The Sunday Mail
As Lea Luik waited in a Soviet-era taxi, her husband, Henno, carried their newborns from the nursery. One, then two, then three. In retellings, the punch line is always the taxi driver’s reaction: “Are you going to empty the whole hospital?”
The sisters Leila, Liina and Lily (Pictured) had been born a month premature.
None weighed more than four and a half pounds, and for several weeks, home was an intensive care unit.
Thirty years 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 Aug 14.
“We had to fight to survive when we were born.
“But we have this spirit to push hard,” Lily Luik (pronounced loo-EEK) said.
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.”
It might seem rarer still to find elite triplets from a country like Estonia, which secured its independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991, has little tradition of female distance running and has a population of only 1.3 million — one of the smallest in the European Union.
Not until six years ago, when they were 24, did the Luik sisters even begin running seriously.
“It’s amazing that they will go to the Olympics in the same event,” said Harry Lemberg, who coaches the triplets.
“It’s such a small country.”
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.
No Luik sister is expected to challenge for a medal in Rio.
Still, Liina Luik finished 27th at the 2015 world track and field championships in Beijing with her fastest race and hopes to crack the top 20 in Brazil.
Once shy, and reluctant to draw attention to themselves, the sisters are now ebullient and funny.
Few can easily tell them apart, but as runners, the triplets do not have precisely the same speed or oxygen-carrying capacity.
They do not recover in exactly the same way from strenuous training. In their alikeness, there is variance.
In Rio, the sisters are tempted to pace one another, or to draft off one another if the day is windy, to experience the highlight of their careers in unison, identical triplets with identical results.
But it is impossible to predict how a marathon will unfold. To achieve their best results, they know they may have to run apart, not together.
As of now, Lemberg said, the strategy may be for Liina, who is in the best form, to run ahead while Leila and Lily run behind.
Leila and Lily laughed when told this and said they would yell at Liina, “Look out, the other two are coming!”
Liina Luik said she felt somewhat torn about how to run the Olympic marathon.
“As a sportsman in Rio, it is best to run your personal best,” she said.
“If you think like a team or like sisters or with your heart, maybe the best way is to finish together. It’s good if we are together. But if I feel my personal best coming, I’ll go.”
With the Olympics mere weeks away, it’s quite funny that running has always been the plan for these three.
The Luik sisters became so active from a young age that their grandmother would tell their mother, “These girls don’t know how to walk; they just run.”
Still, Lea Luik put her daughters into music lessons, preferring that they play the piano, the cello and the violin instead of taking part in sports. Even now, she said, laughing, she does not want them to be marathon runners.
Lily Luik said: “She doesn’t think professional sport is normal for women. She thinks when we get older, we’ll be in a wheelchair.”
The triplets became professional hip-hop and show dancers after high school, taught dance lessons and appeared in a music video.
They also worked as lifeguards, which required running as part of training.
A colleague suggested that they try competitive running.
In 2010, they sought a coach in Lemberg, who is chairman of the Tartu University Academic Sports Club.
By 2011, Liina and Leila Luik divvied up national titles at 10,000 meters, the half-marathon and the marathon. Dancing seemed to help them as runners, Lemberg said, strengthening their ankles, straightening their posture, contributing to their whispery, economical strides.
“I thought they just wanted to be weekend runners,” he said. “After a year, I understood that they wanted something more serious.”
Estonian men have won two Olympic gold medals in track and field since the fall of the Eastern bloc.
Erki Nool won the decathlon at the 2000 Sydney Games, and Gerd Kanter won the discus at the 2008 Beijing Games.
But Estonia’s female distance runners have had limited international success.
The national women’s marathon record, 2:27:04, was set nearly two decades ago, in 1997, by Jane Salumae, who won big-city marathons in Rome, Los Angeles and Vienna and took fourth at the 2002 European championships, but finished no higher than 44th in two Olympic appearances.
Perhaps, the Luik sisters said, their visibility will draw more Estonian women into distance running.
A seven-kilometer run for women drew more than 10,000 participants in May in Tallinn. “We show that it is never too late to start a professional career,” Liina Luik said.
After Rio, the sisters will consider whether to continue toward the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
And, they said, they might challenge the world record, 2:15:25, held by Paula Radcliffe of England. – New York Times.
