Paris Olympics: Regan Smith wins silver in women's 200 backstroke

PARIS — Regan Smith won the fifth silver medal of her still-young Olympic career, but fell just short of an elusive gold in the women’s 200-meter backstroke.

She fell, once again, to Australia’s Kaylee McKeown, who won Friday’s race in 2:03.73. Smith led at the 100- and 150-meter marks. But McKeown closed strong, and finished in Olympic-record time.

It is Smith’s sixth career medal, after two silvers and a bronze in Tokyo, and two silvers in the 100-meter backstroke and 200-meter butterfly earlier this week.

To many swimmers — and to teenage Regan — it would be tinged with disappointment. For many, the pursuit of Olympic gold is uncompromising and binary. To come up short, again and again, by tenths of a second, would be crushing.

“If this had happened to me three years ago, I would have been so unbelievably gutted, and it would have really affected my mental health for a long time,” Smith said Thursday. “And it did. I was struggling after Tokyo for a really long time.”

But for Smith, now 22, maturity has changed her outlook on the sport.

“I’m not too worried about medal count and what I need to do to get a specific color of medal,” she said after Thursday’s butterfly silver. “If you get too caught up in things like colors of medals, I think that’s how you’re going to crumble.”

She has focused, instead, “on my own thing,” on personal growth, outside the pool and in it. She has tried, over the past few years, to become the best version of herself.

And that’s why she was “so proud” of her previous silver. She was proud of the time.

“And to be honest with you, I don’t want to think about what it means to win gold versus silver, because I think when you get so wrapped up in that, then you’re never going to be happy,” she explained. “When you do win the gold, it’s like, ‘OK, well what’s after that?’ I just want to be proud of myself regardless. And I know that sounds like such a cliché answer, but it’s true.”

She later clarified: “I’m going to keep fighting like hell and doing the very best that I can do. If I walk away as a gold medalist in a relay or an individual event, excellent.” She very well could by the end of the weekend, in either the women’s medley relay or the mixed medley relay. She very will could four years from now in Los Angeles.

But for now, she said, “I’m going to be proud of myself no matter what, as long as I do the races I know that I’m capable of.” That Summer McIntosh and McKeown are capable of slightly more does not change who she is.