Paris Olympics 2024: From .01-second heartbreak to stunning gold, Torri Huske lives out a dream in Paris

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TOKYO — Torri Huske stretched for the wall, and emerged from the water, and out of the corner of her eye, she could see it: a bright red light, then a scoreboard crowning an Olympic champion.

That’s how the women’s 100-meter butterfly concluded, Sunday but also three years ago, with a head thrown back and a joyous, disbelieving voice piercing chlorine-scented air.

And here at Paris La Défense Arena, it was Huske’s joy that lit up the Olympics. She had chased down teammate Gretchen Walsh; she had claimed Team USA’s first individual gold of the Games by 0.04 seconds. “It was really surreal,” she later said.

It was especially surreal, though, because, in 2021, in the very same race, it was Canada’s Maggie Mac Neil who screamed: “Oh my God!”

It was China’s Zhang Yufei 0.05 seconds behind. Huske, 18 years old at the time, was fourth by 0.01.

“By one one-hundredth of a second,” she said matter-of-factly.

“And I'm not gonna lie,” she continued Sunday. “That was devastating.”

“But,” Huske also said, “I think that it really fueled me.”

It pushed her away from that awful feeling; it gave her “a little bit more of that edge.” And it lifted her, three years later, up and over the razor-thin barrier that separates Olympic triumph and heartbreak.

How Torri Huske's heartbreak 'fueled' her to Olympic gold

Huske was a rising star at those 2021 Olympics, a teen bursting with potential. As she sped to a lead in the 100 fly at a mostly empty Tokyo Aquatics Center, she was meters, then feet, then inches away from irrevocable fame and delight. She was under world-record pace after 85 of 100 meters. At 99.5, from Lane 2 (left in the picture below), she was, at the very least, on the podium.

At 100, “I hit the wall, and — I don't know,” she said minutes later that morning in Tokyo, crestfallen. “I kinda didn't really know what was happening.”

In retrospect, she says now, “I was a little bit naive.”

Her “whole goal was to just make the team,” which she did at trials. Once she got to Tokyo, she wasn’t quite “unprepared,” but she did almost take success for granted. She thought: “I'm on Team USA. Team USA always medals. I will get a medal. I will get my hand on that wall. And I will be on the podium.”

She learned, of course, that “it's a lot tougher than that.”

“I know now how hard it is to medal,” she said Sunday.

She allowed that experience to guide her over the next three years. She often couldn’t bear to watch the 2021 Olympic race, but she did force herself to sit through a couple replays. And the takeaway was simple: “I don’t want to feel like that ever again.”

The heartbreak, she said this week, was a “setback at the time,” but “it helped me in the future.” The following summer, she won six medals (three gold) at swimming world championships. She refined her strategy in the fly, and won it going away at those worlds. Once upon a time, she would “fly and die”; in the years after 2021, she learned to grab the water more methodically.

Her ascent, though, was far from linear. At last year’s worlds, she finished fifth in the 50 fly and third in the 100. She failed to make the top four at U.S. trials. And that, Huske says, is when she realized she needed to narrow her focus on swimming.

She’d gone off to Stanford, like many great swimmers do; but with classes and campus life eating away at her time and energy, she couldn’t fully prioritize her sport. So she stepped back, and looked at her life with “clear eyes,” and decided to take a gap year.

In the gap year, she swam. When she wasn’t swimming, “I would just read, do art, take naps,” Huske said. “I was able to recover way better. I think I only got sick twice during the year — and they were both times when I was traveling. … You don't realize how much school takes out of you — like, staying up late when you're doing homework, it really affects your recovery. So, I felt like I was able to have better workouts.”

She also “had so much fun. It was very relaxing. I lived life at a slower pace,” she said last month. And she invested, fully, in becoming an Olympic champion.

Huske's golden moment

Huske was something of an unheralded star entering Paris. Walsh had smashed the world record in the 100 fly at trials. So it was Walsh feeling nerves and “a lot of pressure" as the favorite.

Huske, however, was quietly swimming better than ever.

When Walsh raced out to a lead, she was unfazed.

Huske was actually farther behind at the 50-meter mark Sunday than she had been in Tokyo. But this time around, the 21-year-old from Arlington, Virginia, had spent years working on her second 50, preparing for this precise moment.

And so, at around 8:45 here in western Paris, when she stretched in unison with the woman to her right, she got a fingertip to the wall just in time — in 55.59 seconds, to Walsh’s 55.63.

Her brain spun into overdrive.

She reached one hand for the lane line, then cupped it to her mouth.

She could almost feel herself hyperventilating.

“I didn't even know how to process it,” Huske said. “It's just very overwhelming, when you've been dreaming of this moment for so long.”

And then, step by step, she lived out the dream. She walked off the pool deck arm in arm with Walsh, waving to a sold-out crowd. She hugged friends and parents. She paraded around the deck with an American flag. She embraced her coach, Greg Meehan, who’d been bawling.

And finally, as another flag rose toward the rafters, she invited Walsh up to the top step of the podium to join her.

“That,” Walsh said of the 1-2 finish, “was what America needed and wanted. And it was a really special moment.”