Olympic Swimming Top Races, No. 2: Kaylee McKeown, Regan Smith Set For Rematches in 100 and 200 Backstroke
The Olympic swimming competition will begin Saturday, July 27, with the best swimmers in the world competing for medals in 28 individual races and seven relays over nine days of competition. Before that, Swimming World will count down the top-10 most anticipated races of the Games, where we can expect to find the best races and where the most decorated athletes will be racing for history.
All three women’s backstroke finals at last year’s World Championships in Fukuoka went the way of Kaylee McKeown, with the Australian getting the better of American rival Regan Smith each time. McKeown overtook Smith to win by a quarter-second in the 100 back, and then she edged out Smith by three hundredths in the 50 back. Only the 200-meter final bordered on blowout, with McKeown pulling away to win by just over a second.
By the end of the year, McKeown had broken world records in all three events, but 2023 marked a huge rebound for Smith, who posted her best times in four years after one season training under coach Bob Bowman. Next, though, Smith desperately hoped to reclaim her status as a world-record holder.
That happened at the U.S. Olympic Trials last month, days after McKeown narrowly missed her own global marks in both distances at Australia’s Olympic Trials. In the 100 back final, Smith went out two tenths faster than McKeown’s world-record pace and then closed in a time nearly equal to her rival, known as a speedy finisher. Smith came in at 57.13 to break the world record by two tenths. McKeown, though, is right behind in the global rankings at 57.41, and she had set the previous world record in late 2023 at 57.33.
Three days later, Smith showed her fatigue at the end of a long meet as she finished the 200 back in 2:05.16, still more than a second ahead of the field but off her season best of 2:03.99 from the Pro Swim Series in Westmont, Ill., in March and almost two seconds shy of the 2:03.30 that McKeown posted eight days earlier on the other side of the world.
Regan Smith — Photo Courtesy: Peter H. Bick
From a historical perspective, these two swimmers dominate the all-time list in backstroke. In the 100 back, McKeown owns nine of the top-15 performances in history; Smith has the other six. Go down to the top-25 swims, and that adds five more performances by Smith and two from McKeown, with only Kylie Masse (twice) and Katharine Berkoff breaking up the stranglehold. In the 200, they are the only two swimmers to ever break 2:04, with McKeown swimming five such efforts and Smith four. Moreover, there are only three other swimmers to ever go beneath 2:05, and Missy Franklin is the only other swimmer to swim that fast in a textile suit.
It would be a significant upset if McKeown and Smith do not end up 1-2 in the backstroke events in some order in Paris, and this might be the best rivalry of the Olympics, with no other pair of swimmers seen as significantly ahead of the field in two separate events. We’ll see if one swimmer can pull off the sweep, as McKeown did at last year’s Worlds and at the Tokyo Olympics, or if there is a split.
Smith has more speed and explosiveness underwater than McKeown, and her Trials performances shows she can match up with the Aussie down the back-half of a 100-meter race, but maintaining that edge over McKeown for a 200-meter showdown looks more challenging. Still, Smith has finally rebuilt the confidence necessary to make it a true showdown, a confidence she has been lacking since breaking her first world records in 2019.
Behind these two, someone will claim bronze medals in both races, and the leading contenders are Masse and the second American in each event, Berkoff in the 100 and Phoebe Bacon in the 200. Masse swam her strongest times since Tokyo at the Canadian Trials, clocking 57.94 in the 100 and 2:06.24 in the 200. The Canadian veteran, now 28, was the silver medalist in both races in Tokyo, and she won 100 back world titles in 2017 and 2019.
“Yeah, it’s going to be incredible,” Masse said of competing against McKeown and Smith. “I think they’ve pushed me over the last number of years, and to be up there with them is an honor. To see them pushing our sport forward and kind of watching the backstroke push forward over the last couple of years, it’s been truly inspiring. So I’m looking forward to getting in the pool with them and just giving it my best shot.”
Berkoff joined the sub-58 club at U.S. Trials, topping out at 57.83. Australia’s Mollie O’Callaghan is the only other swimmer to ever break 58 in the 100 back, but she opted out of the event in Paris to focus on freestyle. The only others swimming at the Olympics who have broken 59 this year are Australia’s Iona Anderson, France’s Emma Terebo and Canada’s Ingrid Wilm.
In the 200, the Americans dominate the world rankings with Smith (second), Claire Curzan (third), Bacon (fifth), Rhyan White (seventh), Kennedy Noble (eighth) Katie Grimes (10th) and Teagan O’Dell (11th), but only Smith and Bacon will race in Paris. Australian teenager Jaclyn Barclay could also factor into the final while China’s Peng Xuwei won bronze at last year’s Worlds.
