The 41st and 42nd of 42 medal races at the swimming world championships in f*ckuoka, Japan, accomplished something the previous 40 finals, combined, failed to do: With victories in the men’s and women’s 4x100 medley relays — featuring a lap by each of the four best practitioners of each stroke for each country — Team USA could make a case it was still the top swimming nation in the world.
The results of the rest of the meet, however, would point to a different conclusion.
The next major international swim meet will occur at the 2024 Paris Olympics, and based on what happened over eight days in Japan, the team to beat will be Australia. The Dolphins, as they call themselves, topped the medal standings with 13 golds, nearly doubling the Americans’ total of seven and marking the first world championships since 2001 in which Team USA did not take home the most golds — a sobering truth as the countdown to Paris begins in earnest.
Advertisem*nt
“The world is getting better,” Bob Bowman, the men’s coach for Team USA, told reporters in Japan, “and you saw that on display this week.”
Ariarne Titmus crushes the field for 400-meter freestyle world record
There was some consolation for the Americans in the fact they won far and away the most medals in f*ckuoka, 38 to Australia’s 25. Twenty of Team USA’s medals were silvers, the most by any team in history.
“A lot of those silver medals can be flipped to gold by the time we get to Paris,” NBC Sports analyst Rowdy Gaines, himself a three-time Olympic gold medalist, said during Sunday’s broadcast.
Veteran breaststroker Lilly King — who powered Team USA to victory Sunday in the women’s medley relay by outsplitting her Australian counterpart, Abbey Harkin, by more than two seconds — was full of her typical bravado in describing the message the Americans were sending via the relay wins on the meet’s final day.
Advertisem*nt
“Hey, we’re still here. Don’t count us out,” King said. “We’re here, we’re tough, and we’re ready to race next year.”
Beyond those words, however, there were troubling signs everywhere in f*ckuoka for Team USA, which just a year ago in Budapest trounced the Aussies (who were missing a few of their top swimmers) by a margin of 18 to six in golds and 49 to 19 overall. Two years ago at the Tokyo Olympics, Team USA outperformed Australia in those same categories, 11-9 and 30-21. Among the most concerning:
- A whopping 10 world records were set at these world championships, with Australians accounting for five of them, and with one swimmer, freestyler Mollie O’Callaghan, having a hand in four. None of the new standards were set by Americans.
- For the first time in 12 years, Team USA failed to reach the podium in any of the women’s freestyle sprint events (50, 100 and 200 meters), reflecting the gaping hole left by 11-time world champion Simone Manuel, who skipped this year’s U.S. nationals — where qualifying for the worlds team took place — as she continues to recover from overtraining syndrome.
- Of the top-seeded Americans in the 34 individual events at worlds, 22 either added time in the final from their qualifying mark at U.S. nationals four weeks earlier or failed to make the final at all. This includes King in all three of her individual events (50, 100 and 200 breaststrokes) and Regan Smith in all three of hers (200 butterfly, 200 backstroke and 100 backstroke). Those two, with seven individual golds at worlds between them, failed to reach the top of the medal stand in any individual races in Japan.
- Nine swimmers won multiple individual gold medals at the meet, but only one was American: veteran distance freestyler Katie Ledecky, whose victories in the 800 and 1,500 freestyles pushed her career total to 16 individual golds, one more than Michael Phelps atop the all-time standings. The lack of multi-gold superstars was in part a function of Caeleb Dressel’s absence.
Katie Ledecky punctuates worlds by passing Michael Phelps in gold medals
Dressel, a seven-time Olympic gold medalist and 15-time world champ, won five golds in Tokyo, including three individual wins, but withdrew mid-meet from last year’s worlds for unspecified medical reasons and failed to make this year’s team. Obviously, a full return to form by Dressel would go a long way toward tilting the balance of power in Paris back in the Americans’ direction.
Advertisem*nt
“If you look back, historically, at our world championships just prior to an Olympics, we’ve had similar results, and we’ve bounced back to have some of our more successful Olympics,” said Bowman, who first rose to prominence as Phelps’s coach.
Bowman pointed to the 2015 world championships in Kazan, Russia, in which Team USA barely beat Australia in the gold medal race, 8-7, then went on to trounce the Aussies, 16-3, in golds at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics. The difference was made up for in large part by Phelps, who skipped the 2015 world championships but returned in Rio to win five golds and a silver to cap his unprecedented Olympic career.
“So I’m very optimistic,” Bowman said in regards to Paris 2024.
But Bowman, who now coaches at Arizona State, also had the awkward distinction of seeing his international swimmers from ASU combine for nearly as many individual golds — four, with three from France’s Leon Marchand (200 and 400 individual medley and 200 butterfly) and one from Hungary’s Hubert Kos (200 backstroke) — as the entire Team USA roster’s five.
Advertisem*nt
“If you look at swimming, every coach on the U.S. team is coaching [at least one] foreign swimmer,” Bowman said. “. . . Everyone gets support. It’s not a zero-sum. I’m not taking time away from the U.S. guys to say: ‘Nice job, Leon. Make your breaststroke better.’ ”
There were plenty of positive developments for Team USA in f*ckuoka, including the emergence of a potential new sprint star in 20-year-old Jack Alexy, who won five medals, including a gold in the men’s medley relay, and a breakthrough performance by versatile 21-year-old Kate Douglass. Douglass, a University of Virginia product, earned six medals, including golds in the 200 individual medley and the women’s medley relay.
And the most positive takeaway of all is that there are still 12 months of training and racing until the Paris Olympics.
“Not many people will remember f*ckuoka in 20 years,” Gaines said. “Everybody will remember Paris.”
