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After Trials, Illness Setbacks, Luca Urlando is Ready and Realistic for 2022
Luca Urlando didn’t have the summer of 2021 he dreamed of. November and December weren’t great, either, to be honest.
But for a soon-to-be 20-year-old, Urlando is beyond his years in practice handling adversity. Some of it is the California calm the Sacramento native exudes, some of it the honed mentality to match his elite speed. As he approaches the NCAAs Championships, Urlando is confident in how he’s calibrating his goals for the busy year ahead.
With more than two weeks out of the water in the fall – first for a bout of the flu, then an emergency appendectomy with another illness tacked on – Urlando is being realistic. He trained fully for barely six weeks by the time he took home SEC Championships Swimmer of the Meet in February.
That’s reason to be encouraged, especially since his 2022 goals position NCAAs as a stepping stone for what he hopes is a place at World Championships this summer.
Luca Urlando’ Photo Courtesy: Chamberlain Smith / Georgia Athletics
“I’m pretty focused on how good I want to become,” Urlando said recently. “I’ve dealt with a lot of injuries and stuff, so I’m just honestly proud of where I am right now. It would be awesome, and I’m really excited to compete with other conference champions, but I’m not holding myself to too high of expectations.”
Urlando has lived a lot of swimming life in his short senior career. When you’re 17 and find your name in sentences that includes phrases like, “the first American since Michael Phelps,” time has a way of accelerating, ever swim dissected and magnified.
That hasn’t brought a ton of luck his way. There was a shoulder injury to start 2020, preceding the COVID-19-related collapse of reality. All that was in the past when Trials rolled around, though that meet didn’t play out the way Urlando hoped, bringing the double heartache of finishing third in both butterfly events. In the 200, it was by .09 seconds, overtaken by Gunnar Bentz’s final-50 charge. He was .55 shy of Tom Shields in the 100 to miss out Tokyo. (He also scratched the 200 freestyle final after finishing sixth in prelims and semis, a spot that would’ve gotten him a relay swim in Tokyo.)
Urlando felt good about how he rebounded emotionally into his second autumn in Athens. Time away from the pool in the summer allowed him to reenergize, bringing back a more detailed and intentional focus on all the aspects of performance. But the December health issues dented that momentum.
“I wanted to come out of the summer better than I ever was, which includes training and approaching lifting in a different way,” he said. “And I thought I was doing a pretty good job with that.”
Urlando’s start to college swimming has not disappointed. He holds Georgia records in three individual events and top-four times in six, no small feat at a program with such illustrious history. Add in relays and Urlando is in the top four of 11 different events.
He finaled twice at NCAAs in individual events last year, taking fourth in the 200 fly and eighth in the 100 fly, to go with a program of five relays. The Bulldogs finished in the top 10 in four of them.
If the lens of SECs is instructive, Urlando seems poised for a jump. He won the 200 fly as a freshman at conference champs, which this year turned into titles in the 100 fly, 200 fly and 200 individual medley on the way to the SEC Commissioner’s Trophy as the top point scorer.
One helpful addition is training alongside Matt Sates, the South African world junior record holder who joined the program in January. With considerable overlap in their events, they not only complement each other in the meet program – Sates won the 200 free and 500 free at SECs with silver in the 200 fly – but push each other daily.
“It’s awesome,” Urlando said. “He’s a great training partner, probably one of the fastest people I’ve ever trained with consistently. I think it’s a pretty big advantage to everyone, all the teammates that get to be around him and train with him, I think that’s a huge advantage, more so than the times he goes at meets.”
Pressure is something Urlando is asked about often. It’s been an unavoidably constant conversation topic since he downed the 200 fly age-group record belonging to Phelps in 2019, the year he helped the U.S. set three relay records at the World Junior Championships.
But Urlando isn’t swimming to be anyone other than himself. He’s gained big-meet experience, learning how to compartmentalize and relax. In an odd way, the injuries have helped, reinforcing the bounds of what is in his control and when to let go of external factors.
That’s how he’ll approach NCAAs. He hoping to contend for titles, but he’s also aware of the broader goals he’s sketched for 2022.
“I feel like I swim for myself, so if there’s any type of stress, it’s usually stress that I’ve applied to myself,” he said. “I think it’s an honor to be compared next to someone like Michael Phelps, so I don’t really see the pressure involved with it more than as a good thing. …
“There’s still a lot of pressure that I would put upon myself, but it gets easier, knowing that I’m confident in my abilities.”
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I’m a Luca Orlando fan. I try to imagine being in high school, being the fastest American in the 200 fly and likely to stand on the podium in that event at the upcoming Olympics… And then, a shoulder injury dashes those expectations, leaving me with a very long recovery and no guarantee to ever reach that level of swimming again? I don’t think I could have handled the situation as well as he seems to have done.