Estonia’s Luik Sisters Becomes First Set Of Triplets To Play In The Olympics

The Luik triplets, also known as the “Rio Trio,” have beaten every female runner in their nation, qualifying for the upcoming Rio Olympics. 

“We are the first triplets who are going to the Olympics,” Leila, Liina, and Lily Luik told Epoch Times in an email.

Each nation is permitted a maximum of three athletes in each Olympic marathon. The Luik sisters qualified for the marathon standard of 2 hours 45 minutes. Leila has a personal best of 2 hours 37 minutes 11 seconds. Liina’s fastest time is 2:39:42, and Lily’s is 2:40:30. Coincidentally or not, their order of career bests matches their order of birth.

The trio trained for the Olympics almost every day. In the morning their two-and-a-half hour training is much more intense than it is in the evenings, they said. But they do get plenty of rest time, “We try to rest a lot during trainings,” Lily said. 

The Luiks, now 31, were born October 14th, 1985; they grew up in Tartu, Estonia. The sisters Leila, Liina and Lily had been born a month premature. None weighed more than four and a half pounds. For several weeks, home was an intensive care unit. Three decades later, the sisters are Olympic marathon runners for this tiny Baltic nation — and they are believed to be the first triplets to have qualified for the Winter or Summer Games.

The Trio to Rio, the alliterative sisters call themselves as they prepare to run the women’s marathon in Rio de Janeiro on August 14th. The International Olympic Committee said that it did not track siblings but that “various trusted sources reported it will be the first time that triplets compete at the Games.” Among those sources is Bill Mallon, an American who co-founded the International Society of Olympic Historians and keeps a database of 12,000 Olympic athletes and their relatives. 

Two hundred sets of twins have competed at the Games, Mallon said, almost always in the same events, including the canoeists Pavol and Peter Hochschorner of Slovakia, who won gold medals in doubles slalom in 2000, 2004 and 2008.

But Mallon said he was “99.99 percent sure” that no triplets had ever participated in the same or in separate Olympics. “It’s rare enough that we would have heard about it,” he said. “This just doesn’t happen.”