On a weekend in March, 2018 I was spending my time the same way I spent most of the last seven years or so. On a pool deck. It was the Florida Swimming Senior Championships in Orlando. The meet is essentially the state championship for club teams throughout the state. Truthfully, it was not the most important meet relative to other competitions hosted throughout the year. But it was always one of the most enjoyable because a lot of swimmers had the time standards to attend, so teams often brought large groups.
In 2018, I was still fresh off my return to the sport after breaking an eight-year hiatus when I got back in the pool in the summer of 2017. Naturally, I was soaking up everything that I could. I watched and studied other races whenever I got the chance, especially during finals where some of the fastest swimmers in the state, and the country, would be racing. The opportunity was one of the upsides of Florida being a “swimming” state.
These types of championship meets often spanned several days, with a preliminary and finals session each day and most swimmers racing multiple events a day. In other words, they were quite long. And what better way to end a long meet than having the longest event, the mile, race during the last session on the last day. It’s tradition. So, on that Sunday evening in March, 2018, I stood next to my coach as we watched the men’s mile. He told me to pay attention to lane four, a talented St. Petersburg swimmer heading to the University of Florida in the fall. Pretty early on in the race it became clear my coach was right; this guy was really good. In an event that many swimmers and coaches just watch bits and pieces of (sorry to any distance swimmers reading this), the whole pool was mesmerized. By the time he was into the second half of his race, his times for each 50 were the same almost down to the one-hundredth of a second.
I had never seen anything like it.
He touched in first over 50 seconds ahead of second place.
The announcer shouted, “Bobby Finke… new state record!”
Flash forward six years, and once again I find myself at the pool. Except I wasn’t swimming, I was reporting. And it wasn’t at the Florida Swimming Senior Championships in Orlando, it was at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. It was Sunday night and time for the men’s mile because, again, tradition. Once again, a kid from St. Petersburg dove in, this time in lane seven, and took the lead. Except instead of a fellow Floridian trying to chase him down in second, it was a rising star from Tunisia.
While his lead may not have been as dominant as it was in that race in 2018, his back-half of the race displayed the same mind-numbing consistency as I saw six years ago. By the last one hundred yards, he was no longer racing the other swimmers, but a yellow line displayed on the screen in the arena. As he touched the wall, his first-place finish secured the men of USA Swimming their first and only individual gold medal of the Games.
The announcer shouted, “Bobby Finke… new WORLD RECORD.”
By Hanna Barton | @hannakbarton00
