UVA senior Gretchen Walsh won her first gold medal, as a member of the Mixed 4X100 Medley Relay, one of three medals won by UVA swimmers at the 2024 Paris Olympics on Saturday.
UVA alum Kate Douglass won silver in the 200 IM, and another alum, Paige Madden, won bronze in the 800 Free.
The three-medal day brings the total for the UVA swim team at the 2024 games to eight – two golds, five silvers and a bronze.
Walsh has three medals at this year’s Olympics – the relay gold and silvers in the 100 Fly and the 4×100 Free Relay.
Madden finished third in the 800 Free, dropping five seconds from her personal best time to clock 8:13.00, a Virginia long-course record time.
USA’s Katie Ledecky won the race in 8:11.04, with Ariarne Titmus of Australia taking silver with 8:12.29.
This is Madden’s first individual Olympic medal. She is a two-time medalist in relays, taking silver in the 4×200 Free Relay in both Tokyo and earlier this week in Paris.
Douglass posted a time of 2:06.92 in the 200 IM, finishing second behind Canada’s Summer McIntosh, who won the race in an Olympic-record time of 2:06.59.
Kaylee McKeown of Australia took the bronze with a 2:08.08.
Douglass was the bronze medalist in the 200 IM in Tokyo.
This is Douglass’s third medal of the games, with a gold in the 200 Breast and a silver in the 4×100 Relay.
In the 200 IM, UVA grad student Alex Walsh hit the wall third with a time of 2:07.06 and seemed to have won bronze, but she was disqualified after a video review showed that she was flipped too far on her stomach going into the backstroke-to-breaststroke turn instead of finishing the leg completely on her back.
On Sunday, Gretchen Walsh will compete in the final of the 50 Free, and Team USA will compete in the 4×100 Medley Relay Final, after Douglass and UVA junior Emma Weber both swam in the heats to help the U.S. qualify for the final, which will be the last swimming event of the Olympic Games.
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Chris Graham
