Gretchen Walsh Now Holds the 7 Fastest 100 LCM Fly Times in History

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American swimmer Gretchen Walsh now has the 7 fastest swims in the 100 long course meter fly in history, and she has done all 7 swims in the last 12 months.

Starting with her 55.18 World Record swim in the semi-finals of the event at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials, the 22-year-old has now reeled off a septet of swims under the old World Record of 55.48 done in 2016 by Sarah Sjostrom.

Walsh’s Top 7 Performances All-Time in the 100 LCM Fly

The entirety of Walsh’s swimming career is far from written, but as she begins to form the resume that will one day be used to evaluate her place in the annals of swimming history, her numbers so far are a pretty unusual case.

She has four Olympic medals, all from Paris, with three of them coming in relays. That list also includes one individual silver, in the 100 fly, and 2 relay golds, but no individual gold medals.

Walsh is not a late bloomer in any traditional sense of the word – she was a very fast swimmer, and National High School Record breaker as a junior swimmer – but relative to some of the greatest of all-time, it took her longer to hit her stride internationally (Sjostrom, Ledecky, Phelps, etc.). She’s making up for lost time though – she set 13 World Records in 323 days, a pace that nobody else has been able to achieve.

She also now has the 7 fastest 100 fly long course meter times in history, ironically without winning any medals in the event at the long course World Championships or individual Olympic gold, yet.

These kind of runs are usually reserved for the greatest performers of history, the swimmers that are such generational outliers that their accomplishments ring for decades. At present, only two other women can claim at least the top 7 times in a single long course event: Katie Ledecky and Sarah Sjostrom, whose 100 fly record Walsh broke.

Ledecky has the best 11 swims in the 800 free and the best 22 swims in the 1500 free, while Sjostrom has the best 7 swims in history in the 50 free.

Prior to this week, Sjostrom also had the best 14 swims in history in the 50 fly, though Walsh’s American Record of 24.66 chopped that down to just 3.

On the men’s side, the list is one: Adam Peaty, who still holds the top 14 times in the men’s 100 breaststroke (he also has the 6 best swims in the 50 breaststroke).

And that’s it. Others have done this in history, like Phelps in (several events) in his prime, but the point is this: most swimmers who do this get play in the ‘all-time rankings’ debates. Those debates hinge on more than one criteria, but many of those criteria (Olympic gold medals, for example) have high correlations to the kind of event dominance that Walsh has demonstrated.

This article is not advocating for Walsh’s presence on that list, as it is clearly too early for that. It’s more highlighting how unusual Walsh’s career arc has been for a swimmer with a peak this high.

She will almost certainly be a huge factor in several events in Los Angeles, and is young enough to make a run at Brisbane as well. While the future (that will become her history) is still to be fully written, for now, her historic run continues to be really fun to watch.