Nashville’s Gretchen Walsh will return from the 2024 Olympics in Paris with plenty of hard-won hardware.
The Harpeth Hall grad captured four medals in six events, earning gold as part of the U.S. team’s 4x100-meter mixed relay team and the 4x100-meter women’s medley relay final. She won silver in the 100-meter butterfly and as part of the 4x100-meter women’s freestyle relay team.
Walsh on Sunday was part of the U.S. team’s world-record time in the 4x100-meter women’s medley relay, swimming the butterfly leg of the race and joining teammates Regan Smith, Lilly King and Torri Huske in setting the new mark with a time of 3:49.63.
Walsh, who is 21, very nearly added a fifth medal to her total Sunday in the 50-meter freestyle, but she finished fourth with a time of 24.21 — just .01 seconds behind China’s Zhang Yufei.
The two young swimmers have gone from Harpeth Hall to the University of Virginia to the world stage
Walsh, competing in her first Olympics, had earlier in the games finished eighth in the 100-meter freestyle competition.
It appeared that Walsh’s older sister, fellow Harpeth Hall grad Alex Walsh, had on Saturday captured the bronze medal in her lone race, the 200-meter individual medley. She finished second in the event at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo. But Alex Walsh (23) was disqualified from the competition because of an illegal turn — she did not complete the backstroke portion of the race on her back, turning too soon as she readied for the breaststroke.
Gretchen Walsh was distraught by her sister’s disqualification, but knew she had to keep preparing for the mixed relay.
“I was really happy for her when I saw she touched third,” Walsh told reporters in Paris. “I was thrilled that she was on the podium, and then I did one more 50 of warm-down, and then it was a [disqualification]. So I was just stopped in the middle of the pool, like so upset, I don’t really know how to describe it. But yeah, I knew that I was going to have to move on from that quickly in the moment, give her a big hug, tell her that I’m here for her and then go out and do this in her honor.”
Sure enough, Gretchen Walsh was part of the U.S. team that set a world record in the event, finishing in 3:37.43.
“This was the biggest job I had tonight,” Walsh said. “And so it was the main focus, and I was just really proud of myself and our whole relay and the prelims relay for everything we did.
“We got the world record, we got number one, we're on the podium with our gold. It was a pretty special moment, and shout-out to these three teammates. I wouldn't be here without them.”
The Walsh sisters compete at the University of Virginia, where they have been a part of four straight NCAA championships.
This article was first published by our sister publication, the Nashville Post.
