U.S. swim team dealing with ‘acute gastroenteritis' at world championships
The team held a training camp in Phuket, Thailand, where the illness began, before traveling to Singapore last week. It was not clear how much of the team was impacted, but several U.S. swimmers either were pulled from races or noticeably struggled on the first day of competition.
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Gretchen Walsh was a surprise late scratch from the women's 4×100-meter freestyle relay final Sunday. She had posted the top time in the 100-meter butterfly semifinals earlier in the day but was then pulled from the relay and replaced by Erin Gemmell. USA Swimming confirmed the move was 'illness related.'
Walsh competed in the relay at last year's Paris Olympics, posting the Americans' second-fastest time in their silver-medal run in the final. She was also on the silver-medal team at the 2023 world championships.
Without Walsh, the U.S. team of Simone Manuel, Kate Douglass, Gemmell and Torri Huske finished second to Australia in a tight race Sunday. Australia won in 3:30.60, with the Americans finishing in 3:31.04. It was Australia's fourth world title in the last five tries at worlds, only missing out at the 2024 worlds that several top swimmers skipped ahead of the Olympics.
Huske, 22, swam the relay despite being pulled from the 100-meter butterfly heats earlier in the day. Huske won gold in that event in Paris.
Claire Weinstein, 18, was pulled from the 400-meter freestyle heats. She was part of the Americans' silver-medal team in the 4×200-meter freestyle relay in Paris and one of the world's top 400-meter swimmers.
Luca Mijatovic — at 16, the youngest American men's swimmer to compete at the world championships since Michael Phelps in 2001 — finished 36th in his heats for the men's 400-meter freestyle in a time of 3:59.68, almost 14 seconds off his time from the U.S. national championships in June. There, he set national age-group records in the 200- and 400-meter freestyles — even besting the 17- and 18-year-old group record times.
Katie Ledecky, the 28-year-old with more Olympic and world championship medals than any women's swimmer, competed as scheduled in her 400-meter freestyle heats and final. She took bronze behind Canada's Summer McIntosh and China's Li Bingjie.
(Photo of Gretchen Walsh competing in the 100-meter butterfly heats Sunday at world championships: Quinn Rooney / Getty Images)
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