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PARIS — Kate Douglass, understated as ever, glided to the wall, then rose to the surface, and, after a few short seconds, she smiled.
She had just won gold in the 200-meter breaststroke here at the 2024 Olympics on Thursday. She had outraced South African veteran Tatjana Smith and touched in 2:19.24, a new personal best and American record. She had clinched Team USA its fourth swimming gold of these Games. She had justified years worth of practice.
And yet there was no emphatic fist pump. There was no slap of the water. On the top step of a podium less than an hour later, as the “Star Spangled Banner” rang, there was hardly any emotion, perhaps because the size of the accomplishment hadn’t yet struck her.
Or, perhaps, because this is who Douglass is
“She’s one tough cookie,” said U.S. teammate Lilly King, who finished eighth in the race.
And she’s famously even-keeled, undemonstrative, simple.
Her gold was the culmination of a steady, unflashy, years-long rise to the top of swimming. The sport came naturally to her as a teen, but it never anointed her a prodigy; it never — until now — made her a household name. “I was always pretty sure of my place as, like, not on the top,” Douglass said recently. “I was a pretty good swimmer, but I wasn’t one of the best. And … I was just content with that.”
In 2021, she was an Olympic bubbler. “The goal was to make the team,” she recalled.
When she did, and when she won bronze in the 200-meter individual medley, too, her approach to the sport began to change.
She had always been “so fluid and versatile,” as Todd DeSorbo, her coach at the University of Virginia, said. But often, she was the last to realize her talent. “She didn’t know what she was capable of,” DeSorbo explained. As a result, when she’d hit an absurd time, “there was a little bit of shock,” DeSorbo said.
Over the past three years, though, her self-confidence bloomed. And she kept getting better. She added muscle. She contributed to four straight NCAA championships at Virginia.
And she never limited herself to one of swimming’s four strokes, or to a range of distances. She won many a medley. She won medals in freestyle and breaststroke, which require two completely different rhythms and skill sets. She won them at 200 meters, 100 meters and even 50.
She won her first world championship in 2023, in the 200 IM. She also learned to deal with the spotlight and pressure that accompanied the times. In 2021, at the Olympics, “I felt like I was gonna throw up before [the 200 IM],” she said recently. “Since then, I’ve gotten better at calming my nerves.”
“Now,” she said this spring, “I’m excited to race.”
She strode into U.S. trials and won all three of her events, the 200 IM, 200 breaststroke and 100 freestyle.
She eventually dropped the 100 free, though, to home in on the two 200s — and the 200 breast, her “favorite event,” in particular.
She walked out for Thursday’s final in an effortless, unemotional manner. And then she swam the same way. She felt “calm,” she later said. “There definitely was a lot of pressure and expectations coming into this meet. But I kinda try to block all of that out. When I walk out, step up on the blocks, I try to pretend that I’m the only one there. I try to just fade out the noise, and the people in the stands, and just focus on swimming my own race.”
That’s what she did, and she did it well, in precisely the 2 minutes and 19 seconds she knew she was capable of. She mapped out her strokes length by length — 14 over the first 50 meters, then 16, then 17, then 19 — and hit the predetermined counts almost exactly.
She won her first career Olympics gold, and completed her Olympic color palette. And an hour later, it was all still very “surreal.”
“I’m really excited to just be able to call myself an individual Olympic champion,” she said. “But I’m really excited to get a gold for Team USA and help out that medal count.” She just didn’t show it.
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