Gretchen Walsh Overcomes Illness To Win First Individual World Title

What a difference a day made for Gretchen Walsh.

Twenty-four hours after being pulled from the women’s 4×100-meter freestyle relay at the 2025 World Aquatic Championships due to illness, she won her first individual long-course world title, getting her hands on the wall first in the women’s 100-meter butterfly.

In the final, Walsh, 22, challenged the world record she swam in May at the TYR Pro Swim in Fort Lauderdale, an in-season meet and Walsh’s first as a professional swimmer. She stopped the clock for gold at 54.73 in Singapore, just .13 seconds away from her world record. The time is a championship record and the event’s second-fastest performance in history.

“I’m over the moon,” Walsh told World Aquatics after the race. “I’m really happy that when it mattered, I was able to do that and just get my hands on the wall.”

During the first finals session at the competition on Sunday, Walsh qualified for the final in the 100-meter butterfly but pulled out of the women’s 4×100-meter freestyle relay final that concluded the session. “I wanted to be on it so bad, but my body would not let me,” Walsh said in an interview with NBC Sports after her record-setting swim. “I took the morning to rest, recover, knowing tonight was going to be a fight for me. I’m so happy with the result.”

A spokesperson for USA Swimming confirmed on Sunday that the American team is dealing with “acute gastroenteritis” that began affecting swimmers at the team’s pre-meet training camp in Phuket, Thailand.

USA Swimming did not confirm which swimmers were affected, but Walsh was not alone in pulling out of races on the first day of the competition. Torri Huske, the reigning 100-meter butterfly Olympic champion, pulled out of the event before the preliminary heats, though she raced on the women’s 4×100-meter freestyle relay. Claire Weinstein, another Olympian, skipped the 400-meter freestyle.

On Monday, the United States was still looking for its first gold medal of the championships after getting shut out on the first night of racing. With illness making the rounds, the team needed a spark. Walsh’s medal provided just that.

It is also a pivotal moment in her career. Walsh has been one of the most successful swimmers in history in the short-course yards and meters pool, but it took a while for her to find her footing in long-course meters. She had her major breakout in long-course meters last summer when she first took over the 100-meter butterfly world record at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials. It made her the heavy favorite for Olympic gold in Paris, but her teammate Huske was able to pblock her in the Olympic final and the Americans went 1-2 on the podium with Walsh earning silver.

Since the 2024 Olympics, Walsh has continued to showcase her speed as she rewrote the record books in short-course meters and yards in a range of events during her final year as a University of Virginia collegiate swimmer.

But there were still boxes to check. Her 100-meter butterfly gold medal tonight marks the first time she has stood atop the podium at the Olympic or World Championship level in an individual event.

Bringing the 100-meter butterfly world record to new heights—no other female swimmer has broken 55 seconds in the event—has brought a new type of pressure to deliver when the lights are brightest. And despite illness, she rose to that challenge.

“Having that title as the world record holder is a lot of pressure,” she acknowledged to World Aquatics. “But I feel like I’ve gotten used to knowing that that’s my best time, and that’s just kind of what I have to shoot for every time I dive in.”

“I’ve gotten more and more comfortable with it [the pressure],” she continued. “And even going into tonight, I knew that maybe it wasn’t going to be a world record, but any time I would have been happy with if I touched first, because at meets like this, that’s what matters most.”

Walsh is also entered in the 50-meter freestyle, 100-meter freestyle, and 50-meter butterfly at the competition and is a medal threat in all three events. The 2025 World Aquatic Championships run through Sunday, August 3.