The 22-year-old, who isn’t even competing in all the events she qualified for this summer, has all the tools to be America’s next great Olympic success story in the pool.
Kate Douglass can do just about anything in a pool. She can sprint with the fastest women in the world, and she can also stretch out across 200 painstaking meters of breaststroke as well as anyone. Fast twitch or graceful glide, whitewater fury or sustained stamina, she might be the most protean swimmer on the planet.
She is quick enough to record the top time in the country in the 50 freestyle this year, but well-rounded enough to not even swim it at U.S. trials because it overlapped with the 200 individual medley. Imagine being good enough to be that choosey. Douglass broke the American record in the 200m breaststroke in January. / Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar / USA TODAY
Dry-land sports meant sweating and running, two things she hated. So the pool made sense. “And I was pretty good at it,” she says. “Oh my gosh, this is terrible,” Allison Douglass, Kate’s mom, thought at the time. “Too much hype is never a good thing.” Back then, at age 19, Douglass was a prime Olympic contender but no sure thing. The margin by which she did make it tells you everything about U.S. Olympic Trials and the difficulty of simply making the team.
Douglass, right, earned the bronze medal in the 200m individual medley at the Tokyo Games. / Rob Schumacher-USA TODAY Sports On the night of the race, Kate’s siblings, Abby and Will, were more calm. Allison was standing. William was sitting on the couch. A single family friend was invited over on one condition: no talking during the two-minutes-and-change race.“I remember being on the couch and I remember it being on,” he says. “That’s about it.”
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