[ PHOTO BY PETER H. BICK ]
Regan Smith Handling Stresses and Regaining Her Mojo in Time for Olympic Trials BY DAVID RIEDER
O
ver three astonishing days, 17-year-old Regan Smith made the best swimmers in the world look pedestrian, and she made a mockery of all previous records in the backstroke events. Smith had been a rising star since she qualified for her first World Championships at age 15. From there, she continued to improve upon her own best times season after season, so the natural progression would be world title contention, but this monumental leap was simply improbable. At the 2019 World Championships in Gwangju, South Korea, Smith crushed Missy Franklin’s seven-year-old world record in the semifinals of the 200 backstroke. The next day, she captured her first world title by 2.57 seconds, and a day after that, she swam the leadoff leg on the U.S. women’s 400 medley relay and crushed Kathleen Baker’s 100 backstroke world record. Racing against a field of backstrokers that included two-time world champion Kylie Masse, Smith led the field by more than a bodylength. Beforehand, Smith had no idea that she was about to make a colossal leap forward. On the other hand, Mike Parratto, her coach at Riptide Swim Team, figured she would be in that range thanks to her training and her mental preparation, but Smith said, “he’s very good at not communicating what he thinks I’m going to do, and I don’t want him to.” Looking back on the leadup to the 2019 Worlds, Smith remembers swimming amazingly well every day in practice and at meets, although she admitted, “I don’t know if that’s warped because of how the summer went.”
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The 2019 success set up Smith for the Olympic year as the overwhelming favorite for Olympic gold in both the 100 and 200 back, and Smith began 2020 still riding a wave of momentum, but the COVID-19 pandemic squashed that when the Olympics were postponed a year to 2021. “I think putting things on hold and putting things at a stop was very strange, and I think I kind of lost my mojo, just because the hype was really building for me but I wasn’t doing anything performance-wise to back it up,” Smith said. Like most swimmers around the country, Smith was out of training for several months. During the initial post-lockdown buildup, Smith tried to view the delay as a positive, with 12 extra months to improve, but her initial stretch of training was limited, and her confidence, built primarily through her meticulous preparation, gradually eroded. The result was the toughest stretch of Smith’s career. “By the time August rolled around, training was really rough because we weren’t doing as much as we had been and I wasn’t going as fast as I had normally been going in practice,” Smith said. “Backstroke, in particular, felt really rough. I remember it got to the point where I would avoid backstroke and do butterfly instead, just because backstroke felt so funky. Nobody really wants to do fly in practice.” Her first national-level meet after the pandemic began was the November 2020 U.S. Open in Des Moines, “where I
