Note: Opinions in this article don’t reflect the views of SwimSwam as a whole.
There aren’t many active swimmers in the world who have had as many “oh-so-close” moments as Carson Foster.
Foster’s career trajectory is well-known swimming lore now. He started his career as a child phenom, breaking national age group records when he was as young as ten years old. At age 16, like many other talented teenage male swimmers, his name began getting spoken in the same breath as Michael Phelps after he broke Phelps’s 15-16 NAG in the 400 IM. He won World Junior titles and quickly rose to become the top recruit in his class, committing to Texas. He decided to graduate high school early to prepare for the Olympic games, with many believing that he had a shot at qualifying for Tokyo.
When Foster entered college, his kingdom of promise began to crumble. He clocked a 3:35.27 400-yard IM in one of his first-ever collegiate races (which at that time, made him the #2 performer of all-time) but then added considerable time and faded in the closing leg racing the event at the 2021 NCAA Championships, blowing a lead to Florida’s Bobby Finke even though his personal best would have won. This was a precursor to what would happen at the Olympic trials, where he headed into the final 100 meters of the 400 IM in the lead but got run down by Chase Kalisz and Jay Litherland on the home stretch, missing Tokyo by a hair. To rub more salt in the wound, he later ended up posting a 400 IM time that would have won at the Olympics by nearly a second.
Following Foster’s early mishaps as a college, a narrative that he couldn’t swim fast at the right moments developed. That was quickly disproven though, as he qualified for his first World Championships in the summer of his sophomore year and claimed two silver medals in personal best fashion — in fact, his 400 IM time (4:06.56) makes him the #8 performer ever. In a sense, he did live up to his age group hype, becoming one of America’s top swimmers in the 200/400 IM, 200/400 free, 200 back, and 200 fly while his yards times also improved. However, a new problem emerged: there was a guy who was better than him.
Like Foster, France’s Leon Marchand was a 400 IM specialist who also excelled in 200 stroke events. Like Foster, he got the Phelps comparisons — and although he wasn’t American, his connection to Phelps may have been even stronger considering that they shared the same coach in Bob Bowman. But unlike Foster, Marchand won on the biggest stage. He defeated Foster in the four times they faced off at the NCAA Championships and in the five times they raced in the World Championships. One of those times came when Marchand broke Phelps’s world record in the 400 IM, and afterward, the two swimmers were atop the medal podium together while Foster stood to the side.
Oh, and the 400 IM world record was held by an American for 29 years before Marchand broke it.
Foster clearly still has that fire in him — he gave back his college scholarship and finished his NCAA career early (without an individual championship to his name) to go all-in on the Olympics. He opted to swim at the 2024 World Championships, where he failed to win an individual title but still stepped up big-time on relays to help Team USA earn medals. But his mishaps at Worlds made me think about his overall career pathway and the bigger picture surrounding people like him.
The sad reality is that we hype up so many young swimmers as ‘”generational talents,” but there’s only little room at the top when those swimmers get older. This especially holds for American swimmers, who are widely covered throughout their childhoods (and a lot of this has to do with American swimmers being more accessible from a media perspective) and get their accomplishments measured through the eons of NAGs available to be broken. Many grow up to get upstaged by international swimmers who seemingly “come from nowhere,” but the reality is that they just didn’t get the same level of exposure. We fall victim to a recognition heuristic — we favor the more well-known swimmers until suddenly they aren’t anymore.
The story of age group phenoms who are struggling to win gold on a senior level right now doesn’t apply to just Foster — it’s the story of swimmers like Michael Andrew, Regan Smith, and many others. But I can’t help but feel like it stings more when you’re an American male who grew up watching Phelps and swimming the same events as Phelps (Luca Urlando is in a slightly similar situation right now), in a time where there’s pressure on Team USA to find its “next Phelps.” And especially when the athlete you’re constantly being beaten by has a stronger Phelps narrative than you and is preventing you from reaching the top. And this isn’t supposed to paint Marchand as a villain, it’s just that out of the hundreds of talented young swimmers who dream of following the footsteps of the G.O.A.T, only a handful can make that dream a reality.
Winning silver medals shouldn’t be seen as some sort of failure, as gold is such a rare phenomenon in swimming. And yet, the endless winning culture in American swimming makes it seem like a prerequisite.
Now, I don’t want to make this story a pity piece on Foster. Sure, he’s in a tricky spot in his career where it seems like he’s stuck in this eternal bridesmaid status, and there’s not much pointing in favor of him defeating Marchand or other gold medal contenders this summer — even though six of the last seven Olympic gold medalists in the men’s 400 IM were American. But we are still five months out from Paris, and the Olympics are the March Madness of swimming in the sense that anything can happen.
My point isn’t to debate Foster’s chances, though. His recent World Championships struggles just reminded me of the emotional weight that built up throughout his career that will inevitably peak this summer, whether that be so-called “mental blocks,” Phelpsian expectations, and rivalries that keep on swinging in favor of one person. It’s especially important to note this when the American men are still held firmly in Phelps’s grip after his retirement, where he’s the standard that everyone is still compared to but most won’t ever come remotely close to reaching. This is emphasized a thousand times more right now when the Americans are entering Paris with a team that will likely have limited gold medal opportunities.
Could the “what could have been” in Foster’s life story get answered this summer? Possibly. But right now, his career (which can still be considered extremely successful regardless of what he does in Paris) serves as a reflection on the ideas of expectation, promise, role models, and gold being viewed as an end-all-be-all in American swimming. After all, they don’t say it’s lonely at the top for no reason.