Josh Matheny crosses his arms over his gray Pittsburgh Elite Aquatics T-shirt and squints under the brim of his Team USA ball cap, looking out over the nine-lane, 50-meter outdoor pool in front of him.
Asked his favorite place to practice, he doesn’t hesitate.
“This one,” he says, nodding to the still water of Scott Township Pool. “The sun beating down on you — you just feel better in the water.”
At 9:30 a.m., it’s already a muggy 82 degrees that makes the “feels like” function on the weather app read 88 — and even that seems generous.
Matheny just finished a two-hour workout six hours before an afternoon practice at Upper St. Clair High School, his alma mater as of June 9. He will follow this schedule for the summer — daily morning practice at Scott Township with additional afternoon practices every Monday and Wednesday — before heading off to swim at Indiana University in August.
The 18-year-old is settling back into a normal routine after a whirlwind week at the Olympic trials in Omaha, Neb., where elite swimmers he’d watched for years became his peers. Omaha’s CHI Health Center is a confluence of the country’s best swimmers every four years — the COVID-postponement made it five — and Matheny was suddenly right in the thick of it.
“It's a lot crazier than I thought,” Matheny said. “It was definitely the most nervous I've ever been for a swim.”
Trials by fire
Matheny’s Trials slate started early, with the 100-meter breaststroke prelims falling at the end of the first session of the eight-day meet. He was seeded eighth in the 100 and seventh in the 200-meter breaststroke, and on June 13, Matheny made the seven-minute drive for his first race of the week from the Airbnb rental he shared with his parents, Jeffrey and Kristin, and oldest sister, Meghan. Matheny’s longtime coach, Dave Schraven, was in another Airbnb nearby.
Like many elite swimmers, Matheny’s family has a strong swim background. Kristin swam at Bowdoin College, Meghan through high school, and other sister Abby is entering her senior year as a swimmer at Williams College.
The family is familiar with pre-meet jitters, but Kristin says the week in Omaha put them all “on pins and needles.”
“You wanted it to just be over so you'd know that he did OK,” she said. “But you didn't want it to be over because you wanted to enjoy the moment.”
Matheny’s first race, the 100 breaststroke prelim, was over by a little after 12 p.m. local time on Sunday — two hours into the meet. His third-place finish in his heat was good for the sixth-fastest time overall, sending him easily into the semifinal that night.
Eight hours later, his semifinal result was identical: third in his heat, sixth overall. He advanced to the eight-man final, where he would race in Lane 7.
“He knew in the 100, making the A-final would be a huge accomplishment,” Kristin said.
Once in the A-final, all that stands between every swimmer in the pool and an Olympic berth is one fast, perfectly executed race.
Minutes before the first swim of his life with those stakes, Matheny is the youngest in the ready room by three years — and the only one of the eight who didn’t compete in the 2016 Olympic trials.
“To be the youngest one in there is definitely intimidating, to look to your left and right and see the American record holder and previous American record holder,” Matheny said.
He’s referring to 22-year-old Michael Andrew, who set a new American record in the event in prelims the day before, and 27-year-old Kevin Cordes, whose record Andrew broke. Andrew, entering the finals with the top seed, was in Lane 4; Cordes was slotted next to Matheny in Lane 6.
In that pre-race moment, Matheny trained his focus on the AC/DC songs pumping through his headphones, trying not to think about the people around him, reminding himself it doesn’t matter who they are.
“It's quiet in there,” he said. “Nobody wants to say anything.”
Matheny won’t forget the anticipation of sitting in the ready room but fixates on the moment that follows. Before every finals race, the CHI Health Center beams each swimmer on a screen as they emerge from the ready room and line up behind their blocks. During his turn, Matheny remembered hearing his friends cheer his name.
“Walking out of that chute and seeing myself on the big screen I was like, ‘I made it,’” Matheny said. “That's definitely what's going to stick with me the most.”
Two minutes later, the biggest race of his life was over, and he touched the wall fifth — moving up a spot from his final seeding and three spots from the initial psych sheet. It won’t send him to Tokyo, but the race still did what it needed to for the 18-year-old. One solid swim later, Matheny’s first A-final at Trials was in the books.
A bright future
Coming in 1.49 seconds behind first-place finisher Michael Andrew and 1.48 seconds behind second-place finisher Andrew Wilson, Matheny avoided one of those heart-wrenching, one-hundredth-of-a-second-away finishes that can keep swimmers up at night for years.
Schraven, Matheny’s current coach, and Ray Looze, his soon-to-be head coach at Indiana, both know the disappointment is there anyway — and of course it is.
“He was hoping to swim faster,” Schraven said. “I just reminded him, ‘Hey, man, this is your first Olympic trials. You're on national television, and you got a fifth-place medal at the most difficult meet in the world.’”
Matheny’s 200 race didn’t go as well as the 100; he finished seventh in his heat and 20th overall, which nudged him four spots away from the semifinal that night. But he left Omaha with his first final in a meet of that caliber under his belt.
“There's more pressure here than the Olympic Games,” Looze said. “People don't quite understand that the United States is so good. I mean, we'll have the third- and fourth- and in some cases fifth-best people in the world, and they don't even get to go if we only take the top two.”
Looze is confident Matheny has the makings to be in that top two: the confidence, the drive, the ability to perform under extreme pressure. And next time, he won’t be the lone swimmer in the ready room who’s experiencing the meet for the first time.
“He learned a lot,” Looze said. “This is the way Olympic trials can go the first time out.”
Had Matheny qualified for Tokyo — “You don't see any high school boys making this Olympic team,” Looze quips — he would have been the youngest member of the men’s roster and a full five years younger than the roster’s average.
His next chance will come in three years, and the road to the Paris 2024 Olympics might culminate a little closer to home. Indianapolis, just 50 miles away from Matheny in Bloomington, is one of four finalists to host the Trials in 2024.
Matheny shies away from getting too specific about any aspirations for that meet but admits he’s glad his wait is abbreviated by a year.
“Yeah, Paris 2024 would be his goal, but I'm not sure he would ever say that,” Kristin Matheny said, “because he'd just like to swim to the best of his ability. And hopefully, if that happens, everything else will fall in place.”
And those stars have begun to align, albeit years in advance.
In 2024, Matheny will be 21 years old — just two years shy of the average age of the U.S. men’s 2021 Olympic roster. He will be coming off his junior year at Indiana under the tutelage of one of the greatest breaststroke coaches in the sport. He will have swam his best events, the 100- and 200-meter breaststrokes, in a handful of meets that incite pre-race nerves that aren’t that different than Trials, including, hopefully, World Championships and NCAA championships.
Schraven doesn’t want to put pressure on his young swimmer, but he gets excited talking about it: “That's his time, you know what I mean?”
Matheny stays reserved — he’s taking things one race at a time — but he has pondered what it would be like to be an Olympian, mulled over how it would feel to be an Olympic gold medalist.
Matheny has a better idea than most; after winning the 200-meter breaststroke at the World Junior Swimming Championships in 2019, he stood atop the podium as the United States flag was raised and the anthem played.
He has imagined seeing the same flag, hearing the same anthem, with a different podium under his feet.
“I mean, they show it on TV,” he said. “The emotions that those people go through is just — it's just incredible. It would be such an honor to stand on that podium wearing red, white and blue.”
In three years, Matheny will have traded his Pittsburgh Elite Aquatics T-shirt for an Indiana one, but that Team USA hat doesn't seem to be going anywhere.
Caroline Pineda: cpineda@post-gazette.com and Twitter @carolinepineda_.
First Published: June 30, 2021, 2:32 p.m.
Updated: June 30, 2021, 2:38 p.m.
