TOKYO — On the night of June 13, at a pool in Omaha, Simone Manuel reached what was her public nadir. By two hundredths of a second, the Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meter freestyle at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics failed to make even the final of the same event at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials. She was not a lock to make the Olympic team. She was, by her own admission, fragile.
Yet here she was Sunday morning, on the pool deck at Tokyo Aquatics Centre, with three teammates, ready to anchor an Olympic relay.
“I’m happy to be up here with these three women,” Manuel said.
Those words were true just when she showed up because even that represented a victory. But they were particularly true after Manuel gutted out an anchor leg that allowed the U.S. women to take bronze in the women’s 4x100 freestyle relay — well behind the world record pace of the gold medalists from Australia but one that kept alive the United States’ streak of winning medals in the event that goes back 22 Olympics.
“Even though the last couple of months have not been the greatest for me, I’ve trained really hard the past 4½, five years,” Manuel said. “So eventually, that hard work will show up.”
Manuel, 24, ended up in that position in part because the Americans were desperate for a spark. This generation of Australian sprinters is deep and talented, and the two women in the pool last — Emma McKeon and Cate Campbell — had posted 11 of the 12 fastest times in the 100 free this year. In preliminary heats Saturday night, the United States could do no better than snaring the fifth seed, more than three seconds behind the swift Australians.
So the U.S. coaches — led by Greg Meehan, the head coach here who coached Manuel at Stanford and coaches her still — made wholesale changes to the lineup, keeping only Natalie Hinds from the preliminaries and inserting Erika Brown and Abby Weitzeil. Such changes are normal before the final.
But the biggest surprise was Manuel at the anchor leg. At the trials in Omaha, she finished ninth in the semifinals and thus watched eight others compete for two Olympic spots. After emerging from that swim, Manuel spoke emotionally about her struggles with mental health, including depression and overtraining syndrome. All that forced her to take a three-week break from training, which in swimming is almost impossible to overcome in the run-up to an Olympics.
“After trials, it was really difficult not making it in the 100 freestyle,” Manuel said. “I’m grateful to be on this team. I took some time to acknowledge my emotions and get back to work.”
At the trials, Manuel gathered herself enough to make the team in the 50 free, an event in which she won silver in Rio five years ago. She said she spent some time training in the 100 free during the U.S. camp in Hawaii, but that was more to mix up her workouts. She was guaranteed no other swims here — until the coaching staff told her Saturday night that she would be included in the final of the relay.
“I’m always excited and pumped for relays,” Manuel said. “It’s different when you go behind the blocks and instead of being alone, there are other people right there. It’s an experience that is amazing. I don’t take it lightly.”
The U.S. team’s history in the women’s 4x100 relay is staggering. The event debuted at the 1912 Stockholm Games, a year in which the U.S. squad did not enter a team. Since then, American women had medaled every time they showed up to contest the race — 22 straight, including 14 golds.
By the time Weitzeil posted the Americans’ fastest split (52.68) and Hinds touched the wall after her third leg — having made up time, putting the U.S. squad in third — it was up to Manuel to finish it off.
“I knew that when I dove in, I had to give it everything I had,” she said, “and that’s exactly what I did.”
For a time, Manuel appeared to have enough to hold off Penny Oleksiak of Canada — the very swimmer whom Manuel had tied for gold in Rio. At the wall, though, Oleksiak touched in 3:32.78 — more than three seconds back of the Australians and their world record but 0.03 ahead of Manuel.
These Olympics, delayed a year by the pandemic and staged before the coronavirus has been eradicated, have taken a toll, in some way, on everyone, Olympian or not.
What Simone Manuel did Sunday morning, though, was beat back all she had been through — and persevere, regaining her confidence in the process.
“I don’t think it mattered whether I was on this relay or not,” Manuel said. “I’ve seen improvements since going to trials, and it doesn’t do me any justice to step up on the blocks and not be confident.”
