IKEE Rikako

General
OVERCOMING ILLNESS
She was diagnosed with leukaemia in February 2019. She spent time away from the sport to receive treatment and was discharged from hospital in December 2019. She resumed pool training seriously in May 2020, and returned to competitive action at the Tokyo Special Swimming Tournament in August 2020. Although she reiterated that she aimed to compete at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris even after the postponement of the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo, in April 2021 she secured a spot for the 4x100 medley relay at the 2020 edition following her victory in the 100m butterfly at the national championships in Japan. "At that moment, I remembered everything I had to go through to get here. And I was absolutely spent, too. I was shocked. I couldn't make sense out of anything. I think it'll take a while for all this to sink in. Compared to the trials five years ago [in 2016] I was nowhere near as confident and I thought winning on this stage would be much further down the line. But I had put in the work. So no matter how unconfident or tough or difficult things are, if you work hard you get rewarded. In the end, I went into the race thinking, 'I'm home. I belong here'." (japantimes.co.jp, 05 Jun 2019; rikako-ikee.jp, 13 Jun 2019, 17 Dec 2019, 17 Mar 2020; nikkansports.com, 08 Feb 2020, 19 Feb 2020; Instagram profile, 08 Feb 2020; asahi.com, 02 Jul 2020; olympics.nbcsports.com, 02 Jul 2020; daily.co.jp, 29 Aug 2020; Olympic Japanese language Twitter profile, 05 Apr 2021; olympicchannel.com, 04 Apr 2021; swimswam.com, 04 Apr 2021)

MESSAGE OF HOPE
In July 2020 she was featured in a video that marked the one-year countdown to the postponed 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Ikee stood in an empty National Stadium holding the Olympic flame and delivered a message comparing the difficulties of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic with her own battle with cancer. "Think of the coming year, not simply as a one-year postponement, but as a plus one. To overcome adversity, what we need most is hope - a flame of hope glowing in the distance allows us to keep trying, to keep moving forward no matter how hard it is." (tokyo2020.org, 24 Jul 2020; insidethegames.biz, 23 Jul 2020)

She is the first swimmer, male or female, to win six gold medals at a single edition of the Asian Games. She claimed victory in two relay events and four individual events at the 2018 Games in Indonesia. She also became the first female athlete from any sport to win six gold medals at a single edition of the Asian Games. (SportsDeskOnline, 31 Aug 2018; reuters.com, 25 Aug 2018)