COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — With their 12-year-old daughter, Katie, swimming nearby, Shari and Christian Grimes stood on the pool deck talking to Sandpipers of Nevada coach Chris Barber. Christian had just been offered the deputy fire chief job in Logan, Utah, and the family was considering moving there from their home in Las Vegas.“Knowing that I’m already going to Paris is a little bit comforting, 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 mom says. Shari believes there are times Katie needs to celebrate her accomplishments more than she does. But that unrelenting hunger is perhaps what continually propels the teenager to new heights.
“But I also do believe that there is even bigger greatness inside her that hasn’t broken out yet, and I’m excited for that,” Shari said. “Because every time we show up somewhere, that girl literally amazes us with something totally out of the blue that we weren’t expecting.”When Katie was around 3, a Sandpipers coach noticed her older brother Carter at the YMCA pool. Carter had been a gymnast until he grew too tall, and he looked good in the water, so the coach approached Shari to ask 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 big family and frequently drove Sandpipers swimmers to and from practice. The young Katie was her carpool pal, sitting in her car seat in the back.“She loved being around the swimmers,” Shari said. “It was just kind of a natural progression for her to start swimming when she got to that age.”As she emerged as an elite swimmer, Grimes made it her goal to make the 2024 Olympics in Paris. She would not have been a contender to make the Tokyo Olympics as a 14-year-old had they been held in 2020, as originally scheduled. But when those Games got delayed a year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it changed Grimes’ outlook. Her confidence was high, and a part of her wondered if she could make the team.“I just completely ate it,” she said.
Her nerves got the best of her. She had a vision of how the race would go, and had she swam her seed time, she would have made the final. Instead, she added nearly five seconds. After the race, Grimes lay in her Omaha hotel room, sobbing. Inconsolable. All Shari could do was sit on the bed with her daughter and let her cry.It was the most devastated we’ve seen her,” 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 gave her a pep talk with “not the nicest words,” Katie said, laughing.“Just kind of pulled me back up,” she said.It was exactly what she needed.
. Over the coming days, she demolished her best time in the 1,500-meter freestyle, finishing third and narrowly missing the Olympic team. Katie Ledecky, whom Grimes had pictures of on her wall as a kid, told the young swimmer she was the future. Then, in Grimes’ last event, she eked into the final of the 800-meter freestyle, setting up one of the storybook swims of the meet. In the final, she out-touched Olympic medalist Haley Anderson for second place, qualifying for the Olympics.Grimes punched the water with excitement when she saw her time and placement. Ledecky, who got first, swam over to congratulate her, lifting her competitor’s hand into the air so the crowd could cheer.
.“She’s the now!” Ledecky said in her post-race interview with NBC, amending her statement from earlier in the meet. “You’re the future. She’s the now.” It was a career-altering moment for Grimes, whose youth was apparent as she stood next to the then-24-year-old Ledecky. Sponsorship deals would follow, and she was set to head halfway around the globe to race at the world’s biggest swim meet. Swimming, in her words, was “never going to be a silly little thing anymore.”“I just felt like such a loser,” she said.
. Her fellow Team USA swimmers were supportive, though, and Grimes eventually came to the realization that she had put together an impressive summer. Narrowly missing out on the podium also gave her a carrot to chase in 2024. She said it’s helped keep her motivated, though she estimates she still would have had plenty of drive had she come away with a medal. Though trials and the Olympics was Grimes’ highest-profile meet of 2021, they weren’t her last formative one. When she’s dealing with tough circumstances, her mom reminds her of how she handled that winter’s Short Course World Championships in Abu Dhabi. Grimes contracted COVID-19 during the meet, forcing her to withdraw from competition. She then had to isolate in a foreign country. When her family celebrated Christmas back in the U.S., the 15-year-old was alone in quarantine.Fellow U.S. Olympian Regan Smith remembers being touched by Grimes using her extra time to send Merry Christmas texts to her teammates.“That’s something I’ll…
