Olympic swimming trials results: Caeleb Dressel, Simone Manuel qualify for Paris -

INDIANAPOLIS — The week’s biggest crowd at Lucas Oil Field had already been treated to a seven-course menu of delights Wednesday night at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials — superstars dueling upstarts, frantic two-length sprints and grueling 30-length slogs, and a half-dozen new names added to the Team USA roster for next month’s Paris Olympics — when the most important male swimmer in America climbed the starting blocks for the final of the men’s 100-meter freestyle, and every eyeball in the place locked in on Lane 3.

On a night when Katie Ledecky and Kate Douglass each won a final and when Simone Manuel earned a relay spot to become a third-time Olympian, the biggest roar from the announced crowd of 22,209 was reserved for the night’s final race — and for Caeleb Dressel.

When the churned-up, white-capped water finally settled, the smile on Dressel’s face as he hung on the wall told the story even more vividly than the time on the scoreboard: Dressel, the seven-time Olympic gold medalist, was heading to a third Olympics. But this one landed differently.

In a blistering 100 free final, Dressel finished third in 47.53 seconds, behind Chris Guiliano (47.38) and Jack Alexy (47.47). Guiliano and Alexy, both first-time Olympians, will represent Team USA in the individual event in Paris, while Dressel and fourth-place finisher Hunter Armstrong (47.78) locked up relay spots. Though he won’t get to defend his Tokyo 2020 gold medal in the 100 free, Dressel, 27, still has chances remaining in the 50 free and 100 butterfly to earn individual spots in Paris.

But for Dressel, the relay berth completed a remarkable and perilous story arc for which a happy outcome was far from guaranteed. A five-time gold medalist in Tokyo, Dressel spent much of the next three years battling mental health issues — which forced him to withdraw in the middle of the 2022 world championships in Budapest, then miss the 2023 worlds in Japan entirely — then trying to work his body back into championship shape in a condensed time frame. The range of outcomes at this meet for Dressel was extreme and almost impossible to predict.

Not long after his race, Dressel walked over to the stands and threw himself into a long, tearful embrace with his wife, Meghan, and their infant son, August. In a deck-side interview, he spoke directly to the crowd: “You don’t know how much it means to me — the love I get from you. It’s been tough. I’m having fun.”

Bookending Dressel’s redemptive race at the end of the night was Manuel’s at the beginning — a fourth-place finish in the women’s 100 free (53.25) that earned her a spot on the Paris relay, along with Kate Douglass (52.56), Torri Huske (52.93) and Gretchen Walsh (53.13). Like Dressel, Manuel was a massive star in the sport who has spent the years since Tokyo trying to hold her career together.

In Manuel’s case, it was a diagnosis of overtraining syndrome in 2021 that forced a total shutdown from the sport for nearly a year and kept her out of international competition in 2022 and 2023. But she remains a towering figure in the sport, a five-time Olympic medalist and, by virtue of her victory in the 100 free at the Rio de Janeiro Games in 2016, the first Black woman to win an individual Olympic swimming gold.

“It means everything to me,” said Manuel, wiping away tears, of her return to the Olympics. “People close to me really know the journey it took for me to get here. So I’m really proud of myself and proud to represent the USA. … I basically started from ground zero. I think it’s important for me to look back and be proud of myself for continuing to fight through this process and believe in myself.”

Douglass, on the short list of the most versatile female swimmers in the world, pulled off an impressive double, winning the 100 free to lock up a roster spot in Paris, then coming back about 90 minutes later to win her semifinal heat in the 200 breaststroke (2:21.23) and lead the qualifying for Thursday night’s final.

Douglass, the bronze medalist in the 200 individual medley in Tokyo, will also swim that event here as the overwhelming favorite later in the meet and could also swim the 50 free, in which she is the American record holder. If she makes Team USA’s roster in free, breast and IM, she would be the first American woman to swim those three disciplines in one Olympics. Oh, and she’s also a former NCAA champion in the butterfly.

In contrast to Douglass, Ledecky does one thing — swim an exhausting number of freestyle laps — better than anyone in history. On Wednesday night, she won her third (and longest) event of the week, the women’s 1,500 free, in 15:37.35. It was the 16th-fastest time in history, with Ledecky herself owning all 15 of the faster ones, though she sounded disappointed with it.

“I got a little sloppy tonight,” she said. “… I would’ve loved it to have been a little faster. But I’ll take it, and I’ll be faster in a few weeks.

Katie Grimes was second, in 15:57.77, clinching her a third event in Paris, after the 400 individual medley and the 10k open-water race.

Ledecky, 27, previously won the 400 free and 200 free here, and she still has the 800 to come. She has said she expects to drop the individual 200 free in Paris, in the interest of saving herself for her core events, but will swim the 4x200 free relay, most likely as the anchor.

Seventeen-year-old Thomas Heilman surged to victory in the men’s 200 butterfly final with a time of 1:54.50 to become the youngest male swimmer to make Team USA’s Olympic roster in 24 years. Luca Urlando (1:55.08) finished second to grab the second Olympic spot; three years ago, he finished third in both butterfly finals, by a combined margin of about half a second, to narrowly miss out in the most brutal fashion possible.

The men’s 200 breast final produced a pair of first-time Olympians in Matthew Fallon, who set an American record at 2:06.54, and Josh Matheny in 2:08.86. In 2021, Fallon held the top seed entering the final of at the Olympic trials but finished last.

It was Armstrong, the fourth-place finisher in the men’s 100 free, who put a bow on a riveting night of swimming with a comment during a deck-side interview that seemed designed to add fuel to the burgeoning United States-Australia rivalry. At the 2023 world championships, where the Aussies surged past the Americans in the gold medal count, Team USA’s members irked their Australian counterparts by ringing cowbells in the stands to celebrate American victories.

“More importantly,” Armstrong blurted to the crowd in a purposeful non sequitur to a different question, “we need more cowbell.”

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