EP swimmer wowed by Olympic trials, happy with her performance

Caroline Larsen will be watching the Paris Summer Olympic Games on TV with the rest of us.

But she’ll be watching for different reasons. A few weeks ago, she was in the same pool with many of the swimmers at the 2024 U.S. Olympic Swimming Trials in Indianapolis, taking her first shot at qualifying for the games.

Larsen’s expectations weren’t as high as those of Regan Smith, who holds Olympic medals and world records, or Katie Ledecky, a multiple-time Olympic gold medalist and world champion. Hers were the same as most of the 1,000 competitors in the trials: to continue shaving hundredths of a second off times in races that often last less than a minute.

Those fractions of a second mean the difference between first place and eighth place in some swimming events – and qualifying or not qualifying for the Olympics.

The 18-year-old 2024 Eden Prairie High School graduate wasn’t expecting to qualify for the 2024 Olympics. First, you have to experience a taste of what it’s like to swim with the elites under the bright lights.

And that she did.

‘It’s just about racing …’

“I’m really happy,” she said recently as she sat just outside the Eden Prairie Community Center, where she has spent many hours in its pool. “I think what I’m most proud of is that I competed well in all my heats.”

It’s an experience that can’t be replicated, even at the biggest national swimming competitions, she said.

“It’s just about racing,” she said. “There’s no pressure. No expectations. So I just got to enjoy the experience, and I feel really proud about how I raced and took on this new experience and the new sort of nerves that come with that. Because there’s nothing like trials.”

Larsen qualified for the Olympic trials in the 50-meter freestyle event early in 2023, followed by the 100-meter freestyle and 100-meter butterfly, both last summer.

At the Olympic trials, she swam the 100 fly in 59.11 seconds, placing 22nd out of 76 swimmers; the 100 freestyle in 55.52 seconds (including a career-best time in preliminaries), placing 30th out of 56 swimmers (she was seeded 35th) and fifth among swimmers 18 and under; and the 50 freestyle in 25.37 seconds, placing 26th out of 77 competitors (within 0.19 seconds of her personal best). She also placed fifth among swimmers 18 and under in the event.

She felt the most competitive in the 50 free. “(My) breath placement and breakout speed were really good,” she said.

Larsen’s first race was the 100 fly, and she admits she was pretty excited. “I went out pretty fast,” she said. “But that was my second-best meet speed ever. I just recently dropped a full second, so coming off a big drop and still getting that close, I felt really good about.”

Larsen competed with some of the best in the sport in a few of her preliminary heats.

“Gretchen (Walsh) was in my 100 fly prelim before she set the world record in the semis,” she said. “That was pretty cool.” Walsh set the world record at 55.18 seconds.

Abbey Weitzeil and Simone Manuel were in Larsen’s 50 free preliminary heat. Manuel made the Olympic team in that event, and Weitzeil later made the team in the 100 free.

Larsen said her heat in the event with the fewest swimmers was one of her favorites.

“The 100 free was a very small event, only 50-some people, but it was incredibly competitive,” she said. “I was with pretty much all of the national junior team. And we were joking that it was the same as the heat last year at summer juniors.”

The entire final heat was made up of her fellow junior nationals competitors, she said.

“It honestly was one of my favorite races, because it was with all of the people I know and I talk with all the time,” she said. “So, they’re not the biggest names yet, but Madi Mintenko from Pike’s Peak (Colorado), she’s incredible, was in that heat.” Mintenko took 24th in the 100 free (just two spots ahead of Larsen) and eighth in the 400 free.

Fangirling in a swim stadium

Did she have a chance to hang out with Smith, who hails from Lakeville, or ask Ledecky for swimming tips?

As in many sports, it’s an unspoken rule that you don’t interact with the “stars” during a competition, Larsen said. She tends to meet more people at smaller events where the stakes are also smaller.

“But you’re definitely fangirling when I see, like, Katie Ledecky walk by, I’m freaking out,” she said. “You watch a world record go down, you’re freaking out. So, it’s fun to meet them, but you also kind of gotta, like, stay relaxed. You’re at the same meet, you know?”

Larsen had never witnessed a venue such as the one built in Lucas Oil Stadium. Three temporary pools – two 50-meter and one 25-meter – were installed over the field that has hosted a Super Bowl and NCAA football and men’s basketball championships, among other events.

“At the entrance, we’d walk through and go down to the event level and they had athlete lounges, sound setup and massage therapy rooms and coaches’ offices,” she said. “When you walk in, the first thing you see is what looks like a wall and you go upstairs and around the warmup pool, up some more stairs, past the black curtain.”

Once inside the stadium, the view is overwhelming, she said.

“You walk in and see all the stands, and this pool in the middle,” she said. “And it’s bright blue, and there’s the giant Jumbotron in the center of it, right on top of the pool.”

The 3-meter-deep competition pool was surrounded by raised decking. During most competitions, the pool deck is teeming with swimmers and coaches. Here, it was cleared during events, which made for a dramatic setting.

“I think for myself, it was more weird to look around, because pools are never set up like that,” she said. “You never see that. You never don’t see coaches across the side of the pool. That’s never the case. So it was very, very unique.”

Unique enough that you have to come home with some souvenirs.

Larsen isn’t a big souvenir collector, but she does keep all of her meet credentials. “They have your little picture on it and your little, like, credential, and you carry that around to get into the pool as an athlete,” she said. “So I always keep those.”

At the Olympic trials, each swimmer received a kickboard and a water bottle.

She also bought herself a new pair of swim fins. “So, even though they’re not branded with trials, I’ll remember that I got them there,” she said. “Of course, we got shirts and stuff because all that apparel is fun.”

Larsen also has a special souvenir from the 11- and 12-year-olds she coaches at her home club, Foxjets.

“They made me a big sign and a couple of the little girls made bracelets, and so I keep those in my bag,” she said.

Larsen has coached the girls for more than a year. “It’s a really fun group,” she said. “It’s been a great reminder of how fun swimming can be.”

Foxjets finale and off to Louisville

In mid-August, Larsen heads to the University of Louisville, where she plans to major in exercise science with a minor in sports administration and psychology.

She will also be part of a Cardinals swim team that placed sixth in the nation in 2024, its eighth top-10 national finish in the past nine years.

The college swim season goes from September through March, so training will begin right away, she said. She went to orientation in May and has all of her classes set.

Before that, though, Larsen and her sister, Faith, 21, an incoming senior at the University of Northern Iowa, will head to Irvine, California, later this month to compete in the 2024 USA Speedo Summer Championship. “It will be our final Foxjets meet, and we want to share that,” she said.

She will stay in Louisville to train most of the school year, so this will be the end of her Foxjets swimming career.

“So this is the last time,” she said. “It was interesting, because the whole year, I had all these finals things, but it never felt final. But at the end of trials, there was something so final about that experience, because it’s what I’ve been training for with the club for a decade. Essentially, it had been my biggest dream in swimming, to qualify for trials.

“Everybody knows that the Olympic trials is the fastest meet in the world. It’s going to be faster than the Olympics. Eighth place (in the trials) is going to be faster than there.”

Her last couple of Foxjets meets won’t be anything like the Olympic trials, and she likes that. “It’s going to probably be emotional, but I feel like getting through that finale felt like such a culminating moment of everything I’ve done with the team for so long. So, yeah, that’s a big moment.”

The next U.S. Olympic swim trials will be in June 2028 in anticipation of the XXXIV Games in Los Angeles.

Women’s and men’s Olympic swim events begin July 27 and continue through Aug. 4. Diving begins July 27 and runs through Aug. 10.