Recap of Day 2 Finals at the 2025 U.S. Open

By Madeline Folsom on SwimSwam

2025 U.S. OPEN

Welcome to the first full finals session of the 2025 U.S. Open Championships. Tonight, we have a host of races with the top swimmers in the world racing each other as they try to end 2025 on a high note.

Schedule of Events

•  50 Back
•  400 Free
• 200 IM
• 50 Breast
• 50 Free

The meet will start with the 50 backstrokes. On the women’s side two of the best backstrokers in the world, Katharine Berkoff and Regan Smith, will be racing the 50 back with Berkoff, the American record holder in the event, leading the field with her top time from prelims coming in at 27.49

The men’s event will see 17-year-old Australian Henry Allan try to hold off some of the best backstrokers in the world in Hubert Kos and Shaine Casas.

The headline events of the session are the 400 freestyles, but for different reasons. On the women’s side, World Record holder Summer McIntosh earned the top spot by more than 11 seconds in prelims, swimming 4:00.68. Tonight, she will be chasing her own U.S. Open Meet record of 3:59.42, and Katie Ledecky‘s U.S. Open record of 3:56.82, but she will be in a field of her own.

The men’s race will be a different story. Leon Marchand is the best male swimmer in the world right now, and he comes in seeded 3rd behind training partners Luke Hobson and Carson Foster. Hobson swam the top time in prelims, touching in 3:47.56 to lead Foster’s 3:48.05 and Marchand’s 3:48.13. They will be joined by 16-year-old phenom Luka Mijatovic who sits less than two tenths back of Marchand at 3:48.30.

Where the women’s 400 freestyle will be a story of dominance, the men’s could be one of the closest races of the meet among some of the top swimmers in the world.

The 200 IM events see Kate Douglass and Hubert Kos as the top seeds. Douglass comes in nearly a second ahead of Canada’s Mary-Sophie Harvey and a little more than a second ahead of Alex Walsh. Kos, on the other hand, sits just two seconds ahead of Baylor Nelson, who is coming off the meet of his life at the Texas Hall of Fame Invite and half-a-second ahead of Indiana’s Owen McDonald, who also had a strong performance at midseasons.

The meet will end with the 50 breaststroke and 50 freestyle events. Ireland’s Mona McSharry is the top seed in the women’s 5- breaststroke, a tenth ahead of Ohio State’s Maria Ramos Najji from Spain. On the me’s side, South Africa’s Michael Houlie came in just five hundredths ahead of Van Mathias for the top spot.

The women’s 50 free will see Kate Douglass and Gretchen Walsh battle for the top spot from lanes 4 and 5, and the men’s 50 free final is missing a number of the top swimmers in the world including Ilya Kharun, Caeleb Dressel, and Santo Condorelli, but features Serbia’s Andrej Barna as the top seed just ahead of Jack Alexy and Chris Giuliano.

Read the full story on SwimSwam: 2025 U.S. Open: Day 2 Finals Live Recap