Olivia Peoples Swims Fly on Florida’s 4×50 Free Relay, Splits 22.25

2024 Women’s NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships

• March 20-23, 2024
• Gabrielsen Natatorium, Athens, Georgia
• Short Course Yards (25 yards)
• Meet Central
• Psych Sheets
• SwimSwam Preview Index
• Live Results
• Live Stream
• SwimSwam Pick ’em Contest
• Day 1 Finals Live Recap
• Day 2 Finals Live Recap

When we say ‘freestyle,’ collective swimdom agrees that we’re referring to ‘front crawl,’ but by rule, a swimmer can use any style to swim a freestyle race.

And so, in the 200 yard freestyle relay on Thursday, Florida junior Olivia Peoples did just that.

After Bella Sims led off with 21.94 and Isabel Ivy clocked a 21.33 on leg 2, Peoples dove in and swam butterfly. When she got to the 25 wall, she did a flip turn and continued home in butterfly, splitting a 22.25 for her ‘freestyle’ leg. Micayla Cronk finished with 21.71 for a combined 1:27.23 and 10th-place finish overall.

Despite the butterfly leg, Florida was only off their seed time by .72.

Why would Peoples swim butterfly? Because she thought she’d be faster than with freestyle. And in fact, she was, indeed, .14 faster than she had been at SECs in February, when she split a 22.39 freestyle leg on the same relay.

Headed into NCAAs, Peoples’s best flat-start freestyle this season was 22.76, the 5th-fastest on the team. Ahead of her were Cronk (21.85), Sims (21.88), and Ivey (22.27), all from the SEC Championships. Ekaterina Nikonova had gone 22.47 at the Georgia Fall Invitational, but she was injured for NCAAs.

That left Peoples to fill in, and in her estimation, she would be faster for her team swimming butterfly.

She was the only swimmer of the Gators’ finals foursome at NCAAs who split faster at NCAAs than she did at SECs (where she swam the ‘front crawl’).

Florida Splits, 200 Free Relay, NCAAs (change from SECs):

• Bella Sims – 21.94 (+0.06)
• Isabel Ivey – 21.33 (+0.30)
• Olivia Peoples – 22.25 (-0.14)
• Micayla Cronk – 21.71 (-0.50)

Note that, according to USA Swimming and NCAA rules, as long as the swimmer touches the walls at both ends of the pool, it is a legal ‘freestyle’ swim. Therefore, while she chose to do butterfly, Peoples was not obligated to touch either wall with two hands. Thus the flip turn.

You can watch the race here. Florida is in lane 3; Peoples is the third leg of the relay.