2024 Olympics: Torri Huske, after Tokyo heartbreak, wins Team USA’s first individual gold in Paris

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PARIS — Torri Huske chased down fellow American Gretchen Walsh to win the women’s 100-meter butterfly here at the 2024 Olympics by a margin of 0.04 seconds.

Huske, seeded second, beat Walsh, the event’s world record holder, with a time of 55.59, to Walsh’s 55.63, in the first upset of the meet.

Huske, who missed out on a medal at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics by 0.01 seconds, closed with a monstrous final 25 meters to beat Walsh, who slowed down the stretch.

And the Arlington, Virginia, native won Team USA’s first individual gold medal at the 2024 Games, on the other side of swimming’s razor-thin wall between triumph and heartbreak.

Huske, 21, was one of the potential breakout stars of the COVID Games, then just a teenager who burst onto the scene with medal potential in 2020 and 2021. In this same event, the 100 fly, she sped to the wall, neck-and-neck with three other leaders. They all finished within 0.14 seconds of one another. 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, and 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 kind of didn’t really know what was happening until I looked at the scoreboard and saw it.”

And she was stunned.

But she grew over the three-year interim. She went to Stanford. She took an Olympic gap year to focus on her swimming. She arrived in Paris more mature, with the experience of Tokyo in her back pocket.

“My last Olympics will have really helped me going into this next one,” Huske said last month. “When I first made it last time, I was kinda like, ‘Wow.’ That was kind of my whole goal, to just make the team. … Now, it’s like, OK, I have this, and it’s done, and now I can focus on the future, and my other goals [at the Olympics].”

Her goal, presumably, was gold. She accomplished it surrounded by the same three swimmers who out-touched her three years earlier. Walsh, a breakout star, had also forced her way into the club.

Huske, though, outraced all of them.

Walsh settled for silver. But she didn’t let any disappointment take away from the moment. The two U.S. teammates walked off the pool deck arm in arm, waving to the crowd, atop the world.

Zhang took bronze (56.21).