On a night at the Paris Olympics when Katie Ledecky secured a massive chunk of history, when Caeleb Dressel pulled a clutch semifinal sprint out of his swim cap and lived to see another day, when Regan Smith survived a grueling butterfly/backstroke double and when the silver medals again piled up around the necks of American swimmers — it was Douglass alone who was golden.
“I felt like I was physically ready for this race, just [because of] what I’ve done in practice these last few months leading up to this meet,” said Douglass, a 22-year-old University of Virginia product whose gold Thursday night completed a color sweep that already included a medley bronze from Tokyo 2020 and a relay silver in Paris. “I knew if I executed that race well, I would win it.”
It is a sentiment that has been in short supply for Team USA at this meet, where the silvers are piling up high — 10 so far, including ones from Smith in the women’s 200 butterfly (a race won by Canadian phenom Summer McIntosh) and in the women’s 4×200 freestyle relay — but the golds have been in short supply.
Through two-thirds of this nine-day meet, Australia leads Team USA in golds, five to four. One would need to go back to 1988 to find an Olympic meet in which the Americans didn’t top the gold medal count. The Americans, though, lead the overall medal table, 20-11.
There is no shame in silver, of course, and Thursday night at Paris La Défense Arena it was one of those that pushed Ledecky to a lonely, lofty perch in Olympic history. In helping Team USA’s relay to a runner-up finish to the heavily favored Aussies, she secured the 13th medal of her career, giving her the titles of the most decorated female swimmer in history as well as the most decorated female American in any sport.
Ledecky, 27, still has the 800 freestyle to come, with prelims Friday morning and the final Saturday night, and a gold in that race would be the ninth gold medal of her career, which would also give her sole possession of first on the all-time list of female swimmers.
Thursday night, her relay teammates — Claire Weinstein, Paige Madden and Erin Gemmell — couldn’t quite decide what was more amazing: the fact they could forever call themselves Olympic medalists, or the fact they could say they were on the same medal-winning relay as Ledecky.
“It’s easy to forget sometimes that she’s as good as she is, because she’s so humble and just a great teammate,” said Gemmell, 19, who attended the same school as Ledecky, Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda, Md., and once dressed as her for Halloween. “But then she just goes out there and crushes it over and over and over.”
Ledecky, a four-time Olympian, is one of the old lions of the American squad — a group of multi-time Olympians and former champions that also includes Dressel, Simone Manuel, Lilly King, Chase Kalisz and Ryan Murphy. Between them, they own 25 Olympic golds and 42 overall medals, including ones won here. Though all are in the autumns of their careers, with some pushing deeper into winter, they were being counted on here, to one degree or another, to keep Team USA atop the gold medal count.
But it hasn’t exactly gone according to plan: None besides Ledecky, who topped her own Olympic record in taking gold in the 1,500 free, have performed to their past standards. On Thursday night, King, a five-time medal winner may have reached the end of her career with an eighth-place finish in the women’s 200 breast, an event in which she won silver in Tokyo. She has said she does not plan to keep going through Los Angeles 2028, and there are no guarantees she will be tabbed for the medley relay still to come.
King acknowledged she was “thinking about” that possibility, but added, “I’m kind of glad, honestly. I don’t think I’m going to miss the way I feel before these races, even when it goes right.”
At least King can say she is leaving the 200 breast in good hands, with Douglass, the newly minted gold medalist, still ascendant. The same can’t be said for some of the other events where there should be a baton being passed among the Americans.
The U.S. dynasty in the men’s 200 back, for example, once seemed unassailable, with at least one medal, and frequently two, in every Olympics dating back to Atlanta 1996 — a legacy handed down among luminaries in the sport, from Lenny Krayzelburg to Aaron Peirsol to Ryan Lochte to Murphy.
Murphy, 29, came into this meet seeking a third straight double-podium performance in the men’s backstroke events. Though he got it done in the 100, earning bronze, he finished a stunning 10th in the semis of the men’s 200 back, failing to qualify for the final. That, plus Keaton Jones’s fifth-place finish in that final Thursday night, spelled the end of the U.S. dynasty in that event.
That race was won Thursday night by Hungary’s Hubert Kos, who competed collegiately at Arizona State under noted coach Bob Bowman (who has since moved on to Texas). Along with the three golds (so far) from France’s Leon Marchand, that means as many golds so far have been won by foreign swimmers who train under Bowman — an American himself, who has been a fixture on Team USA coaching staff for decades, but who this year is an assistant for France — as by the entire American squad.
“He doesn’t let us be second best,” Kos said of Bowman. “He doesn’t let us stoop down to a level he doesn’t want from us. That brings out the best in us.”
When you look deeper than the medal table, the picture gets even worse for Team USA. When sprinter Chris Guiliano finished 17th in the preliminary heats of the 50 free Thursday morning, it marked the eighth time already at this meet an American swimmer has failed to make it out of prelims — something that happened only three times total in Tokyo and only once in Rio.
Additionally, seven Americans have fallen in their semifinals and failed to make the final. Nowhere was this more acutely felt than in the men’s 200 fly, where, after Luca Urlando finished 17th in prelims and Thomas Heilman 10th in the semis, the ensuing final Wednesday night — where Marchand, the premier male swimmer in the world now, surged to a breathtaking, come-from-behind win — became the first Olympic swimming final without an American entry since the women’s 200 breast in Rio.
Solutions are elusive. Michael Phelps, to paraphrase Rick Pitino, is not walking through that door for Team USA. And in fact, it’s more likely some of the program’s most accomplished and decorated champions, the ones who took the mantle from Phelps, will soon be walking out of it.
