimming is that the noise and energy of this dramatic and pressurized meet doesn’t dissipate into unoccupied space.
Regardless how many fans show up, this is the biggest stage for a swim meet in history. Even the most seasoned veterans like Katie Ledecky and Caeleb Dressel are destined to have a “wow” moment upon first sight. The pool measures the same as always—50 meters in length with 10 lanes, eight of which will be used for competition—but the scale of everything surrounding it is spectacularly grand.
Out front of the building, a statue of Peyton Manning is dwarfed by a massive mural on the side featuring multi-stroke star Kate Douglass, who has a chance to be one of the stars of this summer for the U.S.
The Colts' stadium will be the biggest stage for a swim meet in history. / Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar / USA TODAY
Inside, swimmers will stand on the starting blocks with the names of Indianapolis Colts’ Ring of Honor heroes at their backs. When they finish, they will be churning toward Marvin Harrison and Edgerrin James, Eric Dickerson and Tony Dungy.
Swimmers will walk onto the competition pool deck via an entryway with a 70-foot video board overhead. The board will showcase each athlete as they’re introduced for finals.
Another giant, four-sided video board/scoreboard has been placed above the pool, which will come in handy for a couple of interested parties: fans who are seated farther away from the pool than they were in Omaha; and the competitors themselves, who will have a point of reference while swimming backstroke (better than the disorienting feeling of staring up into the darkness of the ceiling). Times also will be displayed on the bottom of the board, which should aid swimmers who have had to crane their necks to find crucial information at the end of their races.
Other competitor-friendly implementations that are new here:
From the pool deck to the upper deck, the fan experience will be different as well. Fans will have the opportunity to be wined and dined to the extent that their wallets can afford. Suites have been sold out, and there are hospitality areas available for VIPs.
But the swellest of the swell perks is a “speakeasy” dubbed the Dive Bar—a couple of converted field-level suites with windows that will provide underwater views of the competition pool during warmups before night-time finals.
Whether USA Swimming ends up underwater financially from this big swing remains to be seen. But you can’t change the scale of a sport by thinking small.
“We want to showcase how great our sport is,” Hinchey says from the pool deck in an NFL stadium, his ambitious vision towering around him.
As the world abruptly shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, concerns of a canceled Tokyo Olympics were assuaged when it was announced that the Summer Games would be pushed back to 2021. But that one-year delay gave rise to new fears within the United States swimming community: doping.
With drug testers unable to regularly circulate to do their jobs during that time, there was an opportunity for athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs with a vastly diminished chance of being caught. And the nation that several U.S. coaches and officials were most concerned about was China, sources told Sports Illustrated at the time.
“This greatly increases their chances of doping,” one source said in March 2020.
Roughly six months later, the World Anti-Doping Association—the global PED watchdog group—received what sources labeled an “official intelligence report” with a “specific and credible tip” about elite-level Chinese swimmers doping. The whistleblower named individual swimmers in the intelligence report, sources say.
And about four months after that, the tipster’s called shot came in: 23 of the country’s swimmers tested positive for Trimetazidine (or TMZ), a banned drug, during a meet in early January 2021. Among those who reportedly tested positive were some of the athletes mentioned by name by the whistleblower.
Nothing ever happened to the swimmers who tested positive—13 of whom went on to compete for China in the Tokyo Games, with four of those 13 winning medals. At the time, the swimming world had no idea about the positive tests, having been kept completely in the dark by WADA, which deviated from its usual policy of publicly identifying athletes who test positive for prohibited substances.
WADA accepted China’s internal investigative findings that the positive tests were the result of inadvertent environmental contamination that occurred at the hotel where the athletes were staying, citing traces of TMZ that were found in the hotel kitchen. No explanation has been offered for how the TMZ, which is used to treat heart conditions, got into the kitchen.
“It seems so egregious,” says Natalie Coughlin Hall, who won 12 medals across three Olympics, three of them gold. “During the height of the lockdown, this is exactly what everyone was worried about. It’s just a gut punch when you see something like this.”
The entire affair remained a secret until exposes were published in late April of this year by a German television station and The New York Times. WADA subsequently defended its decision not to publicize the positive tests, saying that it would have unfairly impugned the swimmers’ reputations. The drug test revelations created a cloud that will hover over swimming at the Paris Olympics next month.
“To wonder if the competition is going to be fair when you get to Paris?” says 2016 American gold medalist Maya DiRado Andrews. “That sucks.”
When those stories broke, generations of elite American swimmers felt an unwelcome spasm of déjà vu. Many of them have been through this cycle before—whether it was East Germany in the 1970s, Russia in the 2010s or China at varying points. The U.S. has had plenty of doping scandals through the years—enough to make claiming moral high ground inadvisable, if not outright hypocritical—but relatively few of the bad headlines have come in swimming.
After hearing the latest China revelations, the old U.S. swimmers were partly bitter, partly disappointed, and largely unsurprised by the never-ending story of doping within the sport.
“I’m not shocked,” says 1992 gold medalist Summer Sanders Schlopy. “I’m frustrated and I’m sad. I’m emotional for the athletes from Tokyo. I’m emotional for the athletes preparing to compete in Paris. It brought back a lot of emotions [from her Olympic experience.]”
Sanders won gold in the 200-meter butterfly in ’92, but also was favored to win both the 200 and 400 individual medleys. She finished second in the 200 and third in the 400, one spot behind China’s Lin Li in both events. Lin broke the world record in the 200 IM, part of a breakthrough, nine-medal performance by the Chinese women in Barcelona.
China’s sudden ascendance in women’s swimming prompted suspicions from competitors. “Too Good? Too Fast? Drug Rumors Stalk Chinese,” read the headline on a New York Times story from those Barcelona Games. None of the Chinese swimmers tested positive at those Olympics—but the country’s swim program would be immersed in scandal in the years that followed.
A month after dominating the 1994 World Championships in Rome, seven Chinese swimmers tested positive for steroids at the Asian Games. That led to the nation being voted out of the ’95 Pan-Pacific Championships by the U.S., Canada, Australia and Japan. In 1998, a Chinese swimmer arriving with the rest of the team in Australia for the World Championships was found to have 13 vials of human growth hormone in her luggage. Four other Chinese competitors tested positive at the meet.
Those revelations only reinforced the feeling that Sanders had in ’92, when Chinese athletes won a lot of medals without testing positive. Was the performance in Barcelona the undetected beginning of a Chinese cheating wave?
“I see myself as a 19-year-old kid, sitting on a dais in a media room looking at a sea of adults,” she recalls. “And I'm asking myself, Is anyone thinking what I'm thinking? The only thing I could do is trust the system, as a 19-year-old kid. People still say to me, ‘You should have two more gold medals.’”
Ye Shiwen's stunning gold and world record at London 2012 Olympics are still a source of controversy, though the Chinese swimmer has never tested positive for a banned drug. / Rob Schumacher-USA TODAY
Twenty years after Sanders was left to wonder what was going on, 16-year-old Ye Shiwen of China won the 400 IM at the London Olympics and broke the world record by more than a second in the process. Ye’s freestyle split of 58.68 seconds over the final 100 meters was more than 3 1/2 seconds faster than that of the previous world-record holder, Australian Stephanie Rice. More notable at the time, Ye’s 100 free split was just .03 slower than that of men’s gold medalist Ryan Lochte, and Ye actually was faster over the final 50 meters (28.93 to 29.10).
“That last 100 meters was reminiscent of some old East German swimmers, for people who have been around a while,” said John Leonard, executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association at the time.
Ye, who also went on to win the 200 IM in London, has never tested positive for a banned drug. She has remained competitive internationally, but has not won another Olympic medal since then. She is qualified for Paris in two events, the 200 IM and 200 breastroke. According to the World Aquatics database, she has never again swam a time within four seconds of her 400 IM gold-medal performance. At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, her time of 4:45.86 was more than 17 seconds slower than four years earlier, placing her 27th overall. She did not come close to making finals in the event, and she did not compete in Tokyo.
“No comment,” was the immediate reaction of American 400-IMer Elizabeth Beisel to Ye’s plummeting performance in Rio. Four years earlier, Beisel had won silver to Ye’s stunning gold.
Immediately after the race in London, Beisel wondered if she had faltered badly in her final 100 meters as Ye pulled away. Then she got her split times and saw she had swum the fastest closing freestyle leg of her career. It just wasn’t anywhere near as fast as Ye’s scorching finish.
“I heard what people were saying and I wondered, Oh my God, have I just been beaten by someone who’s doping?” Beisel recalls now. “I had many people come up to me after that race. But Ye Shiwen never tested positive and I would never accuse her of anything. I believe the results were fair, because there is no evidence they were not.”
Says fellow 2012 Olympian Caitlin Leverenz Smith, who took bronze in the 200 IM that Ye won: “In 2012 there were eyebrows being raised, and if anything it’s gotten worse.”
For evidence of that, skip ahead to the athlete dining hall at the World Aquatics Championships in Gwangju, South Korea, in 2019. And a round of applause.
Sun Yang, the most famous and accomplished swimmer in Chinese history, had won the men’s 400-meter freestyle for the fourth straight time at the world championships. At the post-race medal ceremony, Australian silver medalist Mack Horton refused to stand on the podium next to Sun, whose career had been steeped in controversy. “I just won’t share a podium with someone that behaves in the way that he has,” Horton said after the race. He had previously labeled Sun a “drug cheat” at the Rio Olympics in 2016.
The podium snub resonated. When Horton entered the dining hall at the university where athletes were staying, swimmers from around the world applauded.
Two nights later, Sun won the 200-meter freestyle. On the podium afterward, co-bronze medalist Duncan Scott of Great Britain refused to shake Sun’s hand. “You’re a loser, I’m a winner,” Sun told Scott after the snub.
Sun served a three-month doping ban in 2014 after testing positive for, lo and behold, trimetazidine. In 2018, Sun again ran afoul of testing protocol when it was reported that his mother instructed a security guard to smash vials containing his blood after a late-night random drug test. That case wasn’t resolved until June 2021, when he was suspended for four years (backdated to 2020) after an appeal of the original eight-year suspension. Sun is not on the Chinese Olympic roster for Paris, but said last month he intends to make a comeback.
So the China syndrome of cyclical controversy seems to continue.
“I don’t think anything can ruin our sport, or the Olympic movement, but PEDs,” says NBC swimming analyst and Olympic gold medalist Rowdy Gaines. “People hold our Olympians in a completely different light than other athletes. I’m not saying there aren’t cheaters in the U.S.—I’m sure there are. But when something becomes systemic, that’s when you worry about the health of the sport. Not specifically China, but the sport in general.”
Here in America, breaking news this month seems to highlight the starkly different approach to positive drug tests between China and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA). On June 4, it was announced that American distance freestyler Kensey McMahon had been given a four-year suspension by USADA for a positive test in 2023.
The 24-year-old McMahon said she tested positive for Vadadustat—a medication used to treat anemia in adults with chronic kidney disease—at U.S. National Championships last summer. In an Instagram post, McMahon says she has spent months (and a lot of money) trying to find the cause of the positive test and clear her name, without success.
“The sport that I had dedicated decades of hard work towards, and all its associated opportunities, that I heard honestly, were taken away from me in an instant,” McMahon wrote. “… I’m not a cheater. I don’t take short cuts. I am incredibly conscientious and diligent with my training, diet, recovery and well-being. I was mindful about everything I put into my body. … I’ve been tested by USADA in competitions and as part of their athlete testing pool since 2016 and never had a positive test. I do believe in and support clean sport.”
McMahon says she enlisted a law firm which helped get testing for every “vitamin, supplement, hydration formula, and medication” she consumed before and during the U.S. Championships. “None were found to contain Vadadustat,” she wrote. Its presence in her system remains a mystery, she says.
Lacking proof of her innocence, McMahon’s suspension stands. This is the hard line USADA and USA Swimming walk. Does it create a level of fear for every athlete—especially in an Olympic year—about somehow testing positive in spite of precautions? Certainly. Results of competition samples drawn during U.S. Olympic Trials starting June 15 will be anxiously awaited by every athlete.
But this is the rigorous doctrine U.S. swimmers accept if they’re going to hold themselves up as exemplars of clean sport. They and other athletes in the testing pool can tell stories for hours about the rigors of drug testing.
“Ignorance is not an excuse,” DiRado Andrews says. “You’re responsible for everything that goes in your body. That goes for multivitamins and any supplements you might take. You give up an element of privacy and autonomy for the sake of integrity in sport.”
Athletes who are in the testing pool are required to document their whereabouts 24 hours per day via online forms. If testers show up to administer random tests where the athlete says he or she will be and they’re not present, it’s a violation. Three whereabouts violations can count as a positive drug test and lead to sanctions.
There are knocks on the door at 5 a.m. There are visits on vacations. Testers may show up at schools or offices. If an athlete says he or she can’t produce a urine sample, the tester will sit down and wait until that time comes.
“They watch you pee, they take your blood, they become your best friends during an Olympic year,” DiRado Andrews jokes. She said she was tested at least 30 times in 2016.
The earlier an athlete starts positing elite times, the earlier they become part of the testing regimen. DiRado Andrews says she was being educated on supplement facts at age 16. Coughlin Hall says she was first tested at age 14.
“I still have nightmares that I haven’t updated my whereabouts,” she said.
“We let people literally invade our lives to have a clean sport,” Leverenz Smith says.
For the athletes who consented to that invasion in 2021 and lost to Chinese swimmers who had tested positive in secret, there is disillusionment. (“Those are all moments these athletes can’t get back,” Sanders Schlopy says. “Even if those medals are retroactively changed, you don’t get that spot on the podium, or to hear your anthem.”)
For the athletes who could be facing those same Chinese swimmers in Paris, there is a looming paranoia. If 23 swimmers could test positive and nobody found out about it for three years, what else could possibly be going on?
“They’re disheartened and frustrated,” says Leverenz Smith, who is chair of USA Swimming’s Athletes Advisory Council and has held multiple conference calls with current athletes to keep them apprised of developments with the China fallout. “They want to be able to get on the blocks and look left and look right and trust that this is a fair competition.”
Trust is hard to have at the moment. But suspicion is poisonous as the days wind down to the most pressurized meet in the world, the U.S. Olympic Trials. If ever there were a time to stay in their own lane, literally and figuratively, this is it.
“You rely on your controllables,” Coughlin Hall says. “You can’t control who might be cheating. But there is a psychological toll this takes.”
Adds Beisel: “This story breaking before the Paris Games casts a massive cloud of doubt, but you just have to put the blinders on and trust what you’re doing.”
Seven-time Olympic medalist Katie Ledecky has voiced concerns about her faith in the sport's anti-doping systems ahead of Paris. / Grace Hollars/IndyStar / USA TODAY
Some current American swimmers have spoken out on the issue. (“China cheated,” breastroker Cody Miller flatly declares. Superstar Katie Ledecky, who anchored an 800 freestyle relay that finished second to China’s world-record effort in Tokyo, voiced her concerns to CBS Morning News recently: “It’s hard going into Paris knowing that we're gonna be racing some of these athletes,” Ledecky said. “And I think our faith in some of the systems is at an all-time low.”)
Many others have tried to avoid it—which will be a futile stance at Trials in Indianapolis. The delicate situation has motivated many of the former swimmers to do the talking for the current generation. (The most prominent former swimmer of all-time, Michael Phelps, had nothing to say on the subject. Phelps declined to be interviewed for this story through his representatives at Octagon Sports.)
“Leading to the Olympic games, you have zero mental capacity to worry about who’s clean,” Sanders Schlopy says. “They shouldn't have to make a huge media stand to have a clean sport. It takes a once-in-a-lifetime athlete like Lilly King, who had the guts to stand up.”
King made her famous stand in 2016, calling out Russian breastroker Yulia Efimova, who twice had been suspended for positive drug tests. Efimova was supposed to be banned from the Rio Games but was reinstated shortly before the competition. King, who would race Efimova in the 100-meter breaststroke, made no secret of her disapproval.
“You know, you’re shaking your finger number one and you’ve been caught for drug cheating," King told NBC after the two competed in the semifinals of the event. “I’m just not a fan.”
King backed up her talk by taking gold in the event. Will other Americans act similarly before, during or after facing Chinese swimmers in Paris? Whether it’s processed as external or internal motivation, the fuel is there.
“I’d probably swim angry if I were them,” DiRado Andrews said. “What else can you do?”
Editor's Note: Pat Forde's daughter, Brooke Forde, was a member of the 800-meter freestyle relay team that finished finished second to China at the Tokyo Olympics.
