Caeleb Dressel will get the chance to defend at least one of his individual Olympic gold medals at the 2024 Games in Paris.
Dressel won the 50-meter freestyle at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials in Indianapolis on Friday, qualifying for the event at the Olympic Games later this summer.
It was Dressel’s second of three finals this week during competitions in Indianapolis. He is the reigning Olympic champion in all three. In the first, the 100-meter free, he finished third to earn a spot on the U.S. 4×100 relay team in Paris, but narrowly missed the chance to defend his gold in the individual event.
But in the second of three events, the “splash and dash” 50 free, he raced to the wall and beat all competitors. Dressel finished in 21.41 seconds, 0.28 – a relative eternity in this race – ahead of Chris Giuliano, who qualified second.
As his wife Meghan celebrated with their month-old baby in her arms in the stands, Dressel pumped his fist and saluted the crowd.
His qualification on Wednesday in the 100 free felt like an ambiguous conclusion to his comeback story.
This, on the other hand, felt emphatic.
Dressel, now 27, won five gold medals in Tokyo. At the following summer’s world championships, he won the 14th and 15th world golds of his distinguished career. But then, with even more medals on the table, he withdrew from the competition for unspecified medical reasons. He took months off from swimming. He returned to the pool in 2023 but was not part of the U.S. team for that summer’s world championships. All told, he went about 17 months without winning a race.
But during 2023 and 2024 he worked his way back to the top of his sport. He achieved his first victory last December. He went into the trials in a good place, mentally, with a smile on his face.
He’s not back to his best levels of 2019 or 2021. But he’s going back to the Olympics.
His third and final test event this weekend is the 100-meter butterfly.
