Torri Huske, driven by Tokyo near miss, gets golden moment at Paris Olympics

NANTERRE, France — The moment that Torri Huske has never forgotten is now three years old, but it drives her to this day. With 15 meters to go in the 100 butterfly at the 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games, she was winning. The race was hers. 

And then it wasn’t. In those last few moments, Huske didn’t drop to second. Or third. No, when she touched the wall and turned to see the scoreboard, she was fourth. She was out of the medals, just off the podium, by 1/100th of a second.

“I’m not going to lie, that was devastating,” Huske said Sunday at the 2024 Summer Olympics. “It really fueled me and I think that did make me better.”

Those three years have gone by quickly, so much so that before she knew it, Huske was touching the wall at the 50-meter mark of Sunday’s 100 butterfly at another Olympic Games, and this time, she wasn’t first. She was third, .21 of a second behind her American teammate and world-record holder Gretchen Walsh. She had 50 meters to go to rewrite the ending to her story. 

There is nothing more exciting in a swimming race than watching someone reel in the person ahead of them. Spectators and even those watching on TV at home see it happening before the leader fully knows what’s going on. There’s a momentum to it that makes it feel almost inevitable, even as it still seems impossible. 

And so it was for Walsh and Huske, both 21, born less than two months apart, as they churned through the water in lanes 4 and 5, side by side, fighting to the finish. Huske was now right beside Walsh. Here came the wall. Their hands reached for it. 

And then…

"You can kind of see out of the corner of your eye but you never really know for sure,” Huske said. “I first saw the light by the block.”

The red light in her lane went off 4/100ths of a second before Walsh’s. She turned to see the scoreboard. She had done it. She had won the gold medal. Her time was 55.59 seconds; Walsh’s was 55.63. 

“Seeing that was just very surreal,” Huske said afterward. “It’s just very overwhelming when you’ve been dreaming of this moment for so long and then it finally becomes a reality. It’s like I didn’t even know how to process it. I felt like I was hyperventilating a little bit maybe. I feel like my body just had a reaction. I felt like I couldn’t control anything that was going on, it was just all happening so fast.”

Huske’s mouth was open. She looked surprised, shocked and so very happy. She put her hand over her mouth as Walsh, who set the world record in this event just last month at the U.S. Olympic trials, reached across the lane rope to hug her.

“I was definitely nervous before,” Walsh said. “I feel like there was a lot of pressure on me just having gone the world record and the Olympic record last night. It was definitely a fight to the finish. Seeing the 1-2 up there was amazing. I’m so proud of Torri and so proud of myself.”

It was the first time a country had a gold-silver finish in the women’s 100 butterfly at the Olympics since the old East Germany did it in Seoul in 1988. 

Over the past year, Huske has worked particularly hard on the “back half” of her 100 fly, “because that’s been a weaker point in my stroke,” she said. She is known for having the fastest start off the blocks in every race, launching herself into a very quick first 50, then fading a bit at the end, as she did in Tokyo. 

“I think I did a good job with that,” Huske said about that final 50, smiling.

While Walsh was one of the stars of last month’s Olympic trials, Huske, a former U.S. record-holder who has been taking a gap year from Stanford, was flying under the radar, which turns out to be a very good place to be heading into an Olympics. 

But then Huske came to Paris and something started happening. She had the fastest split among the U.S. swimmers in the women’s 4 x 100 freestyle relay Saturday, helping the Americans win the silver medal. 

And then came Sunday and the 100 fly, where she was behind, until she wasn’t.