No reward, no punishment: How sibling rivalry shaped Lilly King’s Olympic mindset
USA’s Lilly King has won five Olympic medals, beating the world’s strongest swimmers on her way to the podium, but there is still nothing that compares to the satisfaction of beating her younger brother Alex.
Whether it was swimming laps, or racing to clean their rooms and finish their piano lessons, everything was a competition for the King siblings.
King got one over her brother when she made it to the Olympic Games at Rio 2016 and won two gold medals there. He responded by racing through piano and saxophone scores and majoring in music.
With winning – and losing – a daily occurrence in the battle of the siblings, the swimmer's perception of her results in the pool also shifted.
“The really great thing about that was that there was never a reward if you won and there was never a punishment if you lost,” Lilly King told Olympics.com. “Having that really healthy relationship with competing at such a young age is something that shaped my confidence because I would go into a meet, even when I was doing other sports, going to any competitions, saying, ‘Well, what happens happens. It's just a race. It's not that big of a deal’.”
We asked the Olympic champion to reflect on how sibling rivalry helped her to keep a level head through all the successes and setbacks she has had on the world’s biggest sports stage, and how she plans to earn some more family bragging rights on her next Olympic quest with brother Alex watching from the stands.
King vs. King: “Any time we could race each other, we were racing”
Lilly King never had to look far to fuel her competitive drive. Her brother, who is less than a year younger, was the perfect rival.
The King siblings were competitive in everything, a trait they inherited from their parents. Mark and Ginny King were college athletes - he in athletics, she in swimming - and later became coaches. While they would sometimes join in the family Monopoly games, for the most part, the senior Kings let their children settle scores between themselves.
“Everything we did was a competition, whether it was doing our homework or piano lessons or cleaning our room,” Lilly King recalled. “Any time my brother and I could race each other, we were racing.”
Like their athletic parents, Lilly and Alex each had their own skill set, ready to be deployed on the battlefield that was the King household. Lilly dominated in the water despite Alex also being a talented competitive swimmer, while he had the upper hand on land.
The competitions in homework and piano lessons were especially fierce.
“I was the big, strong one, and my brother was the little fast one. Pretty much anything on land, he was destroying me,” King said. “Piano lessons went back and forth. He ended up getting much better at that. School went back and forth. It was really a pretty even draw on everything except for me being in the water and then him being on land.”
Alex not only practised songs faster than his sister but ended up majoring in music. On the other hand, Lilly went to two Olympic Games from which she brought back two gold medals, two silver medals and a bronze.
While every household activity could be turned into a competition, there were no rewards or punishments to follow. The siblings simply got bragging rights and then moved on to their next duel.
“You were like, 'I won'. Then it was like, ‘OK, cool. See you later’. It was not a big deal,” King continued. “That was the beauty in it, that it was just like, ‘OK, we're racing’. ‘OK, I won’. ‘OK. You lost’. ‘All right. What's the next race?’ That's just how it was. It was a weird, cool concept.”
An Olympian’s dare: Katie Ledecky, Lilly King and one agonising 400 IM
Years later, King’s competitive drive has not changed except that now instead of competing only against her younger brother, she is also competing against Olympic champions.
While the stakes are much higher, the King family’s ‘no rewards, no punishment’ rule still applies. Even when she is not at the top of a scoreboard, King has a way of laughing it off.
This is best illustrated by the nearly five excruciating minutes the 100 and 200m breaststroke specialist spent in the pool last year after her teammate, seven-time Olympic champion Katie Ledecky dared her to race in the 400m individual medley.
It all started at the Fort Lauderdale Pro Swim meet in March 2023 when King boasted in a room full of swimmers who were getting ready for the 400 IM that she could swim it as well. Ledecky quickly challenged her on that statement.
“I was saying, ‘Yeah, I'm pretty good at the 400 IM’, which I would say from time to time,” King said. “And Katie, in the most Katie way possible, I'll paraphrase, was pretty much saying, ‘Put your money where your mouth is’. She’s like, ‘You always say you're going to do the 400IM and you never do it’ so I was like, ‘All right, Katie, I'll swim it. I'll swim it’.”
Ledecky went on to win the 400 IM in Fort Lauderdale with a time of 4:36.04, while King pondered how to get back into a race she has not swam competitively since 2018.
The first step was to get a cut time in the 400 IM since her previous cut time had expired. After accomplishing that in June 2023, King waited until January 2024 to line up against Ledecky at the Knoxville Pro Swim.
King’s preliminary result earned her a lane next to Ledecky in the final, but even with her challenger racing one lane over, King’s ‘no punishment, no reward’ mentality meant she was stress-free when the starting gun fired. As Ledecky might argue, perhaps too much so.
“It was the first time we had ever raced each other,” King said. “I was in the ready room talking to her. She's like, ‘What are you going to do?’ And I was like, ‘You know what? I haven't really decided yet on my race plan’. And she goes, ‘We're in the ready room'. I was like, ‘I know, I'll figure it out when I hit the water’.”
Lilly King accepted a dare to race Katie Ledecky in the 400m individual medley after the seven-time Olympic champion told her to "put your money where your mouth is".
“Refreshing” and “humbling” are two adjectives King later used to describe her experience in that race.
“I think anytime anyone swims the 400 IM, they're regretting it probably every point of the race. It's just brutal,” King said. “It's really tough and it's really painful, and I think I was regretting it behind the blocks, off the blocks, in the first 100, the second 100. The third 100 was good, and then the last 100, I was like, ‘Oh God, I got to race tomorrow too. My body's starting to hurt’.”
The eight-lap trial ended with Ledecky coming in second place with a time of 4:44.82. King touched the wall five seconds later, in 4:49.92, to finish just off the podium.
While it was not a win the ultra-competitive King would have been most satisfied with, it was no cause to dwell either. As in her childhood, the thought going through the Olympian’s mind was: “All right. What's the next race?”
From piano scales to Olympic races: Bringing sibling rivalry to Paris 2024
The next major race for King will be the U.S. Olympic Team Trials and if she makes the cut there, the Olympic Games Paris 2024. King will not attempt the 400 IM in either of them, opting instead to focus on her signature breaststroke and relays.
She won gold in the 100m breaststroke at Rio 2016, together with a gold in the 4x100m medley relay. Tokyo 2020 yielded three medals: silver in the 200m breaststroke and 4x100m medley relay, and a bronze in the 100m breaststroke.
While the most recent World Aquatics Championships she competed at, in 2023, saw her finish in fourth place in both of her Olympic-distance breaststroke races, King is not letting any pressure get to her.
“I'm going to be stressed a little bit, but what I really like to do is change the narrative,” she said. “Again, I go back to growing up and there is no reward, there is no punishment. While in reality there is, somewhere deep, deep in my brain it's just a race. So that's how I'm operating before walking out.”
While King won three medals at Tokyo 2020, she later revealed she was burned out before those Games and was not in the right mindset during her races. That has changed ahead of Paris 2024, which the swimmer describes as her first “normal” Olympic cycle.
Always one to fuel off the crowd’s energy, King is especially looking forward to competing in front of full stands again.
Her parents and boyfriend will be among the spectators, as will her original and oldest adversary, brother Alex, now an assistant swimming coach at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Their rivalry continues to burn strong every time the siblings meet, except that piano lessons and homework have since been swapped for board games and March Madness brackets.
A sixth Olympic medal could just give Lilly King some extra bragging rights. At least for a couple of hours.