Torri Huske swims the women’s 100-meter butterfly semifinal Saturday in Paris. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
NANTERRE, France — Living through the race was painful enough; re-watching it was downright torture. So Torri Huske has mostly avoided it. She says she played it a couple of times that first year after the Tokyo Games, but it never got any easier. The result never changed. The difference between an Olympic medal and three years of second-guessing, wondering, lamenting: just one-hundredth of a second.
“Even though, like, it sucked having to watch it, I feel like it probably helped me,” Huske says now, “just seeing that race and knowing I don’t want to feel like that ever again.”
She’s in Paris seeking redemption at these Olympics, to find the sliver of time that kept her off the podium and make sure the Olympic record books don’t remember her as a talented sprinter who was a fingernail from glory. Huske, a 21-year-old from Arlington, Va., is off to a promising start, helping the U.S. women capture silver in the 4x100-meter freestyle relay Saturday night and putting herself in prime podium position entering Sunday’s final of the 100-meter butterfly.
She’s certainly not dwelling on the past, but that race is a wound that’s still healing. In Tokyo, she was just a year removed from graduation at Yorktown High and was getting ready to report to Stanford for her freshman year. Her skill level was high; experience and expectations were not.
“Last time, the whole goal at trials was just to make the team,” Huske said in a recent interview. “And I feel like once I had done that, it was really hard for me to try to kind of change gears and be like, ‘Okay, now I have to set goals for the Olympics.’ In my head, I was kind of just like: ‘Wow, I’m here. I made it.’”
In that Tokyo 100 fly race three years ago, Huske found herself in second place at the turn, but the last half of the race was a mad sprint with water sloshing in every lane. Canada’s Maggie Mac Neil blasted her way from seventh to first, but only 0.14 seconds separated the top four finishers. Huske was nipped at the end. Her fourth-place time of 55.73 seconds was just a hair behind Australia’s Emma McKeon, 0.01 seconds that would somehow hang over - and influence - the weeks, months and years that followed.
“Even though it was definitely a setback at the time, it helped me in the future,” Huske said, noting her strong showing a year later at the 2022 world championships in Budapest, where she won six medals, including three golds.
That growth was on display Saturday, the opening night of the Paris meet. Three years earlier, her strategy in the 100 fly amounted to “fly and die,” she says. Now she’s more measured, thinking strategically and focused on the back half of her race.
In the Paris semifinal, Huske led from start to finish, touching the wall in 56 seconds. It was the second-best mark of the day, but Huske knows there’s room for improvement. She posted her personal best time at the U.S. trials last month — 55.52, the fourth-fastest time ever — though she might have to go even lower Sunday.
Her U.S. teammate, Gretchen Walsh, won Saturday’s other semifinal in 55.38, just 0.20 seconds shy of the world record she set at last month’s trials, putting the Americans in position for a pair of medals in Sunday’s final.
Huske already got a taste of the Paris podium, turning in a tremendous leg in the 4x100 relay Saturday. The Americans were in fourth at the midway point, when Walsh touched the wall and Huske leaped from the block.
Huske went on to turn in the best 50-meter split of any of the U.S. women — 24.47 seconds. She reeled in Sweden and then China, and she had the Americans in second place for the final leg. Huske’s 100-meter time of 52.06 was the second best of the relay final and gave Simone Manuel enough breathing room on the anchor leg to hold on for silver. It was Huske’s second Olympic medal; she was part of the 4x100 medley relay team that finished second in Tokyo, just 0.13 seconds behind Australia.
“It was good,” she said Saturday night. “I get really nervous on relays, and I’ve been workshopping my start for the whole year. I finally got it in a good place, and I was just trying to set it up well for Simone.”
Huske also will compete in the 100 free in Paris and could get a look in at least one more relay. It’s a heavy workload, to be sure, but she has been focused on it since that disappointing result in Tokyo. In the year leading up to these Olympics, she took a break from her studies at Stanford and paused her athletic career. She felt overloaded by schoolwork, emotionally and mentally drained. Focused solely on her training, she said, already has paid dividends in the water and out.
This time around, just making the U.S. Olympic team wasn’t going to be enough. “I have more goals for the future,” she said.
