By Sam Blacker on SwimSwam
Gretchen Walsh broke yet another world record last week at the Pro Swim Series in Fort Lauderdale, marking a dominant not-quite-12-month period for the Virginia swimmer. No one else has ever broken this many individual world records this quickly; only a handful have even set the 13 she is on so far.
Gretchen Walsh set her first World Record 323 days ago. In that timespan, she has already set 13 World Records.
It took Michael Phelps, for example, 3 years, 3 months, and 7 days from his 1st to his 13th World Record. It took Ledecky just over 3 years as well. pic.twitter.com/PJDpMwlN1M
— Braden Keith (@Braden_Keith) May 4, 2025
Fastest swimmers to 13 Individual Word Records
Gretchen Walsh (USA), 06/15/2024 – 05/03/2025 – 323 days (10 months, 18 days) Debbie Meyer (USA), 07/09/1967 – 08/28/1968 – 416 days (1 year, 1 month, 19 days) Katinka Hosszu (HUN), 08/07/2013 – 12/15/2014 – 494 days (1 year, 4 months, 8 days) Kornelia Ender (GDR), 04/13/1973-06/09/1975 – 787 days (2 years, 1 month, 26 days) Katie Ledecky (USA) – 07/30/2013 – 08/12/2016 – 1109 days (3 years, 13 days)The journey has been something of a rollercoaster, so we’ll look back – all the way back – to her first American Record.
2023 U.S. National Championships – 50 Fly – 25.11 AR
06/28/2023The monkey was off Walsh’s back. The day before she had finished third in the 100 free in 53.14, qualifying for the World Championship team as a member of the women’s 4x100m free relay to bounce back from a disappointing 2022 Trials. Her long course credentials had been in question after a fantastic freshman season in the NCAA had not translated to a World Championship berth, but a second year of training with Todd Desorbo and an all-conquering Virginia team was reaping evident rewards.
She was not yet the world-beater on butterfly that she has become. Walsh only swam the 100 fly at ACCs, where she finished 2nd behind teammate Kate Douglass in 49.34, and entered the 100 backstroke at NCAAs instead.
She was in good form coming into the meet, however. She’d set best times less than a month prior in both the 50 and 100 fly in times of 25.97 and 56.73. At Trials, she sliced off 0.43 in heats and then the same again in finals, going from a 25.97 to 25.11 with a brief pit stop at 25.54.
Torri Huske’s record of 25.38, set at the 2022 World Championships where she won the 100, was no more. A second Walsh sister had announced herself to the world.
Later in the summer, Walsh added in all her swims at her first worlds, but won a medal of each color, including bronze in the individual 50 fly. The winner of that event was Sarah Sjostrom in 24.74 – yet another sub-25 from someone who was, at the time, the only woman to have broken that barrier and the undisputed top flyer of the 21st century.
2023-24 NCAA Season
A quartet of American records at ACCs was some way to kick off her championship season. They came in the 50 free (20.57), 100 free (45.16), 100 back (48.10) and 100 fly (48.25) – the last of those a relatively new event to her championship schedule.
She reset three of those again at NCAAs, the 50 free on two occasions, and was now over a second quicker than anyone else in history on the 100 fly. She’d only started regularly swimming the event in yards this season after qualifying for the 2023 World Championships in the event.
Her best time in LCM had gone from 57.44 in 2022 to 56.34 in 2023. A similar drop in 2024 would put her a quarter second under the world record, but surely at this truly elite level, the gains could not just continue at the same rate? That would be silly, right?
2024 U.S. Olympic Trials – 100 Fly – 55.18 WR
06/15/2024Turns out silly and impossible are two different things entirely. Walsh had broken 56 in prelims at Olympic Trials, going 55.94 and showing some devastating early speed – her first 50 split of 25.45 was a hundredth faster than she went to win bronze in Fukuoka.
In the evening her swim was, quite frankly, absurd. But before we talk about the swim, we need to consider the context around it.
Walsh’s successes in short course yards in the NCAA had appeared to be largely attributed to her exceptional underwaters. She made full use of the allowed 15 meters and was significantly faster under the surface than everyone she raced. The phrase ‘bathtub swimmer’ was bandied about.
That was already an unfair moniker for an individual world championship bronze medallist, as well as one who was the joint-4th-fastest performer all-time in the long course 50 fly and 13th in the 100. There was far more to her abilities than underwaters; the NCAA just gave her the opportunity to show how monstrously devastating they could be.
The previous 100 fly World Record was owned by Sarah Sjostrom, a name that needs no introduction. She’d set it at Rio 2016, when she was at the peak of her powers in a career that has spanned five Olympic Games and counting. Sjostrom set World Records in the LCM 50 free, 100 free, and 100 fly in a 12-month period back then, two of which still stand today, as well as the SCM 100 and 200 free. The phrase ‘bathtub swimmer’ has never been used in the same sentence as Sarah Sjostrom, at least until now.
That was the pedigree of the record – hardly a soft one to target. Other swimmers had started to approach the mark, as all of the top four in the uber-competitive 100 fly final at Tokyo 2020(1) were within a quarter-second, but Walsh was not even seen as the most likely U.S. woman to challenge it. That distinction belonged to Torri Huske, only 0.16 off with the 55.64 she swam to win gold at the 2022 Worlds.
Even after her 55.94 in prelims, Walsh was not assured of a spot on the Olympic team. After breaking the World Record with a semi-final swim of 55.18, that suddenly seemed far more so. Still though, Torri Huske and Regan Smith would be on either side of her in the final – it should have first and foremost been a race for the top-two, not for times.
Race video courtesy of Team USA YouTube
Huske and Smith swam top-five times all-time (at that point). Huske was only 0.04 of Sjostrom’s world record. But it was the swimmer between them that dominated the narrative. Remember Walsh’s 25.11 AR in the 50, set just 12 months ago? She went out in 25.20 to 50 here, just nine-hundredths slower, and then brought it home in 30.11.
She was under Sjostrom’s standard for a second time in 55.31. Her semi-finals time had broken Sarah Sjostrom‘s record by three-tenths, the biggest record-to-record drop in the 100 fly since Sjostrom herself back in 2009. She’d been 0.83 under at halfway and was by the same margin in the final – the 50 was the source of her strength in the longer event.
Walsh would go on to win individual silver behind Huske in Paris, setting the Olympic Record in the semi-finals in 55.38 before going 55.63 in the final. Despite adding from her world record time, that was still the 11th-fastest swim in history and nearly two seconds faster than she had gone in the event in Fukuoka.
Adding time in the summer after a world record earlier in the season is not unusual. Adam Peaty and Igor Borysik did the same in the 100 breast in 2015 and 2009, respectively, and Aaron Peirsol missed the final in the 100 back completely in Rome. For Walsh, a swimmer who had experienced setbacks in long course before, winning her first individual medal in an Olympic event was still an achievement. The top of the international podium would come soon.
Before that happened, though, Walsh went back to doing what she’s made something of a habit of: breaking records at the most unexpected meets.
Virginia-Florida SCM Dual Meet – 100 IM – 55.98 WR
10/18/2024Mid-October is early in the season to be breaking records, especially after an Olympic summer. Kaylee McKeown broke the 50 and 100 back world records in October 2023, and like Walsh seems to be able to throw down near-PBs at any time of the year, but those two are the exception rather than the rule.
McKeown had broken those records at the World Cup, held at the Duna Arena in Budapest. Walsh broke her World Record at Virginia’s home pool, in a single-day dual meet.
She had rarely swum IM even in yards. In fact, Walsh had no prior times in SCM for the 100 IM – this was her first-ever swim in the event. The list of people who have broken a world record with their first swim in a specific event reads like this:
Gretchen WalshYep.
A soft record? A rather resounding no. It was Katinka Hosszu’s, widely seen as one the greatest women’s medley swimmers ever. Her record of 56.51 made her the only woman under 57 seconds.
Walsh, at the end of a dual meet, having broken three American Records already that session, broke 56.
Her time of 55.98 shattered a record seen as fairly untouchable. No one had been particularly close to Hosszu’s mark since it was set, Beryl Gastaldello (57.30) and Kate Douglass (56.99 earlier the same day as this dual meet) the only two within a second since.
The second fastest swimmer in history at the start of the day was nearly six-tenths behind Hosszu. Ironically, considering Walsh’s other world record, that swimmer was Sarah Sjostrom.
This isn’t how world records are meant to be set. They’re meant to be trained for, ground out, targeted, the output of sweat and effort and months if not years of preparing to peak at exactly the right time. Not a time trial in a dual meet a month into the season. Not a time trial in a dual meet a month into the season by more than half a second over the greatest women’s medley swimmer of the 21st century.
But no worry. Walsh would go on to reset this one in the ‘proper’ manner.
And another. And another. And another.
2024 Short Course World Championships – 50 Free, 50 Fly, 100 Fly, 100 IM – WR
12/10/2024-12/15/2024Gretchen Walsh’s first short course world championships was, to be frank, a masterpiece. No one has ever set more than the nine individual world records she set here in a single championship. No one else has ever been even close to that – Michael Phelps is next on the list with five, from the Barcelona World Championships in 2003.
We’ll start with silly, take a detour through jaw-dropping and end with fantastical.
50 Free (2 WR, 3 AR)
Prelims; 23.02, American Record. Semi-finals; 22.87, World Record. Final; 22.83, World Record. She may only have ended a tenth under Ranomi Kromowidjojo’s world record, but it was something of a formality that the record would be hers at some point during the meet.
Those are also the fifth-fastest, second-fastest and fastest swims of all-time. Outside of a 1-week period in summer 2017, where Sjostrom and Kromowidjojo made us forget there were seven other swimmers in the pool, no one has been faster.
50 Fly (2 WR, 2 AR)
Walsh didn’t even wait for the semi-finals in this event. Therese Alshammer’s record was dispatched without a backward glance, the swim of 24.02 leaving her mark of 24.38 in the dust. That record had stood the test of Sarah Sjostrom and Kromodidjojo to last 15 years. It was tough. The 50 requires near-perfection. Gretchen glided into the turn from a metre out and broke the mark by over three-tenths.
Maybe the glide was intentional; it happened in the next two rounds as well as she got even faster. Her world record time from the semi-finals, 23.94, would have finished tenth in the 50 free.
The 24-second barrier had seemed far away in the 50 fly. Going from the 26 to the 25-second mark had taken nine years. Alshammer’s record was set only a year after the 25-second barrier was breached, and had resisted for a decade and a half. Walsh, who it’s fair to say swam imperfectly in this event, made light work of it.
100 IM (2 WR, 2 AR)
Walsh’s slowest swim in Doha was 0.43 faster than anyone else has swum, and 55 days breaking 56 seconds, she nearly broke 55. That would have been rather fitting, but instead she had to content herself with a swim faster than anyone else in history by 1.38 seconds.
Second and third behind her were Kate Douglass and Beryl Gastaldello, multi-time world champions in short course metres, and they both swam top-10 all-time swims. Douglass is now at #5 with a 56.49, two-hundredths faster than Hosszu, with Gastaldello less than two-tenths back in 56.67. They rank as the #2 and #4 performers all-time and Walsh had them on toast by the 25.
The winning time at Worlds had been under 57 seconds on one previous occasion: 56.70 from Katinka Hosszu in 2014. The previous three editions had been won in 57.26, 57.80, and 57.53, and four of the swimmers in the final here went 57.0 or better. This was already an historically quick final if you completely ignored lane 4. Walsh made those swims look pedestrian, an afterthought; that’s what the best swimmers in the world can do.
But Walsh did that to the best swimmers in the world. That is elite, the 1% of the 1% of the 1% in an event she’d picked up for fun 2 months before. The medleys are supposed to be push and pull, strength in one area counterbalanced by relative weakness in another. Not one of these swimmers looked like taking ground off her at any point, let alone catching her.
One good way to compare the ebb and flow of events is to compare the winning times. IM, backstroke and butterfly are the three that are closest in times at each distance (although getting quicker through that list), and a generational swimmer in any one of these would close the gap or widen the lead. Comparing the winning times in the 100 IM to the 100s of backstroke and butterfly over the last five world championships;
Event 100 IM 100 Backstroke (delta) 100 Fly (delta) 2016 – Windsor 57.24 55.54 (1.70) 55.12 (2.12) 2018 – Huangzhou 57.26 56.19 (1.07) 55.01 (2.25) 2021 – Abu Dhabi 57.80 55.20 (2.60) 55.04 (2.76) 2022 – Melbourne 57.53 55.49 (2.04) 54.05 (3.49) 2024 – Doha 55.11 54.55 (0.56) 52.71 (2.40)(Fun fact for you: Katinka Hosszu won all three in 2016)
Walsh’s renaissance in the 100 IM massively closed the gap with backstroke, but on fly the delta was equivalent to that in 2016 and 2018. What could be the reason for that?
100 Fly
The only person faster than Gretchen Walsh is Gretchen Walsh. If you had taken her out the 100 fly the delta would have been 0.45 – roughly the same as backstroke and reflective of the absurdly dominant swim her 100 IM was.
As it was, she unsurprisingly did enter the event where she was the long course world record holder and promptly went around taking a permanent marker to the record books. Maggie MacNeil owned the standard from 2022 in 54.05; Walsh broke that by 0.81 seconds in prelims.
The semi-finals, where she won her heat by nearly three seconds at a World Championships, saw another barrier go down as she went 52.87. She finished with a flourish in the final in 52.71, an overall drop in the World Record of 1.34 seconds.
It took the 100 fly world record 13 years to drop that amount Before Gretchen (BG), and it would be rash to assume that her standard will stand even as long as MacNeil’s record had done before her, because…
2025 Pro Swim Series – Fort Lauderdale – 100 Fly – 54.60 WR
05/03/2025Back in long course, still at her best. Less than a year since her first, Walsh set World Records #12 and #13 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. She went 55.09 in prelims of the 100 fly before smashing the 55-second barrier in the final, the first ever to do so, with a swim of 54.60.
She had capped off her NCAA career with a record in the yards version of the event, breaking the 47-barrier at a time where that would have made the top 8 on freestyle, and wasted absolutely no time in switching over to dominance in the big pool
Her final time of 54.60 was seminal for her; it was the first time she had come back faster than Sjostrom, in her fifth swim under the old record of 55.48 (nearly a second back already). Her splits of 25.32-29.28 were phenomenal, and it’s difficult to imagine another active swimmer who could swim the race similarly right now.
Inge de Bruijn in 2000 was the last swimmer to be this far clear of the rest of the world in the 100 fly. She set 11 individual world records that year, joint with Walsh as the most by a swimmer in a single calendar year, in a similar slate of events; 50 free, 50 fly, 100 free, 100 fly. She did not set another one after the Sydney Olympics, but had set one in the 50 fly in June 1999 to make it 12 in a 464-day span.
Walsh has set 13 in 323 days. She has U.S. Nationals and the World Championships in Singapore before she hits the 464-day mark since her first record; Trials will be before 12 months are up. Fort Lauderdale will almost certainly not be her last World-beating time. It will likely not even be her peak this season.
Read the full story on SwimSwam: A Record-Breaking Journey Of Record Breaking: A Timeline Of Gretchen Walsh’s World Records
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