Erica Sullivan, a Japanese American swimmer, completes her journey to the medal stand.

The American women finished first and second in the 1,500-meter freestyle, with Katie Ledecky winning her sixth gold medal since the 2012 London Games.

While Ledecky has been a fixture of the Olympics for almost a decade, Erica Sullivan, the silver medalist, is a first-time Olympian and the 1,500 is her only event in Tokyo. Her time of 15 minutes 41.41 seconds was four seconds behind Ledecky’s.

Sullivan has said that she visited her mother’s family in Japan often in her life, and that she is fluent in Japanese. Her mother’s family home is in Ofuna, about 30 miles from Tokyo.

But the journey to a homecoming at the Tokyo Aquatic Center was difficult.

“I’m proud of the mental health barriers that I got through, with my dad dying in 2017 and really hitting a rock bottom in 2018 from the stress of losing a parent at age 16 and having to get over the anxiety, the panic attacks, the depression, the PTSD, all that,” Sullivan said at the Olympic trials last month in Omaha.

A Las Vegas native and two-time open water national champion, Sullivan started swimming at age 6. She recently told Swimming World Magazine that she remembered being bullied for bringing bento boxes with rice wrapped in seaweed to elementary school.

“It wasn’t until I got out of high school and I really started to crave my Asian heritage and culture, and I really honed into it,” she told the publication. “Luckily I found a community through anime watchers, and I found my own little network that I grew to love.”

She’ll begin classes next month at the University of Texas, where she’ll swim for the Longhorns.