As the final day of swimming at the 2024 Olympic Games approached, Team USA’s men had yet to clinch an individual victory. A 120-year-plus record was on the line, with only Bobby Finke left to race.
Luckily, Finke kept the streak alive, securing the gold — and setting a world record — in the men’s 1500-meter freestyle. Of the eight golds Team USA’s swimmers won in Paris, Finke’s was officially the only solo one by a man.
“It’s just getting really competitive, especially on the guy’s side,” Finke tells PEOPLE at the Team USA House in Paris on Aug. 5, reflecting. “It’s insane the amount of diverse countries that have won medals. I mean, we got Romania, Ireland, all these countries are coming up and winning medals.”
To put it in perspective, during the Tokyo Games, there were six individual male American gold medalist swimmers. Finke was one of them too, for the 1500-meter and the 800-meter freestyle. In Rio 2016, there were five.
“We’re not as dominant as we used to be, but at the end of the day, it’s a really good thing for the sport,” Finke, 24, says.
And he’s not down about it: “It’s showing that the sport’s growing and it’s something that we want to dominate, but it’s also something we should be proud of, where the sport has come.”
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Finke’s 1500-meter — done in 14:30.67 — had the crowd at Paris’ La Defense Arena roaring, though the swimmer says he was propelled by a “couple of glances at the board where they were showing the world record line.”
“I could see that I was half body length, a body length ahead of it,” he recounts. “And when I was seeing that, I was just getting a little more motivated and I was like, ‘Here we go. I got to keep going.’ ”
But will Finke, who also won a silver medal in Paris, keep going for the next Games, back home in the States in 2028?
“I’m never ruling anything out,” Finke tells PEOPLE of Los Angeles 2028. “I’m really just taking everything year by year.”
For now, he’s focused on some well-earned vacation time, including a trip to the south of France “to just enjoy some beach time again and relax.”
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