Background and career
Lillia Camille King (born February 10, 1997) is an American former competitive swimmer who specialized in breaststroke. At the 2016 Summer Olympics, she won the gold medal in the 100-meter breaststroke competition and also won a gold medal in the 4x100 meter medley relay, in which she swam the breaststroke leg. At the 2020 Summer Olympics, King won a silver medal in the 4x100 meter medley relay for her efforts in the prelims, the silver medal in the 200-meter breaststroke, and the bronze medal in the 100-meter breaststroke. At the 2024 Summer Olympics, she won a gold medal in the 4x100 meter medley relay, where she swam the breaststroke leg. She is the current world record holder in the long course 100-meter breaststroke. King retired from competitive swimming after the 2025 World Aquatics Championships in Singapore.
King was born and raised in Evansville, Indiana, the daughter of Mark and Ginny King. Mark ran track and cross-country at Indiana State University, and Ginny swam for Eastern Kentucky University and Illinois State University. King's younger brother Alex is a walk-on swimmer at the University of Michigan. King attended FJ Reitz High School, where the school's swim team shared Lloyd Pool with five other teams. The lanes at Lloyd Pool were often overcrowded, preventing King from receiving the necessary workout she required to perform at her best competitive level, so to help compensate, King added several morning practices a week with the local masters team and joined a competitive swim team called the Newburgh Sea Creatures.
To gain additional competition experience in her teenage years, King swam unattached at junior national championships, with a standout performance in the 200-yard breaststroke at the 2012 Winter Junior National Championships. As a 17-year-old at the 2014 Junior Pan Pacific Swimming Championships, held in Hawaii, she won gold medals in the 100 meter breaststroke with a Championships record time of 1:07.98, and the 4×100 meter medley relay with a Championships record of 4:03.44, and placed fourth in the 200 meter breaststroke with a time of 2:29.83.
King attended Indiana University Bloomington, where she competed for the Indiana Hoosiers swimming and diving team. At the NCAA Women's Division I Swimming and Diving Championships during her first year, she was the NCAA Champion in the 100 yard breaststroke (56.85) and 200 yard breaststroke (2:03.59). The performance established King as one of the best short course yards breaststroke swimmers in history, setting the American, NCAA, NCAA Meet, U.S. Open, Indiana school, Big Ten, and Georgia Tech Pool records in winning the NCAA titles. That same first year she was named the Big Ten Swimmer of the Year, earned four All-America honors, First-Team All-Big Ten, and Big Ten Freshman of the Year. King continued her elite success by claiming the 100 yard breaststroke and 200 yard breaststroke titles throughout her collegiate career and was only the 2nd swimmer ever to sweep the two events for all four years. As a senior, she won the Honda Sports Award as the nation's best female swimmer.
At the 2016 US Olympic trials in Omaha, King won both the 100 meter breaststroke and the 200 meter breaststroke, qualifying for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. In the 100-meter breaststroke heats, King finished first with a time of 1:05.78 and qualified for the semifinals. There she again finished first with a time of 1:05.70. The next fastest swimmer was Yuliya Yefimova from Russia, the reigning world champion who had previously served a 16-month doping suspension for failing a 2013 drug test. Yefimova also failed a drug test in 2016, but with no research on how long the drug stayed in a person's system, she was not banned or given a suspension. As King looked on from the ready room, where swimmers gather before they race, Yefimova won her semifinal and wagged her index finger, apparently in imitation of King's own finger wag in an earlier heat. After posting the fastest time in the 100 m breaststroke semifinals, King expressed distaste. In a post-race interview with NBC and reported on by The New York Times, King said, "You wave your finger No. 1 and you've been caught drug cheating? I'm not a fan." King went on to win the Olympic gold medal in the 100-meter breaststroke, setting an Olympic record of 1:04.93 in the process. In the 200-meter breaststroke heats, King finished 15th with a time of 2:25.89 and qualified for the semifinals. She finished 7th in her semifinal with a time of 2:24.59. She did not qualify for the final. Charlotte Wilder of USA Today said King and Yefimova's rivalry "was heightened by the backstory, the international rivalry, and the high stakes of a final event. It was the Olympics at its very, very best." Mike Decourcy and Tom Gatto of Sporting News noted the two swimmers "joined the list of the hottest U.S.-Soviet/Russian head-to-heads in sports history." As a result of her approach to the 2016 Summer Olympics and her rivalry with Yefimova, Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports said King developed a reputation as being "friendly but fiery, with no filter and no apologies." Journalists from The Washington Post and the Associated Press criticized King's treatment of Yefimova.
At the 2017 US Nationals, the qualification meet for the World Aquatics Championships in Budapest, King swept the breaststroke events. She won the 50-meter breaststroke with a time of 29.66, the 100-meter breaststroke with 1:04.95, and the 200-meter breaststroke with 2:21.83. In her first event at the 2017 World Championships, King won the 100-meter breaststroke with a world record time of 1:04.13. King's American teammate Katie Meili finished second and Yulia Efimova touched third. The race was highly anticipated because Efimova had nearly broken the former world record and mockingly wagged her finger during the semifinal.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
