Learning To Fly: Katie Kubiak’s Butterfly World Record Highlighted A Dominant Showing At Para Pan Pacs

Katie Kubiak touched the wall in the 50-meter butterfly, saw her time and immediately threw her fist in the air.

Her smile was almost as wide as the pool itself. She’d not only won the race at the Para Pan Pacific Championships in California last month but also set an S5 world record. In the moment, it was pure celebration. Now it feels like another full-circle moment in a swimming career that continues to evolve and grow.

“I could not figure out fly for the life of me when I first came back to Paralympic swimming,” Kubiak, 23, said. “It didn’t click with my body. It didn’t make sense. I think the reaction after just kind of encompassed it. It was just such a special moment for me personally because it showed me how far I’ve come within this journey.”

Once a standout able-bodied swimmer, Kubiak left the sport in high school in 2018 as her late-onset congenital myopathy worsened and she faced spinal surgery. She assumed her swimming career was over. Six years later, she returned to the same Orlando pool where she swam her last high school meet and won five titles at her first Para swimming national championships. She has dominated major international meets ever since.

But Pan Pacs felt different. Over the last year, she’s learned to accept that her neurological conditions mean her physical performance can vary significantly from day to day. Her success affirmed that change in her approach to training.

“I think in prior seasons, I let that get to my head a lot during training and it would frustrate me a lot more,” she said. “I would try to push through it when it probably wasn’t safe or healthy, and I would pay the price for it in the days and weeks after, which doesn’t help anyone get to where they want to be any faster. So I think that was really crucial for me this season was learning how to show myself grace on the days where my 100 percent on a low day might be 50 percent or even 20 percent on a perfect day, and acknowledging that even though what I had to offer was less than I wanted, I still gave it my 100 percent on that day.”

Kubiak’s recent success at Para Pan Pacs — in addition to her world record in the 50 fly, she set five American records while winning three events and taking second in another — also came on the heels of a reclassification.

She swam primarily S4 at her first world championships last year, where she won seven medals, including four gold, and tied Leanne Smith as Team USA’s most decorated swimmer at the meet. With the new classification has come a new set of challenges and goals.

“That means I have to do the 200 IM and the 100 breaststroke, and my breaststroke leg is my weakest,” she said. “And that was something I could get away with not having to swim for the longest time. So I would love to see my breaststroke become decent. Passable.”

Of course, Kubiak once said the same about butterfly. She had no intention of swimming the stroke, she said, until she learned she had to in order to get internationally classified.

“I literally went from not even being able to swim it to the 10-meter mark to swimming to 25 really, really slow,” she said. “And then finding the technique that worked for my body.”

That progression led to silver at last year’s world championships and, now, a world record.

A recent graduate of NYU, Kubiak’s doing a lot more than training full-time. She’s also working full-time in broadcast news for SportsNet New York covering the New York Mets, Knicks and Jets and recently picked up a second gig with the company producing and editing digital content. Earlier this summer she spoke at the United Nations on the intersection of Paralympic sports and disability rights, and in October she’ll travel back to her home state of Wisconsin to speak at an annual summit on disability inclusion, accessibility and equity in the workplace. 

For all her success, there's one thing Kubiak hasn't yet experienced: the Paralympic Games. She returned to swimming after watching Tokyo in 2021 and began dominating international Para competition just after Paris in 2024. Now, with Los Angeles still nearly two years away, she’s learning to be patient with a dream that suddenly feels within reach.

“Especially now, I try to treat every season as its own,” she said. “Every year within the quad is its own season, and hopefully within that season I’m racing at three major international competitions. So I try to break that up into smaller goals as well. It just makes the training a lot more digestible and gives you little things to look forward to along the way and little benchmarks to let you know you’re still on the right course.”

Karen Price is a reporter from Pittsburgh who has covered Olympic and Paralympic sports for various publications. She is a freelance contributor to USParaSwimming.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.