Let’s backtrack.
When he was 13, Jake Mitchell moved from northern California to Carmel, Indiana, a suburb of Indianapolis.
Indiana has a long and proud history of high school and college swimming. The Carmel swim club is one of the best in the nation.
Mitchell and Drew Kibler, who goes to Texas, are the first Carmel swimmers to make the U.S. Olympic team. Kibler is two years older than Mitchell. They are good friends. Kibler is due to swim Tuesday in the prelims of the 4x200 free relay.
At the Trials in Omaha, Mitchell went from fifth to second in the final 50 meters of the 400 free. His problem: he touched in 3:48.17. Too slow. To make the 2020 Olympics, swimming’s international governing body, FINA, demands that everybody in the men’s 400 free have raced at least 3:46.78; in swim lingo, this is what’s called an “A cut.”
USA Swimming officials opted to let Mitchell swim by himself in the Omaha pool. If he could get under the A cut time, he would be good. If not, then others in the field would get the chance to qualify.
Nerves? “I was super-nervous in the staging area. Shaking almost,” Mitchell has since said.
The crowd roared for him that night as he went out strong and held on, finishing in 3:45.86, way better than what he needed and more than two seconds faster than his prior race.
“It’s probably the coolest thing I’ve seen in swimming,” Mike Barbini, the USA Swimming national team performance director, has said.
“We’re such good friends,” Mitchell would say of Kibler. “To see him make it, I knew I had to make it as well. I knew I could.”
After the Trials, reports from the swim team’s pre-Tokyo camp in Hawaii said Mitchell was turning it on.
At 19 years and seven months, Mitchell became the youngest U.S. male to swim at an Olympics since 2004. He was seeded 13th. That meant he should not have made the final.
But he did.
In Saturday’s prelims, in that white swim cap, Mitchell went 3:45.38. If at an Olympics you go faster than you did at Trials, that’s performance under pressure. What more can you ask?
Especially because Mitchell had told insiders that what he really wanted here was that black cap.
That 3:45.38 earned Mitchell a seventh-place seed in Sunday’s race. The only guy lower: Hafnaoui, 18, all the way across the pool in Lane Eight, who would, you know, win. Which no one saw coming.
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July 25, 2021 at 01:34PM
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Abrahamson: Black cap in hand, USA swimmer Mitchell takes last place win - NBC Olympics
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