Saugus Grad Joins US Olympic Swim Team

 Whether she realizes it or not, Abbey Weitzeil is already a celebrity in Santa Clarita.
The 19-year-old Saugus High School graduate received a hero’s welcome when she returned home last week to a group of friends, supporters and local media at Santa Clarita Aquatics Center.
Just a few days before, many of those same people had watched on national television as Weitzeil swam her way to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
She solidified herself as the fastest female sprinter in America by winning both the 50-meter and 100-meter freestyle races at U.S. Olympic Trials in Omaha, Nebraska to fulfill an Olympic dream she’s had for at least the last four years.
“I think about it, and I get this huge smile on my face.  And I watch my races over and over again,” Weitzeil told a group of reporters in Omaha.  “It’s just an amazing feeling when I think about it, but I don’t feel any different.  It’s weird – I actually thought about that today.  I was like, ‘Wow I’m an Olympian.  This is awesome.’  So it hasn’t fully set in yet.”
In addition to the two individual events, Weitzeil will also be a part of the U.S. 4×100 freestyle relay and medley relay teams.
Her spot on the U.S. team became official on July 1 when she won the 100 freestyle in front of a packed Omaha crowd of nearly 14,000.  It was shown live on NBC’s primetime coverage.  At the end of the race, Weitzeil popped her head up, turned around and looked up at the big board to discover she’d won.
She let out a hearty smile and put a hand over her mouth, finally able to let out the emotion of a moment years in the making.
“When I saw the 1 next to my name, it kind of was just a huge relief of, ‘Oh, my gosh, I did it,’ but it’s something I’ve been working for this entire year,” Weitzeil said in a press conference afterward.  “Just to have the hard work pay off is just incredible.”
Throughout her sterling junior and high school career, Weitzeil has stayed humble almost to the point of naiveté about her swimming accolades.  And yet people in the local swim community have had sky-high expectations of her ever since she joined the Valencia-based Canyons Aquatic Club at age 12.
She was immediately a high school superstar as a freshman at Saugus, setting records and qualifying for her first Olympic Trials as a 15-year-old.  It was then that people first floated the idea of her Olympic potential.
As the accolades piled up, that potential started looking more like reality.  She won just about every race she swam in high school, breaking multiple national records along the way.  She more than held her own against some of the best swimmers in the world while competing in various international competitions in Australia, Russia and Qatar.
She committed to the UC Berkeley swim team but decided to delay her enrollment a year to focus on preparing for the Olympics.  This would have been her freshman year in college.
It all culminated in her triumphant week in Omaha, where she raced alongside swimming stars like Missy Franklin and Allison Schmitt, who own a combined 11 Olympic medals.  Weitzeil beat them both, along with every other swimmer in the water, to become one of the youngest American swimmers to book a trip to the Rio Games.
“Abbey’s been in the heat of battle before in international competition. She’s stepped up a number of times so she knows what the pressure is like, but this meet I think is unlike any other … in terms of pressure,” said Coley Stickels, Weitzeil’s coach, in a post-race press conference in Omaha.
But despite Weitzeil’s laundry list of medals, trophies and broken records, the national media hasn’t quite caught on.
The Olympics run from Aug. 5-21, and the focus leading up to it will continue to be the established names and former Olympians.
For now, Weitzeil is a relative unknown in the nation’s eyes.  Her celebrity hasn’t grown far beyond the boundaries of the Santa Clarita Valley.
In Rio, that could very well change.

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