With Semester in Madrid, Lydia Jacoby Taking Time to ‘Reevaluate’
Lydia Jacoby announced on social media this week that she’s skipping national trials next month, part of a larger effort to reevaluate her priorities in swimming.
That has come with Jacoby studying abroad in Spain, the 2021 Olympic gold medalist cultivating interested outside the pool.
“Missing the Olympic team for Paris 2024 by 0.03 (seconds) was a moment where I realised that I wasn’t pursuing the sport for all the right reasons in my heart,” Jacoby said in an interview with Olympics.com. “I have been competing since I was 12, and it has been my whole life. I’d never even considered that I could take a break. Being an Olympic champion, I felt like I had to compete again straight away because that’s what you do. It felt like I was going through the motions a bit, which is not enough when you’re trying to do things on the level that I do.”
Jacoby, a native of Alaska, was one of the sensations of Olympics Trials in 2021 to make her first Olympic team. She then shocked the field by winning gold in the 100 breaststroke. She parlayed that success into an NCAA title as a freshman at the University of Texas.
But Jacoby hasn’t yet gotten back to those speeds. She missed the second spot in the 100 at the Paris Olympics in Indianapolis last summer and scratched the 200 breast. She turned pro in the fall, foregoing her remaining eligibility at Texas. That has allowed her to pursue other interests, such as studying abroad in Madrid and finding ways to exercise that don’t include swimming. (She said she originally looked for a training location but has decided “to keep fit in other ways.”)
Jacoby has reiterated that she’s not done with the sport. In a post announcing that she would skip trials, she said again that, “2028 is still very much on my mind.”
Read the full interview with Olympics.com here.
