NCAA Women’s Championships, Day 3 Finals: Claire Curzan Touches Out Bella Sims By One Hundredth For 100 Back Triumph
A pair of versatile Olympians swam in the middle lanes in the 100 backstroke final, split by tiny margins at each intermediate split. Claire Curzan flipped first after one length and then after two, but Bella Sims used superior underwaters to emerge ahead and put herself in position for the title. But one final surge from Curzan in the closing 10 yards was enough to earn her a national title by the slimmest of margins.
Curzan, representing the University of Virginia, split 12.52 on the last lap, enough to clock 49.11 to beat Sims (49.12) by one hundredth. That stunning finish gave Curzan the second individual national title of her career, having previously won the 200 back in 2023. Curzan became the third Virginia swimmer to win individual national titles this week, joining Gretchen Walsh and Alex Walsh, and Curzan has already been part of winning UVA efforts in the 200 medley and 200 freestyle relays.
Curzan jumped Regan Smith and Beata Nelson to become the fourth-fastest swimmer ever in the event while Sims is one of three to ever break 49, having gone 48.97 at last month’s SEC Championships.
Indiana’s Miranda Grana broke 50 seconds for the first time on the way to a third-place finish, clocking 49.62. Having already placed fourth in the 100 fly earlier in the session, Grana finishes the night with 31 individual points. Southern Illinois’ Celia Pulido backed up her sub-50 performance from prelims with another best time in finals, her time of 49.77 giving her a fourth-place finish. Wisconsin’s Phoebe Bacon, the national champion in the 200 back in 2021 and 2024, just missed cracking the barrier with a time of 50.00 for fifth place.
The two years between Curzan’s individual NCAA titles featured numerous career-defining changes. She transferred from Stanford to the Cavaliers, and after an initially successful redshirt year in which she swept the backstroke events at the February 2024 World Championships, she missed out on qualifying for the Paris Olympic team. At the U.S. Olympic Trials, Curzan came up seven hundredths short of the the team in the 200-meter back.
The immediate aftermath of that disappointment gave Curzan mental hurdles to push through. “I got really jaded with the (idea of) ‘hard work equals progress,’” Curzan said in December. “I essentially put my life on pause for the entirety of the year, and the result wasn’t exactly what I wanted. I put in all this work and I dedicated all this time, but I didn’t exactly see the results. So what’s to say that it won’t happen again in the future? I know that’s being extremely pessimistic, and I think I got very negative about the hard work in the beginning of the year.”
Sims entered the meet as the top seed, her success in the 100 back at the conference meet convincing her to the event on her NCAA Championships schedule instead of the 200 free, but she struggled mightily at the start of the national meet. Entering as the defending national champion in the 500 free, Sims struggled in prelims and was unable to advance to finals with her 17th-place finish, her time 10 seconds off her lifetime best.
But she rebounded in the 100 back prelims to qualify second behind Curzan, and despite the unfortunate luck of the finish here, now she has earned top-three national finishes in four different events in the first two years of her college career.
