100 metres Freestyle, Men

China’s Pan Zhanle was favored in this event. Pan had won the 2024 World Championship in the event earlier in the year, setting a world record of 46.80 while doing so. His biggest challenges were expected to come from Australian Kyle Chalmers, gold medalist at Rio 2016, silver medalist at Tokyo 2020, and the 2023 World Champion; and Romania’s David Popovici, the 2022 World Champion, who had already won the 200 freestyle in Paris. Caeleb Dressel was the defending gold medalist but he had not made the United States’ team for this event.

All three favorites made the final, along with hometown favorite Maxime Grousset, the silver medalist at the 2022 World Championships. Pan and Grousset had the fastest reaction times and led at 50 metres, but Pan was over 3/10ths of a second ahead by that point. Grousset could not maintain his speed and would finish fifth, as Chalmers and Popovici, who were eighth and seventh respectively at the halfway mark, came on and finished strongly. Neither made a dent in Pan’s lead, however, as he had the fastest second half and won the gold medal with another world record of 46.40. Behind him, Chalmers took silver and Popovici bronze.

Pan had obliterated the field, winning by an unheard of 1.08 seconds, the biggest margin of victory at the Olympics in a century, since Johnny Weissmuller (USA) won by 1.2 seconds in 1928 over Hungarian István Bárány. Pan bettered his world record by 0.40 seconds, the most improvement in the record since South Africa’s Jonty Skinner took 0.55 seconds off the mark back in 1976. Pan would win a second gold medal in Paris, in the men’s 4x100 medley relay, where he also closed in 45.92 on the anchor leg, the fastest split ever recorded.

After pre-Games revelations that 23 Chinese swimmers had tested positive in 2021, but all were exonerated, there were some raised eyebrows at Pan’s mark; however, he was not one of the 23 and he noted that he had been tested 29 times in the last year, all of which were negative.