Close Calls, Difficult Moments Have Megumi Field, U.S. Artistic Swimming Team Ready For Olympic Return In Paris

Imagine that it’s the lead up to the Olympic Games Paris 2024 and your the artistic swimming team, which has qualified to the Games for the first time since 2008, is supposed to present three routines: technical, free and acrobatic.

Now imagine that you’re on the team, and you don’t know what the acrobatic routine is going to be.

What sounds like the stuff of Olympian stress dreams — the athlete equivalent of a nightmare where you’re cast in a play and arrive on opening night only to realize you forgot to learn your lines — is the reality for Team USA artistic swimmer Megumi Field.

“I know, you’re like, oh my God, don’t you leave for the Olympics soon?” Field laughed. She didn’t sound worried. The acrobatic routine, which is new to the Olympics this year, is based on seven acrobatic moves, and the team had been practicing them for months. The rest is “really just kind of filling in the blanks almost,” Field remarked.

Swimmers were briefed on the new routine in June, the day the Olympic team was announced. It was an emotional day. A close-knit group who had gone through the qualification process together, the team was whittled from 12 swimmers to eight (plus an alternate) for Paris.

“It has been a long and calculated process of hard choices,” coach Andrea Fuentes said in naming the athletes who made the final cut. “These 12 will forever be our heroes.”

Given the circumstances, the process went about as well as it could have, reported Field, who will also perform in the duet event with Jamie Czarkowski in Paris.

“I think we’ve done a very good job within the team,” the 18-year-old Field added. “Even though we were competing against each other, we all felt very well supported, and we helped each other to get better, which I think also is helping us as a whole team.”

Just getting to the Games was a roller coaster of heart-palpitating highs and confidence-dashing lows. A year ago, the U.S. earned silver and bronze medals at the 2023 World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka, Japan, a nice confidence boost heading into November’s 2023 Pan American Games in Santiago, Chile, only to miss out on Olympic qualification there by less than a point.

The team eventually qualified to the Games in February at the 2024 world championships in Doha, Qatar, the last chance to get to Paris. Knowing that an error-free swim would advance them to the Games, the Americans delivered an enhanced routine devoid of base marks, meaning that the team received credit for the difficulty it attempted. In the end, the U.S. earned two bronze medals and finished fourth in the other event in Doha. It was more than enough.

The moment, full of hugs and shrieks of joy, is imprinted in Field’s memory. In hindsight, what seemed like a setback in Chile was a blessing in disguise.

“Looking back it was like, Pan Ams had to happen in our story so that way we could have gone to Doha and did as well as we did,” Field explained. “In Japan we won some world medals and we got excited, like, ‘Oh, maybe we can actually do this.’ Pan Ams just kind of brought us back to reality. I think we came back and worked much, much harder, just took it to a different level. … It just felt that much better knowing how much more work we had put in.”

Born and raised in Delaware, Field and her mom Naomi moved to California when Field was 10 so she could pursue artistic swimming at UCLA. She was named to the national team four years later, just in time to see the team miss qualifying for the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020. Though difficult at the time, it proved a valuable learning experience.

“I was super excited, and then to just kind of see everyone’s hard work fall slightly short, and the tears and everything, it made me want to work that much harder so that our future team could hopefully make it,” Field said. “Not that they weren’t working to the absolute max, but it brought me to reality where I was like, this is the Olympics. This is as big as it gets.”

This season the team has worked hard at maintaining the Zen-like focus it achieves at its best practices, something it hasn’t always been successful at. In Paris, they won’t be paying attention to other teams’ degrees of difficulty and the inevitable comparisons that invites to their own.

“We work better when we stay in a bubble,” Field said. “At the end of the day, it only matters how we end up doing and if we can show our best. So going toward the Olympics, even though it’s the Olympics and it will be a lot harder and we obviously want to take in everything the Olympics has to offer, at the same time coming back to our little team of swimmers and keeping the same calmness and energy that we have at practice (is key).”

Field plans to stay in Paris after the Games to celebrate her accomplishment. Though she finally checked seeing the Eiffel Tower off her bucket list earlier this year (“on the third time going,” she says ruefully) she is looking forward to spending time with her family and a few old friends from Delaware in the City of Light. After that, she’ll return to California to begin college at Stanford, where she’s interested in computer engineering.

Her future is still anchored to artistic swimming. “I really want to come back and compete in 2028, especially since it’s my hometown of L.A.,” she said. “I don’t know if that means going to college for two years and then coming back for two years before the Olympics, but at least right now that’s what I want to do. That’s my goal.”