Gretchen Walsh just keeps making the 100m butterfly look impossible. At the Fort Lauderdale Open on May 3, 2026, the 23-year-old American touched the wall in 54.33 seconds — lowering her own world record by 0.27 seconds and rewriting the event's ceiling for the fourth time in roughly a year.

Walsh now holds the 13 fastest 100m butterfly times ever recorded.

The Race

The Fort Lauderdale Open is a low-key tune-up meet by international swimming standards — closer to a high-level training showcase than a championship. That's part of what makes Walsh's record so striking: she dropped it without taper, in a regular-season pool, in front of a modest crowd. She turned at 25.20, the fastest opening 50 in the event's history, and held form through a controlled back half to finish a full body length ahead of the field.

Her previous record of 54.60, set in the same pool, had stood for almost exactly a year. Walsh became the first woman to break the 55-second barrier in 2024. Each subsequent record has chipped away at what was, until very recently, considered the human edge of the event.

How Far She's Pushed the Event

Before Walsh started rewriting the record book, the 100m fly had been one of the most competitive events in women's swimming, with a tightly clustered top tier separated by hundredths of a second. Walsh has effectively pulled away from that pack. The previous benchmark before her 2024 breakthrough — Sarah Sjöström's long-standing record of 55.48 from 2016 — looks, by the standards of 2026, like a different sport. Walsh has now lowered the world mark by more than a full second in 13 months.

"I just feel like I keep finding small things to fix," Walsh said after the race. "It's never one big change. It's a lot of little ones."

What's Next

The Fort Lauderdale Open is part of a build toward the world championships and the Olympic cycle. Walsh has said her goals for the rest of 2026 include defending her 50m butterfly world record and chasing personal bests in her secondary events, including the 100m freestyle and the 50m freestyle. With the 100m butterfly, the open question now is whether she can push under 54 seconds — once considered absurd, but no longer impossible given the trajectory.

The Bigger Picture

Swimming records typically fall by tiny fractions, with each generation polishing technique, equipment, and training science to wring out a hundredth here and a hundredth there. Walsh's repeated, decisive lowering of the 100m butterfly mark is unusual — the kind of run that only a handful of athletes (Michael Phelps in the late 2000s; Katinka Hosszú in the women's medleys; Kelvin Kiptum in the marathon) have produced in any sport.

For now, the 100m butterfly belongs to her, and the most interesting question in the event isn't who will catch her. It's how much faster Gretchen Walsh thinks she can still swim.