Lochte told reporters that he and the three other swimmers were the victims of a robbery at gunpoint that night, but a police investigation showed that security guards at a gas station stopped the swimmers after they urinated outside and damaged a poster. It started during a night out with teammates Lochte, Gunnar Bentz and Jimmy Feigen. He made headlines last summer in Rio, but not for the reasons he’d hoped. Swimming World Magazine named him a “National High School Swimmer of the Year” in 2013.Ĭonger accepted an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin (UT), where he helped lead the Longhorns to three consecutive NCAA men’s swimming and diving national championships, most recently in March. A 2013 graduate of Our Lady of Good Counsel High School in Olney, Conger was a three-time Washington Post All-Met Swimmer of the Year and broke a national high school record in the 100-yard butterfly. He was also a rising star in the region’s club swim team system, where he was a member of the Rockville-Montgomery Swim Club before following his coach, Sue Chen, to Machine Aquatics and then to the Nation’s Capital Swim Club. At his neighborhood pool, Flower Valley in Rockville, he quickly began demolishing records in Montgomery County’s summer league. qualify for the finals, became a competitive swimmer at age 9. Teenage girl shot at underage party in Silver SpringĬonger, who went on to earn a gold medal at the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro by swimming in the semifinals of the freestyle relay and helping the U.S. “I didn’t start crying until I saw my mom later that night at the hotel.” “When I saw my mom, my dad and my sister, it all really hit home,” he says. By placing third in the 200-meter freestyle final, he earned a spot on the U.S. “That has really stuck with me.”įor Conger, now 22, it was one of many surreal experiences that followed the moment he touched the wall at the 2016 Olympic trials in Omaha, Nebraska, realizing a dream he’d hatched as a kid growing up in Rockville. “He looked at me after the last person was gone and said, ‘I never leave someone out who wants an autograph-because this will never last, Jack,’ ” Conger says. The two stayed late until the line of fans dwindled. “Dude, they don’t want my autograph,” Conger said. Olympic swim team’s training camp in Atlanta last summer when teammate Ryan Lochte, someone Conger had looked up to for years, asked him to come sign autographs. Jack Conger had just finished a workout at the U.S.
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