Gretchen Walsh breaks world record in 50m freestyle

Key Points:

• Gretchen Walsh set a new world record in the 50m freestyle with a time of 23.55 seconds at the Sette Colli meet in Rome, surpassing her training partner Kate Douglass' record of 23.59 set just nine days earlier.
• Walsh, who also holds the 16 fastest times in the 100m butterfly, is now the fastest woman in history in both the 50m freestyle and 100m butterfly, and recently swam the second-fastest 50m butterfly ever, just 0.08 seconds shy of the world record.
• Both Walsh and Douglass train at the University of Virginia, and Walsh has rapidly improved her 50m freestyle personal best from 23.91 to 23.55 in the past two weeks, moving from joint eighth-fastest to number one in history.
• Walsh is the first American woman since Jenny Thompson to hold long-course world records in two different strokes simultaneously and the first since Tracy Caulkins to do so in any strokes since the late 1970s.
• Having already won multiple world titles and Olympic medals, Walsh is poised to contend for historic success at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, especially with the 50m butterfly making its Olympic debut.