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PARIS — Torri Huske edged out fellow American Gretchen Walsh to win the women’s 100-meter butterfly here at the 2024 Olympics by a margin of 0.04 seconds.
Second-place finisher Huske beat world record holder Walsh in 55.59 to Walsh’s 55.63 in the first upset of the meet.
Huske, who was 0.01 seconds away from a medal at the Tokyo 2021 Olympic Games, closed with a monstrous final 25 meters to overtake Walsh, who slowed down the stretch.
And the Arlington, Virginia, native won Team USA’s first individual gold medal at the 2024 Games, straddling swimming’s narrow wall between triumph and heartbreak.
Huske, 21, was one of the potential breakout stars of the COVID Games, as a teenager bursting onto the scene with medal potential in 2020 and 2021. In this same event, the 100-meter butterfly, she ran to the wall, neck and neck with three other leaders. They all finished within 0.14 seconds of each other. The race was so close that USA Swimming tweeted in celebration, thinking Huske had won bronze.
But she finished 0.14 seconds behind Canada’s Maggie Mac Neil, 0.09 behind China’s Zhang Yufei and 0.01 behind Australia’s Emma McKeon.
“I hit the wall and I don’t know,” Huske, then 18, said that morning in Tokyo. “I didn’t really know what was going on until I looked at the scoreboard and saw it.”
And she was stunned.
But during her three years on the bench, she grew. She went to Stanford, took an Olympic sabbatical to focus on swimming, and arrived in Paris more mature, with the Tokyo experience under her belt.
“My last Olympics will have helped me a lot going into the next one,” Huske said last month. “When I first came in last time, I was like, ‘Wow!’ That was my goal, just to make the team… Now, I’m like, ‘Okay, I got it, it’s done, and now I can focus on the future and my other goals (at the Olympics).”
Her goal, presumably, was gold. She achieved it surrounded by the same three swimmers who had beaten her three years earlier. Walsh, a rising star, had also worked her way up through the club.
However, Huske outperformed them all.
Walsh settled for silver, but didn’t let any disappointment take away from her moment. The two U.S. teammates walked out of the pool arm in arm, waving to the crowd, high above the world.
Zhang took bronze (56.21).
