Budapest 2024: Which Female Star Will Dominate?
Of the four women who won multiple individual gold medals at the Paris Olympics, three will miss this week’s Short Course World Championships in Budapest. Distance legend Katie Ledecky continues her streak of never competing in the 25-meter championship meet while Australian backstroker Kaylee McKeown withdrew earlier this fall and Swedish sprinter Sarah Sjostrom is also passing on the trip. In addition, American butterflyer Torri Huske pulled out and Aussie freestyle gold medalists Ariarne Titmus and Mollie O’Callaghan never planned to compete.
Despite the absences, the field of women scheduled to race at Duna Arena is still filled with multi-event stars, including the Canadian teenager who is the consensus top female swimmer in the world, Summer McIntosh. She will be joined by a trio of American women who all departed Paris with multiple gold medals each between their individual and relay events: Regan Smith, Kate Douglass and Gretchen Walsh. Who will leave this meet as the top performer is a big question.
Kate Douglass (left) and Summer McIntosh — Photo Courtesy: Giorgio Scala / Deepbluemedia / Insidefoto
McIntosh will swim four individual events while making one key change from her Olympic lineup. She retains two of her three gold-medal-winning events, the 400 IM and 200 butterfly, but she will skip the 200 IM because it falls on the same day as the 400 free, an event in which she will be the big favorite in the absence of Titmus, Ledecky and Erika Fairweather. Added to her program here is the 200 backstroke, an event in which McIntosh has never raced internationally, but she has posted consistently strong backstroke legs within her medley events.
The 400 IM and 200 fly will be the only two women’s events in which the gold and silver medalists from Paris will both race. No one expects Katie Grimes to seriously challenge McIntosh in the 400 IM, but the McIntosh-Smith rematch in the 200 fly could be a classic after the Canadian won by eight tenths in Paris.
Smith, meanwhile, will have a chance to dominate the backstroke events after playing second fiddle to McKeown a whopping five times between the 2023 World Championships and the Paris Games. In short course, Smith set world records in both the 100 and 200 back during the World Cup circuit, and with Huske skipping the meet, she will also add the 100 fly to her program in Budapest. In long course, clocked 55.62 at the U.S. Olympic Trials to finish third behind Walsh and Huske, but her time would have reached the podium in Paris, so she is a serious medal threat in a fifth event at this meet.
Douglass actually has six individual entries, and she is seeded first in four of those. With McIntosh and McKeown both out of the 200 IM, Douglass will be the big favorite there, and her World Cup times in the 200 breaststroke, 100 free and 50 fly all have her atop the field entering the meet. She is seeded second in the 100 IM, an event in which she ranks third all-time, and no one would be surprised if she won the 50 free. In long course, she clocked 23.91 at the long course version of the World Championships earlier this year in Doha, good for second behind Sjostrom, and no one besides the Swede beat that time in an Olympic final when Douglass passed on the event because of scheduling conflicts.
That said, Douglass will face a familiar obstacle in all four of her 50 and 100-meter events in the form of Walsh, her training partner at the University of Virginia. Walsh broke the world record in the long course 100 fly earlier this year, and that time of 55.18 is quicker than anyone else’s short course entry time for Budapest. She took silver in that event in Paris while making two other individual finals, but her incredible underwater-dolphin-kick skills are shown off further in short course, as evidenced in two years of dominant NCAA swimming performances.
Her underwaters make Walsh a huge threat in short course backstroke in addition to her butterfly and freestyle, but the presence of Smith and Katharine Berkoff, the bronze medalist in the 100 back in Paris, will prevent Walsh from taking a shot at a pair of events in which she would surely be capable of reaching the podium.
All four of these women have put together career years in 2024, and all are positioned to cap it off with huge weeks inside Duna Arena. Any of them could be declared top swimmer of the meet at its conclusion, although the Americans will surely have an overall medal advantage because of their capability to wrack up additional relay medals. Meanwhile, the matchup between these top names, including McIntosh-Smith in the 200 fly and 200 back and Douglass-Walsh in the sprint events, should be the meet’s most anticipated.