COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — With their 12-year-old daughter, Katie, swimming nearby, Shari and Christian Grimes stood on the pool deck talking to Nevada Sandpipers coach Chris Barber. Christian had recently been offered the job of deputy fire chief in Logan, Utah, and the family was considering moving there from their home in Las Vegas.
Shari says Barber is a good listener with a calm mind and the Grimes family trusts him. That’s why he didn’t take her words lightly that day. Barber started off by saying that Katie could go anywhere and earn a college swimming scholarship.
“But I’m telling you right now,” he added, “there’s something different about her. And if you leave her here, she’ll become an Olympian.
Shortly after, Sandpipers CEO Ron Aitken, who trains the team’s top swimmers, heard what the family was considering. He reached a compromise: if they stayed in Nevada, he promised to stay with the Sandpipers at least until Katie graduated high school.
The reactions of the trainers were telling. Katie was a special talent who had much greater abilities than her parents realized. So Shari and Christian listened. The family stopped there.
Five years later, Grimes is one of the most promising swimmers in America. She had already made Barber a prophet by making it to the Olympics in 2021 at the age of 15, and has since won three silver medals in pool events at the World Aquatics Championships. , She is also a world-class open-water swimmer and has already qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics in the 10 kilometer race after winning bronze at the 2023 World Championships, making her the first American athlete to secure a spot in France Is.
“Knowing that I’m already going to Paris is a little bit of a relief, but I still really want to make it in the pool,” said Grimes, now 17. …I feel like I still have a lot to do.
Grimes is never satisfied, her mother says. Shari believes that sometimes Katie needs to celebrate her accomplishments even more than she does. But that insatiable hunger is probably what drives teenagers to continually reach new heights.
Katie, who is home-schooled and the youngest of seven children, spent a little more than three weeks at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado, this fall. Shari supervised for part of the trip, and she stopped by the pool from time to time during practice. She became emotional seeing how hard her daughter and other swimmers work and how much they sacrifice to hit their goals.
“But I also believe there’s even greater greatness within him that hasn’t been revealed yet, and I’m excited for that,” Shari said. “Because every time we show up somewhere, that girl really surprises us with something unique that we didn’t expect.”
When Katie was about 3 years old, a Sandpipers coach spotted her older brother, Carter, in the YMCA pool. Carter was a gymnast until she was very tall and looked good in the water, so the coach approached Shari and asked if the family would be interested in joining the swim club. Carter tried it and excelled, eventually swimming at the University of Missouri.
From that moment on, “Katie pretty much grew up on the pool deck,” said Shari, who had a 12-passenger van because of her large family and would often drive the Sandpiper swimmers to and from practice. Young Katie was his carpool friend, sitting in the back seat of his car.
“He loved being around swimmers,” Shari said. “It was a natural progression for her to start swimming when she reached that age.”
As she emerged as an elite swimmer, Grimes set her sights on a berth at the 2024 Olympics in Paris. She would not have been in contention for a spot at the Tokyo Olympics at the age of 14 had they been held in 2020 as originally scheduled. But when those games were delayed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it changed Grimes’ outlook. Her confidence was high and a part of her wondered if she could make the team.
She liked her 400 meter individual medley best. But when she took off to race on the first morning of those U.S. Olympic trials, everything went wrong.
“I ate it all,” she said.
His nerves got the best of him. She had an idea of how the race would go, and if she swam her seed time, she would have reached the final. Instead, he added about five seconds.
After the race, Grimes lay in her Omaha hotel room crying. Inconsolable. All Shari could do was sit on the bed with her daughter and let her cry.
“It was the most devastating event we’ve ever seen her do,” Shari said.
Katie was sharing a room with her older brother Sawyer, who swam at the University of Minnesota and also made the Olympic trials. “He didn’t give her very nice words,” Katie said, laughing.
“Just kind of pulled me back up,” she said.
It was exactly what he needed. In the coming days, she destroyed her best time in the 1,500 m freestyle, finishing third and missing the Olympic team by a narrow margin. Katie Ledecky, whose photos Grimes had on her wall as a child, told the young swimmer she was the future. Then, in Grimes’ last event, she reached the final of the 800 meter freestyle and set one of the storybook swims of the meet. In the final, she finished second behind Olympic medalist Haley Anderson and qualified for the Olympics.
Grimes punched the water with excitement when he saw his time and place. Ledecky, who was in first place, swam over to congratulate him, and raised her opponent’s hand in the air for the crowd to cheer.
“he is now!” Ledecky said in her post-race interview with NBC, amending her earlier statement at the meet.
“You are the future. He is now.”
Katie Grimes, 15, will join The Katie Ledecky #tokyoolympics this summer. #swimtrial21
📺 NBC pic.twitter.com/bLQQa1G8Qh
– NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) 20 June 2021
It was a career-changing moment for Grimes, whose youth was evident as she stood next to the 24-year-old Ledecky. Sponsorship deals would follow, and she was set to fly halfway around the world to race in the world’s biggest swimming competition. In his words, swimming “will never again be a silly little thing.”
“This is serious,” he thought to himself.
Making it to the Olympics at the age of 15 was a significant achievement in itself. Grimes, who was the youngest member of Team USA in Tokyo, lost even more time in her preliminary 800-meter freestyle swim to qualify. But she was a little slow in the final – although still faster than her breakout swim at the trials – and missed the podium by one second. If she had swum in the prelims, she would have got a bronze medal.
Was she happy with her swim, considering what a great achievement it is to finish fourth in the world?
“Umm…” he said, pausing for a moment. “Not necessary.”
Grimes rode the shuttle alone to the Olympic Village, then sat under a tree to call her parents, who were watching from the U.S. She cried as she emphasized how proud she was of her. Is.
“I felt like a loser,” he said.
However, her fellow Team USA swimmers were supportive, and Grimes eventually realized that she had conducted an impressive heat.
Missing out on the podium by a narrow margin also cost him a chance to advance to 2024. She said this has helped her stay motivated, although she guesses she would still have been more motivated if she had brought home a medal.
Although the trials and Olympics were Grimes’ highest-profile meets of 2021, they weren’t her last preliminary meets. When she is battling tough situations, her mother reminds her how she handled the Winter Short Course World Championships in Abu Dhabi. Grimes contracted COVID-19 during the meet, forcing her to withdraw from the competition. Then he had to live in isolation in a foreign country. While her family celebrated Christmas in the US, the 15-year-old girl was alone in quarantine.
Fellow US Olympian Regan Smith remembers Grimes using her extra time off to send Christmas greetings to her teammates.
“It’s something I’ll never forget,” Smith said. “Such a simple story, it says a lot about who she is.”
The two-plus hour race was reduced to tenths of a second. It was the 2023 World Championships, and Grimes reached the finals in the 10 kilometer open water event. After a photo finish review it was decided that she had the upper hand over the two previous Olympic gold medalists Sharon Van Roovendaal and Ana Marcela Cunha. She won the bronze medal, making her the first official American Olympian for Paris and a two-time Olympian at the age of 17.
An exciting finish as Katie Grimes becomes the first athlete to qualify by name for the 2024 US Olympic team!@USASwimming , @TeamUSA pic.twitter.com/2Y0n0Ml1sx
– NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) 15 July 2023
He wasn’t on the family’s radar, Shari Grimes said. His daughter had surprised him once again.
The swim earned Grimes the USA Swimming Golden Goggle award for female race of the year. If she qualifies for the Olympics in the pool event at the US Trials in June, she will be the first American woman to compete in pool and open water events at the same Olympics.
But even without her world-class swimmer resume – which could grow significantly in the coming months – Grimes won’t be a normal 17-year-old girl. Sometimes she jokes with her parents that she was born in the wrong decade, she should have been born in the 1980s.
“He’s such an old soul,” Shari said.
Start with his musical tastes. He is currently into Fleetwood Mac, Nirvana, Alice in Chains, and most notably the Foo Fighters. He also likes classic cars. She’s not quite sure how she got into them, though her father may have something to do with it. He owns a 1977 Ford Bronco, and is obsessed with his classic car itch. Grimes fell in love with the Toyota Land Cruiser FJ40, and he and his father scoured websites looking for the vehicle. Her father eventually got one, and Katie learned to drive a stick shift and helped change the car’s timing belt.
“I like learning about them and learning how to fix things and I think they’re pretty cool,” he said.
Heading into the 2024 Olympic cycle, Grimes — who plans to swim collegiately but hasn’t picked a school yet — feels more nervous than she did in 2021. This time she is not going to surprise anyone. He is a well-known contender and has set expectations for himself.
“It’s like, ‘Well, I did this when I was 15, why can’t I do it when I was 18?'” she said. “But honestly, these are just intrusive thoughts that you can stop completely. … I’ve progressed faster and I’ve gotten better in practice and working really hard, so there’s no reason for me to be nervous. Just trust my training and trust that I have progressed and I am smarter and able to handle things better.”
Her experience from the previous Olympic cycle as well as the combination of pool and open water will help her do all this.
“I think she continues to learn how resilient she really is,” her mom said. “I think she feels like there’s more inside of her that she wants to show the world.”
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(Top photo of Grimes and her bronze medal in the 10 kilometer open water swim at the 2023 World Championships in July:
