Swimmer Shaine Casas missed the Olympics, then made a rare move

Shaine Casas missed the Olympic team last year, then did something usually reserved for Olympians. He turned professional.

Casas, a 22-year-old former Texas A&M standout, has openly stated that his biggest motivation stems from last June’s Olympic Trials, when he finished third at a meet where the top two make the team.

He then took two months off from swimming, avoided watching the Olympics — “I didn’t want to relive my biggest failure,” he said. — and, after first entering the NCAA transfer portal, eventually turned professional instead, moving from College Station to Austin.

“Everybody probably assumes, how could he do this, he’s betraying the school, all this stuff,” Casas said on a SwimSwam podcast in January. “It’s not personal. This is business. If you want to be good in this sport, you’ve got to make the hard decision.”

The early 2022 returns back that up.

In two Pro Series meets this year, Casas owns wins in the 100m freestyle and 100m butterfly against fields that included Olympic gold medalist Caeleb Dressel. The latter came on Thursday, the first full night of finals at the San Antonio stop, the last top-level meet before the world championships trials in four weeks.

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“I’m aware that they’re in the heat,” Casas, who clocked 51.09, said of Dressel, who touched in 51.79, and fellow national teamers Coleman Stewart and Michael Andrew, “but I just kind of zone out and do my thing.”

In his four best events, Casas must contend with a countryman who won the Olympic title in either 2016 or 2021. Casas now ranks No. 1 in the nation this year in the 100m fly and 100m free — Dressel’s territory — and second in the 100m and 200m backstrokes, his signature stroke. Only Ryan