Torri Huske of Team USA reacts after winning gold in the women’s 100-meter butterfly final on Sunday at the Olympic Games in Paris.
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NANTERRE, France — As Torri Huske touched the wall of the pool on Sunday night in the Olympics women’s 100-meter butterfly race, she could see that she had won. But she didn’t yet believe it.
“You can kind of see out of the corner of your eye, but you never really know for sure,” she said.
It was hard to argue with the fact that the light on her block was the first to turn on — the official indication that she had won the race.
“Seeing that was very surreal,” Huske, 21, said after the race. “You’ve been dreaming about this moment for so long, and then it finally becomes a reality. I don’t even know how to process it.”
For Huske, Sunday’s gold medal finish in the 100-meter butterfly was especially rewarding and emotional after the pain of her fourth-place at the last Summer Olympics in Tokyo.
In that race, in 2021, Huske led for much of it but faded as she closed in on the wall. Ultimately, she fell short of the medal podium by the thinnest of margins: a single one-hundredth of a second.
“I’m not going to lie, that was devastating,” Huske said. “But I think that really fueled me, and it did make me better.”
She had been “naive” going into the Olympics in 2021, she said Sunday. Her success within Team USA had given her confidence that she would win a medal. “But it’s a lot tougher than that,” she continued. “I know now how hard it is to medal, and I’m just really thankful to be here.”
Gold medalist Torri Huske and silver medalist Gretchen Walsh of the United States celebrate after their 1-2 finish in the women’s 100-meter butterfly final at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
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Another part of the reason Huske’s win came as such a surprise — even to Huske — was because another U.S. swimmer, Gretchen Walsh, had been the heavy favorite to win the event.
Expectations were sky-high for Walsh, 21, on Sunday after she set the world record in the 100-meter butterfly last month in the U.S. Olympic Team Trials — then followed that with an Olympic record in her heat here at Paris’s La Defense Arena on Saturday.
But those stellar finishes turned what was once a “fun, no-pressure” event for Walsh into the opposite, the swimmer said after the race. “There’s definitely pressure now, and that’s just a reality that I have to face,” Walsh said. “I was pretty nervous going into tonight.”
In the end, Walsh finished the race in 55.63 seconds — .04 seconds behind Huske’s 55.59, and a quarter-second behind her own heat finish of 55.38 the night before.
“That one hurt, for sure,” Walsh said. “I left it all out there in the pool. It might not have been the time I was necessarily looking for, but to even medal at my first Olympics is something that I don’t think many people get to say.”
The bronze medal was awarded to Zhang Yufei, the star Chinese swimmer who has become embroiled in a doping scandal after revelations that she was among 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned substance in early 2021. She went on to compete in the Tokyo Olympics, where she won four medals.
With their Sunday medals, both Huske and Walsh have now become the first Americans to win multiple medals at the Paris Olympic Games. They both won a silver medal on Saturday when they participated together in the women’s 4×100-meter freestyle relay.
Reporting contributed by NPR’s Brian Mann in Nanterre, France.