King was not happy about the upshot saying, “Ya know, you’re shaking your finger number one and you’ve been caught for drug cheating. She had a fantastic swim”, King said at a press conference afterward where Efimova tried to defend herself against the doping charges.
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But the brash 19-year-old from IN was much more than that on an electric night at the Olympic pool, where she held off Russian Yulia Efimova IN a 100-meter breaststroke showdown that was loaded with overtones of a new doping Cold War.
As a freshman, King won the Big Ten Championship, the NCAA Championship and the Olympic Trials in the 100m breast prior to her gold medal in Rio.
Victory barely softened her temperament, if at all, even if he much-publicized Mutombo-like finger wag at a television showing Efimova was not meant for public consumption.
The meeting was highly anticipated, and it didn’t disappoint – particularly from Lilly King’s point of view.
The two will battle it out tonight.
For all of the American swimmers we’ve mentioned above, this is their first Olympics – just as it was for Kathleen Baker, who won the silver medal Monday in the women’s 100-meter backstroke.
After beating Efimova in the 100-meter breaststroke Monday night, King called her win a “victory for clean sport”. “It would have really been the end of a fairytale, a frightful dream, if I’d won gold”.
A smattering of boos greeted Efimova after she won her preliminary heat Sunday. He also continued a streak of USA dominance in the backstroke, which Americans have won in the past six summer Olympics. But the Russian responded angrily: “I would really like to encourage my fellow athletes to understand my problems and not let politics into it.I always thought the Cold War was long in the past”.
Michael Phelps felt that the athletes banned for doping shouldn’t be allowed to come back to the sport again.
“She has something to prove”, Vollmer said of King.
“I basically said what everybody thinks”, King added.
“I once made mistakes and I was banned for 16 months”, Efimova, 24, said.
There’s a growing alignment among the competitors – not along national lines, but among those identifying themselves as “clean athletes” who are shunning and shaming the so-called “drug cheats”.
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Coventry struggles with the knowledge that sometimes cheating athletes do get a precious moment on the world stage, receiving Olympic medals in the limelight only to get caught later.
