INDIANAPOLIS – As with so many other athletes, Sarah Bacon’s journey to the Paris Olympics was years in the making. Except you have to go back, back, back, and keep going.

Go back five years, 10, 20 ... 70 years.

Start with three years ago.

That is when the Hoosier diver’s journey was to culminate at the 2021 Olympics. She was coming off a silver medal on 3-meter springboard at the World Cup, a Tokyo test event against the same divers she would soon meet again.

She was the “poster child” for USA Diving, the 27-year-old remembered.

More: After years of setbacks and adversity, Sarah Bacon finally gets Olympic spot

“I had media and people all over me,” Bacon said. “The last Olympic Trials, I had so much pressure on me. I didn’t know how to deal with it because I’d never been in that situation.”

She did not make it back. She was done with diving. Or so she thought.

Go back five years.

At the 2019 World Championships, Bacon’s 1-meter silver made her the first female American diver to win a global individual medal since Laura Wilkinson was world champion on 10-meter platform in 2005. (One-meter is not an Olympic event.) Wilkinson, a 2000 Olympic gold medalist, is a hall-of-famer.

Go back 10 years.

Bacon was honored by USA Diving for overcoming adversity — multiple stress fractures in her back, Besides winning at high school state for Cardinal Ritter in 2013 and 2014, breaking a record held by Olympic diver Mary Beth Dunnichay, she was a 1-meter national champion at age 17.

Go back 20 years.

Bacon was introduced to diving at Broadmoor Country Club, where she learned front and back flips on the same day. A lifeguard told her parents if she took lessons, she could become as good as Thomas Finchum.

“We had no idea who Thomas Finchum was,” Bacon said.

Finchum, another Indianapolis diver, became an Olympian in 2008 and won two World Championships synchro medals with David Boudia. A 7-year-old girl had an Olympic dream.

We’re skipping over some decades, but go back 70 years.

Bacon’s paternal grandparents, Bob and Shirley Kerr Bacon, were hall-of-famers at Tarkio College, a small Presbyterian school in Missouri that closed in 1992. Both played basketball. Bob was also a football player and became the first Tarkio athlete to qualify for the NAIA Championships in track and field.

Athleticism is in the genes. Now, in a third generation, a Bacon is in the Olympics.

“She turned out to be the best athlete out of all of us,” said her brother, Brian. “There’s no question about that.”

***

Because of the pandemic, Sarah Bacon could not have had family in Tokyo. The Bacons will be out in force in France.

Besides the parents, Steve and Barb, there will be three brothers — Kevin, 28; Brian, 25; Brad, 24 — and her boyfriend, Nick Jaworski, a former kicker at Mississippi State and indoor pro leagues. They will be lodged a mile from the Aquatics Centre in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris.

It is a family of competitors, so Sarah’s brothers weren’t keen to have her on their team in backyard basketball.

“‘Why do we have to have her on my team?’ But I was good,” Sarah recalled.

Standards in the house were high.

The father played college basketball at George Mason, setting a school record by shooting .871 on free throws. In high school, his West Springfield (Va.) team twice lost in state championship games to Petersburg, led by hall-of-famer Moses Malone.

Kevin was a Ritter basketball player. Brian and Brad were on state championship teams in baseball and football, respectively. Brian, also a pitcher, batted .493 in one season. Brad, a track hurdler and standout bowler, ran 72 yards for a touchdown in the Class 2A title game.

Brian, a high school history teacher in Chicago, said his sister has been an inspiration.

“It makes you want to get up every day and put your best foot forward,” he said. “Making sure you put action behind what you want to do in your life.”

***

Growing up, the boys were not always around Sarah, who was home-schooled so she could practice up to eight hours a day when the national training center was in Indianapolis. There was travel, too, to national and international meets.

As young as 11, Sarah won two junior Pan American gold medals in Puerto Rico. As a 15-year-old, she was ninth on 3-meter at the 2012 Olympic Trials.

But going to her brothers’ ballgames “was my favorite thing to do,” she said.

Training that much was stressful, so some normalcy returned to life when she attended classes at Ritter. She could not go for a state three-peat in 2015 because of a non-diving issue — a concussion from a car collision. Not to mention the time she sliced her Achilles tendon in a Florida hot tub.

“She’s had many more injuries than people even know about,” her father said.

She delayed college enrollment at Minnesota to prepare for the 2016 Olympic Trials. She was injured (again) a month beforehand, and she finished 18^th.

In one surgery, she needed a bone shaved to allow her acromioclavicular (AC) joint to lay down. When she came back, she tore the labrum in her same shoulder and needed another surgery.

“I could not lift my arm above my head,” Bacon said.

Still, she persevered.

Under Wenbo Chen, who had also coached her in Indianapolis, she became one of the most decorated divers in college history and totaled five NCAA titles.

After finishing second in the NCAAs on 1-meter as a freshman in 2017, she won the next two and took that 2019 World Championships silver. No American woman had won a global springboard medal since Mary Ellen Clark, a bronze medalist on 3-meter at the 1996 Olympics.

Bacon redshirted in 2020 for an Olympics that was postponed. In keeping with her setback series, she endured a bout of COVID-19 that swept through her Minnesota team.

***

Finally, it was 2021. There was going to be an Olympics, and she was preparing for her third Trials.

Bacon underscored her status as one of the world’s best. Besides sweeping NCAA 1- and 3-meter titles, she won that World Cup silver, a first by an American in that event since 1989. She was the Big Ten’s female athlete of the year, an honor that has gone to the likes of Suzy Favor, Stephanie White, Katie Douglas, Lilly King and Caitlin Clark.

“My plan was to make the Olympic team in 2021, dive in the Olympics, hopefully medal, and then retire,” Bacon said. “That did not go to plan.”

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At the hometown trials, she was third on 3-meter, with two going to Tokyo. She and Kassidy Cook were second in synchro, with one team to go.

It was “devastating,” Bacon said.

She moved to Texas with her boyfriend, took six months off. Then she popped the question:

What if I give diving another shot?

His answer was yes.

“He 100% surprised me,” she said.

The couple returned to Minnesota, where Bacon enrolled in graduate school and was eligible for a sixth year. In 2022, she repeated as NCAA champion on 3-meter, finished second on 1-meter and became a Big Ten distinguished scholar.

She capped the year by winning another 1-meter silver at the World Championships.

She has funded her Olympic quest with USA Diving stipends and side gigs. Fifty-nine percent of Olympic hopefuls reported earning less than $25,000 during the year of their respective Olympics, according to a survey by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC).

“It’s been tough,” Bacon said.

***

The diver has discovered a way to laugh at herself. It has helped.

She learned small children thought she looked “scary” on the diving board. It is her genuine intensity.

Her coach reminded her to smile, enjoy the journey. Bacon said she felt less pressure at the recent Olympic Trials, explaining she wanted to prove to herself, not to anyone else, that she had what it took.

“When I can relax and have fun,” she said, “I dive better.”

At Knoxville, Tenn., she and Cook were comfortably ahead of second place in synchro, winning by 30 points. Some missed dives made individual 3-meter closer, but Bacon won that, too.

Bacon has been competing against, or with, Cook for virtually all of their diving lives. The collaboration in synchro dates to 2019, when Cook came out of retirement.

Cook, 29, a former Stanford diver from The Woodlands, Texas, made her first Olympic team in 2016. She, too, has known heartbreak — she missed in 2012 by less than a half-point. When they made the Olympics together in 2024, it was Cook who slipped an Olympic ring on the finger of her tearful teammate.

The close friends resemble each other in technique and body type, and even beyond. They have a wardrobe of matching clothes — shoes, socks, shirts, sweatshirts, leggings.

“It’s unbelievable what they have going on between them,” Bacon’s father said. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life between two human beings.”

They are contenders to win a medal July 27, the opening day of Olympic competition. They missed the podium by less than a point at last year’s World Championships.

Prelims, semifinals and final on individual 3-meter are Aug. 7, 8 and 9. Medaling is plausible there, too. Bacon is one of only four divers on women’s springboard ever to make three straight World Championships finals, according to @TeamTrackerUSA.

She said she is fit and healthy. She has resolved not to try “too hard,” stay consistent, keep it light.

Her brothers will be there to keep it real.

“Nothing we did compares to anything that Sarah did,” Brian Bacon said.

Contact IndyStar correspondent David Woods at dwoods1411@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidWoods007.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Sarah Bacon didn't give up, will finally get Olympics diving moment