Gretchen Walsh, ‘bathtub swimmer’ no more, arrives at her big Olympic moment

Bathtub swimmer.

Gretchen Walsh sometimes uses the term her critics once used to poke at her, but it’s OK now. She’s shed the label once and for all, and perhaps even more importantly, she’s convinced herself she’s more than just a short-course swimmer.

She’s an Olympian. She’s a world record-holder. And she has a chance to be the breakout star of the Paris Games.

The “bathtub swimmer” insult implies that a swimmer can only be good when distances are short and there are lots of walls, which means you can spend about 60 percent of the race underwater. Long-course swimming — in those 50-meter pools you see at international competitions like world championships and the Olympic Games — is hard because you spend only about 30 percent of the race underwater. (For both short- and long-course, swimmers have to break the surface 15 meters from the wall.)

Generating speed underwater by pushing off the wall and using dolphin kicks can be a huge advantage in short-course swimming, like in NCAA competition. And Walsh has excelled in that setting, winning seven NCAA titles this season alone to help the University of Virginia win its fourth consecutive team national title. She also lowered four of her own NCAA records on the way.

But she still needed to prove herself in the 50-meter pool. And before she could do it, she had to believe she could do it. Her coach, Todd DeSorbo, believed she could. Her sister and fellow Olympian, Alex, believed she could. Her confidence coach knew Gretchen could and should believe she could, too.

“It’s important to listen to people when they have faith in you and they have confidence in you, and not to let that just, like, become a weight on your shoulder of pressure,” Gretchen Walsh said. “It took a while for me to accept that maybe I am capable of doing stuff like this.”

Expectations have always been high for Walsh ever since she burst onto the scene as a teenager in Nashville. She qualified to swim at U.S. Olympic trials in 2016 at age 13, the youngest participant at the event. At the Tokyo trials in 2021, her sister made the Olympic team, but she didn’t, finishing fifth in the women’s 50-meter freestyle final and not even qualifying for semifinals in the 100 free (an event in which she’d seemed to have a good shot to make the relay). And then, in 2022, she missed the U.S. world-championship roster after a third-place finish (by one hundredth of a second) in the 50 free.

So, for the past two years, Walsh and DeSorbo went to work. The issue was part mental, because Walsh needed to believe she could succeed in the different race format, but she also needed to approach races a bit differently. There were practical changes she could make to her daily routine, too.

She got stronger. She tweaked her freestyle technique, so she’s longer and more powerful, even on the back half of a 100-meter race. Her underwaters remained terrific — she’s double-jointed and unnaturally flexible, which helps make her dolphin kicks even more effective — so everything she was adding above the surface only elevated what she was doing underneath in NCAA competition. But DeSorbo split her time, with more of a focus on long courses in the fall before flipping it to short courses for the NCAA season. And she made the U.S. roster for 2023 worlds, where she earned a bronze medal in the 50-meter butterfly and medaled as part of two relays.

“Everyone always says, like, I’m just a bathtub swimmer, can’t do the long-course pool, but I think I finally proved to myself that I can do both,” Walsh said a few months afterward. “I know that I still have a lot of room to grow in terms of long-course but having (made the world championship team) as Round 1 and building up from there, I’ve already taken so many lessons that I learned from that meet into my training.”

By the time U.S. Olympic trials rolled around in June, Walsh knew she should make the team, as long as she swam close to what she was capable of swimming. But that doesn’t lessen the pressure or quiet the internal critics.

A world record does, though.

On the second night of competition in Indianapolis, Walsh broke the world record in the women’s 100-meter butterfly, touching the wall in 55.18 seconds. And it was just the semifinal round — a stunning achievement but one that caused some new nerves. What if she set a world record but then failed to make the Olympics the next night? What if, what if …

“I had a talk with my confidence coach, and we were just saying, all I have to do is execute,” Walsh said. “Nothing more, nothing less. Just execute.”

She did. She touched first in what was now the second-fastest time in the world in the event ever (55.31), making her first Olympic team at age 21. She embraced her sister. She saw DeSorbo tearing up. “She’s very proud of that,” he said, laughing.

Then Walsh qualified as part of the women’s 100-meter freestyle relay. Then she added the 50 free to her Paris program with a second-place finish in the final. The pressure was gone, the doubt quieted.

“For her, it was about getting the monkey off her back,” DeSorbo said. “It’s been a long time coming.”

Alex made the team a few nerve-wracking days after Gretchen clinched a spot, qualifying in the women’s 200-meter individual medley and securing roommate status with her sister for Paris. Alex said she was more nervous for Gretchen than she was for herself — that she was more crushed than her sister was when Gretchen missed Tokyo, that she was happier than her sister was for herself this go around, too.

“It’s a dream come true,” Alex said. “It now finally feels like everything is going her way, and it’s so rightly deserved.”

Gretchen Walsh will be busy this weekend at Paris La Défense Arena, as the Olympic swimming program gets under way. On Saturday, she qualified fourth in the prelims of the 100 fly, with the semifinals later Saturday and the final set for Sunday. The women’s 4×100-meter freestyle relay final is also Saturday night — the U.S. had the second-best time in Saturday morning’s prelims; Walsh did not swim in it but is expected to swim the final. Next week, Walsh will also compete in the 100 free individual event because teammate Kate Douglass dropped it, and she’ll swim the 50 free, too. It’s quite likely she’d swim the butterfly leg as part of the women’s medley relay as well.

That’s a heavy workload, but it feels just right for a swimmer who has already shed so much baggage just to get here. Gretchen Walsh is ready for her close-up.

(Top photo of Gretchen Walsh: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)