My Top 17 Favorite Moments From Swimming at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games

As the dust settles in La Defense Arena, this meet was one for the history books. A global superstar grew his wings in Leon Marchand, a young prodigy Summer McIntosh rose to the hype, two World Records fell, and 15 new Olympic-best standards went by the wayside.

While there are only a few times that will be seared into our brains, the stories and moments of this meet will. While every record and every medal is a moment, I’ve compiled my favorite swimming moments from the 2024 Olympics. Not times, not performances, just moments. The criteria? Strictly vibes. Get your pitchforks.

Honorable Mentions

• Kieran Smith having the fastest split for the US in finals of the 800 free relay, validating the decision to give him a pass to finals even after not swimming well in the 400 free. The US took silver.
• Torri Huske bringing Gretchen Walsh to the top step of the podium in the women’s 100 fly to share the American national anthem with her. That started a trend that carried throughout the meet.
• Florent Manaudou‘s bronze medal in the 50 free, the 4th-straight Olympic Games in which he has medaled in the 50 free. That might have been the most energized we’ve ever seen an Olympic crowd for a bronze medal.
• Daniel Wiffen taking the 800 free gold. Just because he’s such an open and transparent swimmer. It has been fun watching his journey via his vlogs to the top of the podium.
• If Ariarne Titmus was going to beat Katie Ledecky in the 800 free at this meet, she was going to have to do something special early. While the 200 and 400s will be the higher ranks on Titmus’ resume, her going after Ledecky at the start of the 800 was the gutsiest swim and the one that I appreciated the most.
• Top 4 Women Share a Hug in the Pool After the 100 Back – There was so much emotion and rivalry loaded into this race, and after the intensity of the moment, Kaylee McKeown, Regan Smith, Katharine Berkoff, and Kylie Masse came together and shared a moment. True champions: they battled in the lanes, and celebrated together afterward.
• Gretchen Walsh, the bathtub GOAT, now holds 3 World Records in long course.

11. Ariarne Titmus/Katie Ledecky Lane Mixup

Was it head games? Was it an honest mistake that still gives me age group nightmares? I don’t know, but it reminds me of when you’re watching a TV show and two characters who don’t have main storylines have an interaction. Like when Chandler and Rachel have a 1-on-1 scene in Friends.

Ariarne Titmus mistakenly takes Katie Ledecky’s lane ahead of the 400m freestyle. #ParisOlympics pic.twitter.com/1yDRUSXuvx

— On Her Turf (@OnHerTurf) July 28, 2024

10. Apostolos Christou‘s Surprise Silver & Emotional Podium

Greece is literally synonymous with the Olympic Games, and so you might be shocked to know that they haven’t won an Olympic medal in pool swimming since 1896, when they swept the 100 metres for sailors event. Christou was a phenom as a teenager, but as the oldest swimmer in the men’s 200 back final, it looked like his moment had passed him by. But a gutsy swim that saw him pace the field for 175 meters rewarded him with silver. His emotional podium moment was beautiful.

no thoughts just the pure emotion of the Greek silver medalist Apostolos Christou of the men’s 200M backstroke who was not expected to be a medalist 🥹 #OlympicGames pic.twitter.com/I15LC0NRD7

— kelechi (@kelechi_ai) August 1, 2024

9. Leon Marchand‘s Dirty Double

The schedule change and gap of time between Leon Marchand‘s wins in the 200 fly and 200 breast made it slightly less impressive. But the manner in which he won, especially that 200 fly, still made it one of the great moments of this meet. Surging past the World Record holder Kristof Milak in the last 30 meters was an exceptional vision in that 200 fly and a display of just absolute dominance.

8. Kristof Milak‘s Stone-Faced 100 Fly

The Hungarian wasn’t as fast as he’s been in the past, and it seems like something in his training impacted his ability to finish the 200 fly. But after the roller-coaster he’s been through over the last year (he skipped his post-race press conference so we still don’t know what really went down and how much training he was actually doing), that 100 fly was a message. I don’t know exactly who it was a message to, but it was an important message to someone. His stone-faced reaction to the race could be interpreted a dozen ways, and will be until he decides he wants to explain what was going through his mind in that moment, but it was a vision of the meet.

7. Kate Douglass For the Culture

A bathtub swimmer no more: Kate Douglass, one of the greatest NCAA/short course swimmers in history is now an Olympic gold medalist. She isn’t the meet’s superstar on the women’s side (Summer McIntosh and Kaylee McKeown were), but nobody on the women’s side proved as much with a gold medal as KD.

6. Pan Zhanle‘s World Record

I hear you. I hear the suspicions about China. But until evidence shows otherwise, this swim by Pan Zhanle was the single biggest paradigm-shifting performance of these Olympics. I just cannot ignore the amplitude of this swim, four-tenths under the World Record, and what it changes for the men’s 100 free. The next swimmer to go 46.9 in the 100 free will be half-a-second behind Pan. It’s a Ledecky-esque or Phelpsian performance.

5. Bobby Finke’s World Record

The American men were on the precipice. The last time the American men didn’t win an individual Olympic gold medal in swimming was 1900. In the very last opportunity, Finke bailed them out, setting a WORLD RECORD in one of the more-intense 1500s we’ve seen in recent memory. His coach Anthony Nesty, also the Olympic head coach, was visibly shaking throughout the race. Not to mention breaking one of the oldest World Records on the books, and maybe one of the most controversial as Sun has two doping dings on his record. Finke’s swim saved a thousand headlines and launched a thousand more.

4. Watching Caeleb Dressel‘s Emotions

I am of the camp that Caeleb Dressel‘s tears on TV were valuable. Maybe NBC lingered too long, but I think that will be one of the lingering images of the games. But what hammered home just how powerful that moment was came two days later when Dressel, the former holder of the “Captain America” title, processed his emotions and came back and split 49.4 on the men’s 400 medley relay. It would have been sweeter if the US men had won that relay, but still – the whole arc, all played out in front of us on TV, is going to be an incredible message for young swimmers. First he smiled, then he cried, then he processed, then he erupted – in a positive way. The mental health conversation in sports is not about avoiding pressure, about ducking the weight or ignoring the feelings. It’s about embracing the moment and all of the emotion that comes with it, processing that emotion in a healthy way, and then coming back for the next one. Let the emotions happen before the emotions break you. That’s the message that all of our young athletes need to hear.

3. Torri Huske‘s Relay Redemption

Let’s call a spade a spade: after the 2023 World Championships, the book on Torri Huske was that she was a relay liability. But she beat the charges, unanimously, in Paris. First she split 52.06 in the 100 free on the women’s 400 free relay, then she anchored the American mixed 400 medley relay in 51.88 at a moment where they needed every hundredth to hold off China and set the World Record.

When combined with her gold medal in the 100 fly, the redemption arc for both her, and her coach Greg Meehan, at this meet was pure magic.

2. Leon Marchand Wins the 400 IM and Becomes a Superstar

I don’t even know if this was his best swim of the week. With view of the full body of work, it might have been his 4th-best individual final swim of the week. But that’s not what made it special. This is the one that stamped Marchand on the record-books. The one where last year he forever linked his name to Michael Phelps, and where this year he ever linked his name to these Olympic Games. Marchand was so good that the host nation ran a feature-length glamour film about him in La Defense while he still had races to swim. It was fun watching Marchand’s sun rise in real-time this way. He gained a million Instagram followers during the Olympics. That’s a Travis Kelce/Taylor Swift level rise.

1. Sarah Sjostrom Surprises Herself in the 100 Free

Sarah Sjostrom is a gift to swimming. Always has been, always will be. She’s real, maybe the realest superstar swimmer we’ve ever had. After changing her mind several times in the last 6 months, just a few days earlier the Swede decided to swim the 100 free (after apparently not realizing that it wasn’t back-to-back with the 50), and won over another bona fide star Mollie O’Callaghan. Then she gave maybe the best post-race interview of the whole week, where she admitted that she has never surprised herself like that. It wasn’t her last medal of the meet, but it was her 2nd career gold medal, the one that chipped away at the biggest critique of her career, and the one that cemented her legacy as one of the Greatest of all-time.