Olympic Swimming 2021: Women’s 100m Butterfly Medal Winners, Times and Results

AP Photo/Matthias Schrader

Canada’s Margaret MacNeil is an Olympic gold medalist.

MacNeil won the women’s 100-meter butterfly on Sunday (Monday in Japan) at the Tokyo Games and was joined by China’s Yufei Zhang (silver) and Australia’s Emma McKeon (bronze) on the podium.

The race was tight throughout with MacNeil capturing gold with one final push that got her to the wall just .05 seconds ahead of Zhang and .13 seconds ahead of McKeon.

Perhaps nobody was more disappointed with the nailbiter result than American Torri Huske, who finished in fourth place and a stunning .01 seconds off the podium.

Anything but a thrilling race would have been a surprise given how close the field was heading into the competition. Eric Goodman of NBCOlympics.com noted the top six swimmers were all within 0.75 seconds of each other during the qualifying process.

One of those top six swimmers was Huske.

The 18-year-old had the opportunity to become the youngest gold medal winner in the 100-meter butterfly since 1980, per Jake Lourim of the Washington Post.

She turned heads while qualifying for the Olympics by breaking Dana Vollmer’s nine-year-old American record in the semifinals and then beating her own mark in the finals with a time of 55.66 seconds.

That mark was also the fastest in the world in 2021 coming into the Olympics, per Christine Brennan of USA Today.

That put Huske squarely under the spotlight for Sunday’s race, and she held the lead at one point during the final 50 meters.

However, she couldn’t hold off MacNeil, Zhang and McKeon in one of the closest races there will be throughout the Olympics.