Pan Pacific Swimming Championships 2026: Katie Ledecky and Summer season McIntosh to go head-to-head

USA teammates Gretchen Walsh and Kate Douglass will face off within the girls’s 50m and 100m freestyle with a attainable world record-breaking remaining within the former. Douglass broke the 50m free world report on 19 June, solely to have Walsh decrease her time by 0.04 to 23.55 on 28 June.

Walsh can be racing the 50m and 100m butterfly, whereas Douglass is down for all three breaststroke races, the 50m butterfly and 200m particular person medley, although shouldn’t be prone to do all seven occasions she is entered in.

Walsh’s older sister, Alex Walsh, additionally has a packed program with eight occasions that she is prone to trim down, specializing in her signature 200m IM, by which she is a Tokyo 2020 Olympic silver medallist and 2022 world champion.

Other prime names for the USA girls on the meet embrace Paris 2024 100m butterfly champion Torri Huske, and backstroke specialists Regan Smith and Katharine Berkoff.

Jack Alexy is USA’s prime prospect for medals within the males’s 50m and 100m freestyle whereas three-time Olympic champion Bobby Finke is the person to beat over the 800m and 1500m free. Finke has additionally tagged on the 400m IM, which may result in his first main medal within the occasion.

Australia’s Sam Short is Finke’s greatest rival over the long-distance occasions. He arrives in California recent from sweeping gold within the males’s 400m, 800m and 1500m freestyle on the 2026 Commonwealth Games.

Zac Stubblety-Cook, an Olympic gold and silver medallist for Australia within the males’s 200m breast, will look so as to add to his medal tally throughout the 100m and 200m races in that stroke whereas his teammate, world medallist Elizabeth Dekkers, is among the many favourites throughout the girls’s butterfly occasions.

Three-time Olympic medallist Tang Qianting of the People’s Republic of China is likely one of the strongest contenders in girls’s breaststroke. She is entered within the 50m and 100m races.

Her teammate Yu Yiting, a two-time Olympic relay medallist, can be seeking to diversify her trophy case with extra particular person medals, focusing particularly on the 2 IMs which might pit her towards McIntosh and Alex Walsh.