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Lia Neal’s home sits about half the distance of the 400-meter freestyle relay she will swim in the Olympic Games from the elevated portion of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that winds its way from the Brooklyn Bridge into New York’s largest borough.
Neal, 17, arrived home late Tuesday night from the U.S. Olympic swimming trials in Omaha, Neb., as an Olympian.
She qualified as a part of the women’s 400-meter freestyle relay with her fourth-place finish in the 100-meter freestyle Saturday night.
Based on the pedigree of her Olympic teammates — most of whom have trained in swimming hotbeds such as California, Arizona, Texas and Florida — Neal, who began taking lessons as a first grader because her mother thought she would enjoy the recreation, might be the unlikeliest Olympian of them all because she has never left New York.
That is as much a badge of honor for Neal and her family as those five interlocking rings of the Olympic logo she’ll wear proudly in London.
“There is a certain pride that comes from being from New York and being from Brooklyn,’’ Neal said yesterday. “I just hope to represent Brooklyn and New York well at the Olympics.’’
Neal’s father, Rome, who is African-American, and mother, Siu, who is Chinese, could easily have assessed their daughter’s rare talents as a youngster and taken her out of New York to train somewhere with better facilities to further develop her raw skill.
They never did, and Neal is surely stronger for it.
“I believed in New York,’’ Rome Neal, an actor and musician, said. “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere in the world. You get more out of life when you’re a New Yorker.’’
Rome Neal then said proudly, “Fort Green, Brooklyn, will be in the house’’ in London.
Rome, who’s had a role in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing’’ and has done other movie and theater work, is a spiritual man and had positive visions for his daughter at the trials last week.
About a month ago, he said he walked out of the Lenox Lounge, the legendary Harlem jazz club, saw three shiny dimes on the street, picked them up and “saw them as a sign’’ of his daughter’s impending success at the trials.
Rome, who fasted for 11 days from Father’s Day to Lia’s first trials race last Wednesday as a way to pray for her success, gave his daughter the three dimes before she left for the trials.
“I really felt very strongly that she was going to do something amazing,’’ he said. “I know she had it in her and I thought she can just rock that place.’’
Based on the reaction of her teammates afterward, Neal’s fourth-place finish in the 100-meter freestyle was one of the most popular results of the week. A bundle of tears after the race, Neal was mobbed by her teammates.
Lia, who trains out of Asphalt Green Unified Aquatics on the Upper East Side, said the fact that she’s an Olympian “is sinking in slowly.”
“I still can’t believe that I’m going to go to London,” she said. “Once I get to the venue or Olympic Village, maybe then I’ll realize that I’m actually at the Olympics.’’
Though she’s only 17, this has been a long time coming for Neal, who will enter her senior year at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
Smile, one of her three older brothers, recalled the first moment when he realized his baby sister was a special athlete when “at age 10 or 11 she started breaking records for her age group.’’
“That made you think, ‘Hey, those records mean something,’ ’’ he said. “They hadn’t been broken in eight, nine, 10 years or longer. That told you if she keeps that up she can possibly do something with it.’’
Treasure, another of Lia’s brothers, recalled receiving recruiting letters from colleges seeking out Lia when she was merely 9.
Later in the month, when the international sporting spotlight shines upon the Olympic athletes, Neal will stand out as much for her swimming talents in the pool as she will for the color of her skin.
In a predominantly white sport, she is only the second African-American woman to make a U.S. Olympic swim team, following trailblazer Maritza Correia, who won a silver medal in the 400 freestyle relay in 2004.
Before Neal had dried off after her qualifying swim Saturday, she had received what she called a “heartfelt’’ message on her phone from Correia, whom she had “friended’’ on Facebook several years ago, “when she had no idea who I was.’’
Cullen Jones, an African-American swimmer from Irvington, N.J., on the men’s Olympic team since 2008 who’s become a mentor to Neal, delivered some meaningful advice to her moments before she was to make her fateful swim on Saturday night.
“For a 17-year-old to be sitting there in finals, I knew she was a little nervous,’’ Jones said. “I told her, ‘You’re swimming against some great names,’ and I saw her face drop.’’
That’s when Jones dropped these words of wisdom on her: “What they have in experience, you have in raw talent. You’ve practiced so hard. You’ve gone out there and beaten me in practice. You’re not going to die. Go out there and finish hard.’’
She did exactly that.
Next stop London. Brooklyn, New York, will be in the house.
Watch the women 100m freestyle final at the US Olympic swimming trial
mark.cannizzaro@nypost.com