First Look at LA28: Swimming

Following the conclusion of the 2025 U.S. Swimming National Championships, USA Swimming released the roster for the World Championships in Singapore, scheduled to take place from July 27 to August 31.

The National Championships, which served as trials for the World Championship team, provided U.S. swim fans with their first glimpse of potential stars for the U.S. swim team at the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics.

U.S. Women’s Team

The U.S. women’s swim team in LA should be led by names we know from the Paris Olympics.

Gretchen Walsh, Torri Huske, Kate Douglass, and Regan Smith, will all swim in 4+ events in Singapore along with the most decorated U.S. female Olympian of all time, Katie Ledecky.

19 of the 22 female and mixed gender pool events2 at the 2025 World Championships should feature one of these five athletes competing for Team USA in it.

Walsh, Huske, Douglass, and Smith all won at least four medals each in Paris and could have had a bigger haul in LA with the addition of 50m strokes (breaststroke, backstroke, and butterfly). With all four of them being the U.S. national champion in one of the four 100m strokes, these women will likely comprise a powerful medley relay team for Worlds, featuring two world record holders in their respective events, Smith and Walsh, plus Olympic gold medalist Douglass in the breaststroke and Olympic silver medalist Huske anchoring the freestyle leg.

Gretchen Walsh will head to the World Championships as the gold medal favorite in three individual events (50m butterfly, 50m free, 100m butterfly), as 14-time world champion Sarah Sjöström is missing the World Championships due to her pregnancy and the expected birth of her first child in August. Meanwhile, if Walsh wins all four of her individual events and plays a part in securing gold in multiple relays, she could become the first U.S. woman to win seven gold medals at a single World Championships. 3 Walsh’s biggest competition could be teammate Torri Huske, the defending Olympic champ in the 100m butterfly, who swam the fastest time in the world this year in winning the 100m freestyle at the U.S. National Championships.

Katie Ledecky won three U.S. national titles as she heads to Singapore to compete in four events (400m, 800m, 1500m, 4x200m relay) in an attempt to become only the second athlete in history with over 30 World Championship medals, joining Michael Phelps. Ledecky, who has gone six-for-six in the women’s 800m freestyle world titles since her first World Championships appearance in 2013, could face her stiffest competition in that event from three-time Paris Olympic gold medalist Summer McIntosh, who became only the second swimmer in history to go under 8:05 in the 800m freestyle at the Canadian swim trials this week.

U.S. Men’s Team

Nearly a decade after Michael Phelps swam his last competitive race in Rio, the men’s team is very much in a post-Phelps era, looking for their next star to win multiple events at the World Championships. During the last three World Championships (2022, 2023, 2024) in the quad leading up to Paris, no American men won two world titles at a single World Championship, a feat previously accomplished by an American man at ten of the previous eleven World Championships this decade.

The U.S. men’s team will be led by three-time Olympic gold medalist Bobby Finke, who is hoping to add 1500m world champion to his resume after being a back-to-back Olympic champion in the event. Finke impressed at the U.S. National Championships by winning the 400 IM with the second-fastest time in the world this year (behind Olympic gold medalist Leon Marchand). However, he will not swim the event in Singapore, as the 400 IM and 1500m freestyle finals are held on the same day.

Missing from the world team is the entire men’s medley team from Paris (Ryan Murphy, Nic Fink, Caeleb Dressel, and Hunter Armstrong). The quartet had combined for over 60 World Championships medals and 25 Olympic medals for Team USA since the 2016 Rio Olympics, when both Murphy and Dressel were teammates of Michael Phelps.

The youth of the team is exemplified by Luka Mijatovic, a 16-year-old who made his first senior team in the 400m freestyle, becoming the first swimmer born after Phelps won eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics to be selected for a U.S. senior national team. Teenagers Campbell McKean and Thomas Heilman will try to medal in the 100m breaststroke and 100m butterfly, respectively, and could play a significant role in the middle legs of the medley relay teams, replacing Fink and Dressel.4

The only member of the U.S. men’s team who competed in the Rio Olympics, and did so against Phelps, was 30-year-old Santo Condorelli, who made his first U.S. national world team in the 50m freestyle. Condorelli had competed in two previous Olympic Games with two different countries, Canada in 2016 and Italy in 2021.

As of now, American men will be heading to Singapore with the fastest times in the world this year in five of the 17 men’s individual events, but they will face a very tough international field, where eight men have set world records in their respective events over the last three years.5

Luke Hobson who at the U.S. Championships became the first American man to swim under 1:44 in the 200m freestyle since Phelps has talked about the extra motivation of the first home Summer Olympics for Team USA in thirty-two years: “To win (Olympic) gold on home soil, I saw Leon (Marchand) do it a couple times last summer and that inspired me. It’s definitely something I’m working towards and something that motivates me every day.”