By the time Lydia Jacoby dove into a pool at the Tokyo Aquatics Centre in the summer of 2021, the first-time Olympian had long known who had her back. In Seward, Alaska, where the seventeen-year-old had lived her whole life, everybody knows everybody. And everybody supported Jacoby’s dreams.
So the fact that hundreds of her friends and supporters gathered at a railroad terminal in Seward (population: roughly 2,700) to watch the hundred-meter breaststroke final wasn’t out of the ordinary. What was unusual was her surprise win in a shade under 1 minute and 5 seconds (1:04.95, to be exact), which sent the crowd jumping up and down and up and down, higher and faster once she tapped the wall. Some of those following from the forty-ninth state cried tears of joy.
“It was definitely super special to see them all rallying behind me,” says Jacoby, now a twenty-year-old rising junior at the University of Texas. But in that underwater moment, it was her alone coming from behind to shock the reigning Olympic champ, Team USA’s Lilly King, and South Africa’s Tatjana Schoenmaker.
“I’d fully gone into that race thinking I’m in contention for a medal, but I never imagined that it would be a gold medal,” Jacoby says.
That wasn’t the expectation back home, either. The people of Seward had tried to throw Jacoby a full-on parade before the games even began, after she qualified for the Olympics, but there wasn’t time before she left for Japan. And she had to travel alone, since athletes weren’t permitted to bring family or friends during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Now, just three years after Jacoby electrified her hometown and stunned the world, she is again on the verge of doing something monumental. But this week, as she returns to the U.S. Olympic Team Trials poised to defend her title in the Paris Games, she has transformed from teenage unknown to bona fide front-runner. The Longhorns star is far from the quiet life she once knew in Alaska.
In Austin, Jacoby is a key part of a powerhouse women’s swim team that finished as runner-up in the 2024 NCAA championships and is a threat to end the University of Virginia’s run of four straight titles in 2025. But her journey to elite collegiate breaststroker and potential two-time Olympic medalist was bumpier than many, including Jacoby, might have expected.
In Seward, a port town roughly a hundred miles south of Anchorage on a bay that opens into the Gulf of Alaska, learning to swim is a matter of practicing good water safety. That’s all Jacoby’s parents hoped for when they enrolled her in a local swim club called the Tsunami.
“I don’t think when they put me into the swim team at six years old that they thought that I’d be where I am today,” Jacoby says. “And then I just kept going.”
As Jacoby learned the basics of swimming, she worked through her homeschooling curriculum. She lived with her boat-captain parents, who worked in the tourism industry, on a sailboat for six months out of the year, traveling between Seward and Washington State, back and forth through the Gulf of Alaska. The solitary lifestyle suited her and gave her more time to practice swimming, even once she started attending some classes with other students at a local middle school and taking the rest online.
“I think homeschoolers get a reputation for being weird,” Jacoby says. “I’m definitely weird. I won’t deny that. . . . But I think my parents [were] really good about getting me lots of social time, and putting me in different activities and stuff.”
At age ten, Jacoby attended her first out-of-state swim meet. By twelve, she had broken her first Alaska state record. By fourteen, she had qualified for the Olympic Trials.
She rattles off these milestones almost as if they were routine accomplishments, but in fact, there was no well-traveled lane to becoming an Olympic swimmer from Alaska. Jacoby was the first Alaskan to make the cut and just the second Alaska-born athlete to ever make the Summer Games across all sports. As the broadcasters who called her races in Tokyo often underscored, in a tone of disbelief, the largest U.S. state by landmass has only one Olympic-size pool, at an Anchorage high school about two and a half hours north of Seward.
Madison Story, Jacoby’s friend and competitor from Homer, three hours southeast of Seward, says, “The purpose [of swimming] was not to produce a gold medalist in the Olympics. That was completely not a thing.”
Jacoby swam most of the time at her high school’s 25-meter pool, half the regulation length. And that pool, the closest one around, says Jacoby’s friend and high school teammate Wren Dougherty, has endured threats of closure over funding issues.
Through it all, Jacoby kept swimming. Story, who recently left the sport after competing at the University of Utah, says the two of them felt burned out in high school. “We were on the verge of quitting, because we weren’t having fun,” she says. Then, in March 2020, COVID-19 hit.
Jacoby wasn’t even supposed to be at the Tokyo Games. She almost certainly wouldn’t have been had the Olympics not been postponed due to the pandemic, giving her an extra year of experience. She says she used the time to transform physically (calling her sixteen-year-old self “scrawny”) and mentally.
Perhaps no athlete benefited more from the postponement than Jacoby. Most athletes didn’t benefit at all, and many were actively distraught. The Tokyo Games’ most famous athlete, Texan gymnast Simone Biles, confessed that she cried when she heard the 2020 competition had been put on hold. Retired swimming legend Michael Phelps, a mental health advocate, despaired to NBC, “I really, really hope we don’t see an increase in athlete suicide rates because of this. Because the mental health component is by far the biggest thing here. This postponement is uncharted waters. We’ve never seen this before. It was the right decision, but it breaks my heart for the athletes.”
Jacoby wasn’t immune to mental health struggles, but hers would come later, after Tokyo. Still, her preparations were anything but smooth once Seward High School’s pool closed in March 2020. For two months, Jacoby didn’t swim. She stayed in shape by skiing cross-country behind her house (Alaska!). In May, the Olympic-size pool at Anchorage’s Bartlett High School reopened. By then Jacoby was more than ready to get back in the water.
She and Story decided to share an apartment in Anchorage that summer, with their mothers trading off keeping them company as they trained with Ben Kitchen, a coach at the Northern Lights Swim Club. Their first month in the state’s biggest city, they’d return home from grueling practices and cry from exhaustion. Since there weren’t many world-class swimmers in Alaska, neither was used to the level of competition they were able to offer each other on a daily basis.
Seward’s pool reopened that fall, and Jacoby resumed training there with Tsunami coach Solomon D’ Amico while still periodically driving to Anchorage to work with Kitchen. When Olympic trials finally rolled around in June 2021, Jacoby, as nervous as she had ever been for a race, took second place in the hundred-meter breaststroke, with a time of 1:05.28 to King’s 1:04.79. Both qualified for Tokyo.
King, now 27, had known Jacoby since the latter was 14. “I remember she swam really fast and we were all kind of thinking, ‘Uh-oh, watch out for this kid,’ ” she says. Even so, she probably didn’t expect Jacoby to beat her in Tokyo.
Soon after the Olympics, Jacoby dove back into the pool to resume training. Too soon, in D’ Amico’s opinion—she was swimming only about a week after arriving home in Seward. That’s when her burnout returned in full force.
“I just decided that I hated the sport,” Jacoby says. “I didn’t want to do it anymore. I hated training.”
D’ Amico sensed that Jacoby was struggling to stay committed after reaching the pinnacle of swimming. “You carry a thing to term and then the thing’s done,” he says. “And now it has its own life and you’re sitting there trying to reconcile what all happened, and trying to make peace with it all at the same time. Life’s moving at you a million times faster.”
A high school senior after she achieved Olympic glory, Jacoby considered giving up swimming to have a “normal” college experience. (She had committed to UT Austin’s team before Tokyo.)
“I felt like whenever I was choosing to do training, or choosing to go to a meet, or choosing to go work with a sponsor, that that was something that was taking away from me being a kid,” Jacoby says. “Just watching my friends growing up through that time in their lives, just making dumb mistakes, having fun, being reckless. . . . So many people wanted a piece of me. I didn’t save any of myself for myself.”
After a childhood spent in relative solitude on and in the water, Jacoby was no longer Alaska’s best-kept secret. While she was facing burnout, she was facing, for the first time, life in the public eye. She was spreading herself too thin.
Jacoby ultimately chose to keep swimming, but she disappointed herself the following April, when she missed the cut for the world championships at a meet in Greensboro, North Carolina. King won the race, and Annie Lazor edged out Jacoby and another competitor, Kaitlyn Dobler, for second, with the pack separated by nine hundredths of a second. For the first time in her swimming career, Jacoby had not been able to smoothly check off the next milestone.
In the run-up to that competition, there had been entire days when Jacoby didn’t get out of bed, didn’t even get on her phone, didn’t see friends or family. Both of her parents separately came to her and told her they were worried. What ultimately woke Jacoby up to her depression and anxiety was her failure to qualify for worlds. Her focus had consistently been her performance, and she had undeniably underperformed.
“I didn’t want to live the life that I was living,” she says. “I had so many other trajectories that I wanted to explore.”
Jacoby had been seeing a therapist on and off since before the world championships qualifier, but she’d told herself it was just for preventative reasons. That changed after the meet, once she put a name to her depression. She started attending weekly sessions, even when she felt like she might not have anything noteworthy to share.
With the help of therapy, she wound up turning the corner toward loving swimming again and surfacing from her depression by reminding herself of who she was on dry land. Jacoby had always been someone with several outside interests, but those had fallen by the wayside due to her demanding swimming career. Fashion, music (she plays guitar, upright bass, and piano), art, photography, travel—she had stopped making time for the other activities that brought her happiness.
After high school, Jacoby stepped out of the water for a few months, having learned from missing worlds that time away was key. She celebrated graduation with a trip to Mexico with an old friend. When Jacoby arrived in Austin for her freshman year, she felt refreshed.
To move to Texas from Alaska is to—at least temporarily—switch sides in a half-hearted size rivalry that dates back to the 1950s, during the lead-up to Alaska’s incorporation as a state, which meant Texas would no longer be the country’s largest state by landmass. A huge ego blow.
Jacoby is aware: “My dad, when I moved down here—I still have my Alaskan license plates and stuff—he was like, ‘You should get a custom plate that says BIGGER.’ ”
Harlow Robinson, the founder of the Alaska Sports Hall of Fame and a lifelong state resident, mentioned an iconic T-shirt that shows the shape of Texas inside an outline of Alaska, both drawn to scale. It reads, “Take that, Texas.”
But underneath the apparent competitive spirit and friction, Robinson says, “I think maybe there’s some similarities between the two states, and they both have a little bit of that Lone Star mentality. I guess one’s Lone Star and one’s North Star.”
Aside from the heat, Jacoby adjusted comfortably to life in Austin. “There’s lots going on, definitely more than three thousand [people],” she says. Call it roughly 972,000 more.
Jacoby joined a running club in the city. She switched her major from textiles and apparel to advertising, still with the ultimate goal of working in the fashion industry.
The pool doesn’t define her anymore, but now she is happy there under Longhorns head coach Carol Capitani. It was important to Jacoby to work with a woman coach, a rarity in collegiate swimming. “You don’t recruit many kids out of Alaska,” Capitani says, “and so the fact that she was seeing the success that she did while living in just—I mean, without a lot of good swimmers around her, I thought was interesting.”
While Jacoby’s adjustment to Texas went smoothly, slotting in to the collegiate swim-team framework was slightly more challenging. “At home I had a really small team, a couple training partners, coach,” she said. “So I think the biggest change has just been having a team and learning to work with so many other people and learning to accept all that support from my peers.” Capitani and other program staffers have melded Jacoby’s individualized training program with what works for the Longhorns as a whole, something that’s helped the swimmer progress.
Jacoby, of course, was a coveted recruit for her speed, but also for what Capitani called her “relentlessly positive” attitude and life outside of her sport. It’s common wisdom that elite athletes must remain hyperfocused on their sports. In the 2020 book Why We Swim, author Bonnie Tsui cites a few greats as exemplars of this approach.
“What sets [Dara] Torres, [Katie] Ledecky, and Phelps apart as successes includes the ability to grind it out, forever and ever and ever, in the interest of achieving autopilot,” Tsui writes. “The constant rehearsal, and the unwavering focus that’s required, is its own kind of endurance.”
But Jacoby now openly shirks a single-minded approach. She grinds it out at practice, to be sure, but she’s learned not to make training her whole universe. “She likes to live outside of just the swimming world,” Capitani says. “She would be a terrible athlete if she just concentrated on swimming and school. She likes to have little carrots, little goals. She likes travel; she likes fashion; she likes music. Austin was actually a great fit for her.”
Jacoby’s long-term goals aren’t obvious. But she’s at peace with that. She journals about her appreciation for little things every day: her off-campus bed’s coziness, flowers she bought for herself at the grocery store, a good conversation with a friend.
The short-term goals, on the other hand, couldn’t be more obvious: Make the Paris Olympics. Defend the hundred-meter breaststroke title. Maybe pick up another team-relay medal (she shared silver in the 4×100-meter medley in Tokyo). Get UT over the NCAA championship hump next season.
“Right after the Olympics, I was feeling a lot of pressure,” Jacoby says. “ ‘I always need to be the best; I need to defend this title, do this and that.’ And I’ve kind of realized that that doesn’t work for me. So I’ve tried to switch back to that ‘I have nothing to lose’ attitude by remembering that I’ve already done that. I won that medal in Tokyo. No one can take that away. And moving forward, I am an Olympic champion and I always will be.”
And she’ll always be the athlete who helped spur swimming’s growth in Alaska, motivating children statewide to pursue the sport competitively. The results are already easy to see: she’ll be joined at this year’s trials by PJ Foy of Juneau, an incoming college freshman at North Carolina set to race in the hundred-meter butterfly.
This time around, in addition to a fellow Alaskan in Foy, Jacoby will have a cheering section of loved ones in person, not just at the hometown railroad terminal. “That’s going to feel way different,” she says, “than just being isolated.”
