Torri Huske has spent the year telling anyone who asked that she wanted to widen her event programme, and at the 2026 TYR Pro Swim Series in Sacramento she put the racing behind the words.
The Paris 2024 100m butterfly Olympic champion qualified into two A-finals on day one of the Sacramento meet, including a top-seeded swim in the women's 200m individual medley heats. The 200m IM has never been a primary event for Huske at a senior international level — she has historically swum the 200m freestyle as a secondary event behind her sprint butterfly and freestyle programme — but the medley addition is consistent with what her Stanford training group has publicly described as a deliberate broadening of her endurance base ahead of the 2026 World Championships and Los Angeles 2028.
Huske's heat time was set up by a strong butterfly leg, an area where she does not need to gain anything, but the breaststroke split was the more meaningful number. Critics of Huske as a medley swimmer have always pointed to the breaststroke as the limiter, and on Sacramento day one she showed measurable improvement on that 50m section relative to her college-level personal bests.
The Sacramento meet is unusual in the US Olympic cycle calendar because it gives senior athletes a heavyweight opening hit-out without the trials pressure that would arrive later in the summer. Huske is using it to settle her programme. Coaches across multiple US national-team training groups have suggested over the past 12 months that the deepest women's IM field at LA 2028 will likely include butterfly-strong athletes who can hold their breaststroke and freestyle together — a profile she fits.
Elsewhere in the women's events, Sacramento featured Olivia Smoliga in the back-end sprint freestyles, Regan Smith in the backstroke programme, and a string of NCAA-era prospects looking for senior-level meet form before college dual seasons resume.
Huske's American teammates have not always taken kindly to swimmers crossing event boundaries late in a career — there are only so many qualifying spots — but the maths of US Olympic team selection means broader is generally better. Huske does not need to win the 200m IM trials final to make the team in the event; she just needs to keep showing she belongs in the final. On Sacramento day one she did exactly that.
The finals session of the 200m IM was held later in the schedule with Finlay Knox and Grant House setting the pace in the men's equivalent. Huske returns to the pool through the remainder of the four-day meet with at least three more events on her programme.
