Lily Ryan carefully surveyed her brother Sean's casual attire Friday morning.
"He's got a U.S. Swimming T-shirt on, his McCallie School class ring and blue and gold tennis shoes for Michigan," she said. "He's got it all covered."
Well, everything but his just-secured place on the 2016 U.S. Olympic swim team. Finishing fourth among more than 75 swimmers at the World Championships 10,000-meter open-water event in Kazan, Russia, on July 27, Ryan guaranteed himself one of 25 spots allowed for the same event at the 2016 Summer Games. They will begin in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, a year from this month.
Back in Chattanooga for the first time since that accomplishment, the 23-year-old Ryan admitted to thinking ahead already to Rio.
"Oh, I definitely think I'll be nervous," he said during a brief news conference at McCallie. "To represent my country, there's definitely going to be a lot of nerves."
One might think those nerves already would be fraying after The Associated Press revealed last week that its private testing showed not a single Rio water venue for Olympic competition was safe for swimming or boating, with most of the threat for illness coming from the dumping of human waste and sewage into those water sites.
With nearly 1,400 of the 10,000 athletes from 205 countries slated to spend at least some time in those waters as swimmers, canoeists, sailors or rowers, the threat of many kinds of respiratory and digestive illnesses - including explosive diarrhea and vomiting - as well as the potential for serious heart and brain diseases is clearly a cause for concern among open-water Olympians such as Ryan.
In the days since the initial AP report, the World Health Organization has advised the International Olympic Committee to analyze viral levels in Rio waters.
"Everybody's known the water (in Brazil) is sort of iffy," Ryan said Friday. "But the AP report was the first time we'd seen science attached to the story. I know the USOC, the IOC and U.S. Swimming are all looking at it. They all want what's best for the athletes. But I have no clue what they'll ultimately do. I'm just getting ready to swim."
McCallie coach Stan Corcoran said a somewhat similar situation prior to the 2012 London Summer Olympics - an unsafe level of bird droppings in the open-water venue - caused the London organizers to dredge the venue and refill it in the months leading up to the Games.
But with all that still 12 months away, and having just returned from Russia, Ryan wanted to spend at least one long weekend in his parents' Hixson home while catching up with family and friends before returning to the University of Michigan, where he'll continue to train for the Olympics and wrap up his master's degree in manufacturing engineering.
"McCallie really laid the groundwork for everything I've accomplished in swimming," Ryan said. "Without McCallie and Stan I couldn't have gone to Michigan, and without Michigan I might not have made the Olympic team."
But he did make it with relative ease, despite divulging on Friday that "my goggles fogged up the first 1,000 meters."
Nor is he taking anything for granted over the next 12 months.
"I plan to keep training how I've been training - 10 practices a week, " he said. "But now that I've made the Olympics, I might do a little more."
What he most wanted more of on Friday was Chick-fil-A biscuits, which apparently are hard to come by in Ann Arbor, Mich.
"The only one I know of up there is at the Detroit airport (a 45-minute drive from campus)," Ryan said. "And driving there to get one would make it the most expensive chicken biscuit anywhere."
So he'll eat as many as he can while he's home, enjoy a dinner out with family and friends at least one night before leaving Monday, regret that he probably won't have time to enjoy his mom's chicken parmesan this trip - "My go-to favorite meal," he said - and hope that his mother (Margret), father (Eugene) and sisters Lily and MaryKate can all find their way to Rio in August of 2016.
"We already know his brother, Brendan, is out because he and his wife are having a baby in October," Margret said. "We're just hoping the rest of us can be there."
Everyone else no doubt hopes that human waste and sewage won't be there in the water by the time the Olympians arrive. Yet whatever happens or doesn't happen on that foul front, Ryan remains determined to focus far more on what he can control than what he can't.
"I just know," he said with a smile, "that I'm swimming in the Olympics next August."
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.