Elizabeth Beisel, a 15-year-old junior at North Kingstown High School, will swim in several other events this week at the Olympic trials in Omaha, Neb.

The Providence Journal / Ruben W. Perez

It’s the fairy tale that became reality.

How else do you explain a 15-year-old Rhode Island teenager, a girl born and raised in North Kingstown, swimming her way to the Olympics.

Rhode Island produces Olympic hockey players, maybe even an Olympic sailor or two, but not Olympic swimmers. Olympic swimmers come from places like Santa Barbara and Long Beach, Calif., or maybe even big college towns such as Ann Arbor, Mich., not Saunderstown, R.I.

But last night in Omaha, Neb. there was Elizabeth Beisel, the North Kingstown High junior who first fell in love with the water at the beach down the street from her Saunderstown home, earning a trip to Beijing as she finished second in the finals of the women’s 400-meter individual medley on the opening day of the U.S. Olympic swimming trials.

Three months ago she was setting records at the Rhode Island high school swimming championships. Yesterday she became an Olympian.

Fairy tales do come true.

The official tally sheet said that Beisel swam the 400 meter IM, which consists of 100 meters each of the butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle, in 4:32.87. She finished second to 19-year-old Katie Hoff, the three-time world champion in the event who set a world record last night with a winning time of 4:31.12.

Under U.S. Swimming Association regulations, the top two finishers at the trials, and only the top two, in every event other than the freestyle events, earn Olympic berths for that event.

So the kid from Rhode Island, who grew up in a town that doesn’t even have an indoor swimming pool, will be in Beijing in August.

Yesterday’s performance was just the latest in what has now become a string of amazing, some might consider shocking, performances by Beisel.

She started swimming in a youth program at URI about the time she entered kindergarten. She was a natural, an aquatic prodigy of sorts, who also seemed to enjoy the work required to become a good swimmer.

Now a member of the Attleboro Bluefish Swim Club, she has been on the national youth swimming radar screen for about five years. She set her first national age-group record when she was 10. When she was 11, she set the national 11-12 age group record in the 100-meter backstroke, then bettered that mark when she was 12. Three years ago she also set a national 12-and-under record in the 400-meter individual medley.

Last spring (2007) she took a few weeks off from her freshman year at North Kingstown and swam at the World Championships as the youngest member of the U.S. team. She finished 12th in the 200-meter backstroke. The 12th-best female swimmer in an event at the age of 14, it’s not surprising that she was being mentioned as a future Olympic hopeful.

Most people, however, were not talking about her swimming in this year’s Olympics, even after she won four individual titles at last summers National Junior championships. She was still young. There were a host of older, talented, and more experienced swimmers on the scene and the fact that only the top two finishers at the trials make the Olympic team makes the trials a nerve-racking experience for even tested veterans.

Through it all she has enjoyed being both a normal Rhode Island high student as well as an Olympic hopeful. She enjoys swimming with her classmates on the North Kingstown High swim team as much as she enjoys competing with the best swimmers in the world.

But there’s a big difference between swimming against other teenagers from Cumberland and Barrington high schools like Beisel was doing in February at the state high school championships and swimming against the country’s best, most of who are either collegiate swimmers or graduates of high-powered college programs.

Beisel has never let long odds curb her enthusiasm or work ethic.

“I definitely feel pressure,” Beisel told me a few months ago about all the talk of her possibly making the Olympic team. “Everybody I know is asking, ‘Are you going to be in the Olympics?’ I’m going to the trials with the mindset whatever happens, happens. I’m young. I figure I have at least two more Olympics after this year.”

Last night the present and future collided.

She had become the talk of the early opening-day competition when she finished second to Hoff in the qualifying for the 400 individual medley. She was ahead of world-record pace at the 250-meter mark before eventually finishing in 4:35.76. That was nearly two seconds better than the previous Olympic trials record in the event.

Then last night she came out for the finals with spotlights glaring, 15,000 people cheering and a national TV audience watching and bettered her qualifying time by nearly three seconds.

The kid from Rhode Island loves to deliver in the clutch.

She’s not finished. The Olympic trials are a weeklong affair and she has qualified to swim in several other events, along with some other Rhode Islanders.

There could be more Olympic berths, but regardless of what happens the rest of the week, Beisel has become one of the best stories Rhode Island sports has ever produced and it’s not a fairy tale.

jgillool@projo.com