Sarah Sjostrom Continues Remarkable Run, Poised to Add to Her 10 Career World Titles This Summer
Consider the generations of swimming that Sarah Sjostrom has spanned. She swam in her first Olympics in 2008, with a European title already collected, although Sjostrom did not advance out of the prelims at that meet. She turned 15 on the day competition ended. One year later, she set her first world records in the 100 butterfly, her 56.44 semifinal mark lowering the nine-year-old mark of Dutch great Inge de Bruijn and her finals time of 56.06 securing her first world title. That was the meet where the soon-to-be-banned full-body polyurethane suits helped swimmers lower a ridiculous 43 world records.
Now, Sjostrom is approaching her 30th birthday, so she has been a consistent international presence and a household name among swimming fans for literally half her life. Her leadup to the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics was rocky after sustaining an elbow injury five months before competition began, but she returned in time to win Olympic silver in the 50 freestyle, and from there, she took on an ambitious schedule in the International Swimming League that culminated in an MVP performance in the finale.
2022 brought the ninth and 10th individual long course world titles of Sjostrom’s career plus three more gold medals at the European Championships. Thanks to those results, she was the unanimous choice for European Female Swimmer of the Year, her fifth time receiving that honor. After her major meets of the summer were completed, Sjostrom revealed she would be taking the rest of the year away from training and competition but that her long-range plans included the 2028 Olympics, which would be the Swedish star’s sixth Games.
Her break must have been effective because Sjostrom is off to an extremely swift start in 2023. Her performances at last week’s Swim Open Stockholm were lights-out for mid-April, with times of 25.04 in the 50 fly, 23.92 in the 50 free and 52.99 in the 100 free.
Let’s break those times down a little bit because Sjostrom has made those numbers very routine, particularly in the one-lap events. Her 50 fly time is a mark that no other swimmer has ever surpassed, with fellow Swede Therese Alshammar ranking second all-time at 25.07. In 2014, Sjostrom demolished that world record with a time of 24.43, and since then, she has won four straight world titles in the race. The record for most consecutive titles is Katie Ledecky’s five in the 800 free, and Sjostrom will be heavily favored to match that record this year.
Her 50 free time was only a quarter-second away from her world record of 23.67, set in 2017, and the sub-24 performance was the 20th of Sjostrom’s career. For some perspective, there have only been 45 different 23-second performances ever, so Sjostrom has posted almost half of them. And yes, her time was faster than her world-title-winning performance last year, although she was one hundredth slower than her European Championships time (23.91).
In the 100 free, she has returned to 51-second territory since setting the current world record of 51.71 leading off Sweden’s 400 free relay at the 2017 World Championships, but she has captured a medal in that race at five consecutive World Championships (although never gold). That will be the toughest of her three main races when she returns to the global stage in July in Fukuoka, Japan, with competitors such as reigning world champion Mollie O’Callaghan, Olympic champion Emma McKeon, Olympic silver medalist Siobhan Haughey and Worlds bronze medalist Torri Huske, but Sjostrom has already beaten all of them to the first 52-second swim of 2023.
You might notice some events missing from the above analysis: in particular, the 100 fly, the event in which Sjostrom broke out onto the international scene almost a decade-and-a-half ago. She has not competed in the event internationally since Tokyo, when she exceeded all expectations just by getting herself into the medal mix over the first two rounds before falling to seventh in the final. Sjostrom still holds the world record at 55.48, but it would not be surprising if it is broken this year, with Huske and Maggie Mac Neil among those gunning for the mark.
Sjostrom has also steered clear of the 200 free recently. She was the Olympic runnerup in that race in an exciting showdown with Katie Ledecky in 2016, and she won World Championships bronze in 2019, but a return to the event seems unlikely.
These days, Sjostrom usually sticks to the 50-meter races plus the 100 free, but her medal-winning ways have not changed. If her most recent in-season swims are any indication, she is on track for some excellent results this summer, likely her fastest long course times since the 2017 Worlds, when she won three gold medals for perhaps the finest single-meet performance of her career. She has won 20 medals at the long course edition of the World Championships, and when numbers are combined from the Olympics plus long course and short course global plus continental championships, Sjostrom has 89 total medals internationally.
It’s been one of the finest careers of any swimmer in history, and perhaps an underappreciated one given that Sjostrom has shared the international spotlight with the likes of Ledecky, Hosszu, McKeon and others. But now, fifteen years after her first international gold medal, Sjostrom has plans to continue this run a while longer.