Sara Curtis and the record of the record

Cosa succede nella testa di un’atleta che deve tornare a vincere 24 ore dopo aver già realizzato il sogno più grande
Author Fabio Zarra www.sportpsychologycenter.com

On Wednesday 12 August, in the 50m backstroke semi-final at the European Aquatics Championships in Paris, Sara Curtis swims 26″63 and erases Kaylee McKeown's world record from the books. A few words, straight after: “Madness, I don't know what to say… I have no words to describe it”. Then she adds, to Sky Sport's microphones, the sentence that best captures the moment: “It was my biggest dream”.

24 hours later, in the final of the same event, Curtis swims faster than everyone once again and sets a new world record with a time of 26″56. Historic.

The news coverage told the story of the feat, the emotion, the season-long progression that took Curtis from the Italian record to the European one and then to the world record in a matter of weeks. Now, the other question that naturally arises is: how do you get back in the pool and beat yourself just one day after already achieving “the biggest dream”? From a sport psychology point of view, that day in between is one of the most delicate moments an athlete can go through.

The hidden risk: when the goal arrives too soon

In positive psychology there's a well-documented and studied phenomenon called “arrival fallacy”, first described by Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar, himself a former competitive squash player. Ben-Shahar recounted spending years thinking that winning a certain tournament would finally make him happy. When he finally achieved it, the joy lasted very little. And, interestingly, the same old tension returned almost immediately! After that personal experience, the researcher decided to dig deeper into the topic, and his research grew out of a very common mechanism: we tend to believe that reaching an important goal will give us lasting satisfaction, rich with fulfilment and enthusiasm, but when that moment arrives, the effect is often shorter and “flatter” than we expected, as if the satisfaction curve hits what's called a “plateau”.

The reason, psychologically speaking, lies in the fact that the emotional reward is “consumed” in advance — during the waiting and the preparation. The brain quickly gets used to what it has achieved (hedonic adaptation) and shifts its attention almost immediately to a new target. Think of positive events like a long-awaited promotion, a degree, or buying the house of your dreams: they give us a peak of enthusiasm that fades faster than expected. This happens not because the achievement doesn't matter, but because the mind isn't designed to stay satisfied for long by a goal already reached.

For an athlete this isn't just a matter of psychological well-being — it's a performance risk. If the world record, achieved in the semi-final, is experienced as the final destination, what's left to drive the body and mind the following day, in the final, when the most important race has yet to come? It's a recognisable problem in elite sport: performance drops immediately after a landmark result, precisely because that result is unconsciously experienced as “the end of the road” rather than as one stage of it.

Curtis, in the final, did exactly the opposite. She improved her own time even further. This raises a more useful question than simple admiration: what protected her from that drop? What's distinctive about her approach?

Staged goals: why breaking down the dream works

One possible answer comes from Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's goal-setting theory — one of the most solid and most studied frameworks in the psychology of motivation, with over forty years of research in both workplace and sporting contexts. One of this theory's most consistent findings is that distant goals (“distal”, such as “I want the world record”) sustain motivation far better when broken down into near, verifiable goals (“proximal”, such as “I want to improve my start in this training session”). Every small milestone reached generates a concrete signal of progress, which then fuels motivation for the next step — instead of leaving the person staring at a single, enormous, distant result with no intermediate feedback. A kind of gradual, step-by-step passage.

An experiment that has become a classic in the psychology of motivation, conducted by Albert Bandura and Dale Schunk in 1981, shows clearly why this works. The two researchers worked with children who struggled with, and had little interest in, mathematics, dividing them into three groups. The first group was asked to complete a small portion of exercises at each session (proximal goal), the second to complete the whole programme only by the final session, weeks later (distal goal), and the third to “do their best” with no specific goal. Only the children with the proximal goal — the one broken into small, immediate steps — showed rapid progress, stronger confidence in their own abilities (what Bandura calls self-efficacy), and, surprisingly, even greater spontaneous interest in the subject once the experiment ended. The group with the distal goal, the one most similar to a “final dream” with no intermediate steps, showed no significant benefit compared with the group that had no goal at all.

Curtis's season, seen through this lens, isn't a single chase after “the world record”, but a sequence of increasingly ambitious proximal goals. First the Italian record (27″33), then the European one (27″07 at the Settecolli meet), then the world record in the semi-final (26″63), and finally the world record again in the final (26″56). Along this path, each stage probably worked as a new starting point rather than a final destination. Clearing it reinforces the confidence to clear the next, even harder one too — exactly as in Bandura and Schunk's experiment. In other words, Wednesday's record didn't “close” anything. It simply raised the bar of the next proximal goal: Thursday's.

It's a principle that holds outside the pool too. Imagine building a path made of progressive milestones, step by step. Building a shield against the motivational void of “I did it, now what?” doesn't mean avoiding big goals. It actually means building, around the big goal, a ladder of smaller, verifiable, closely spaced steps, to be climbed one at a time.

Pushing even when the minimum would do

There's a second, more behavioural element that reinforces this reading. Before the semi-final — where a top-eight finish was enough to reach the final — Curtis said she told herself she wasn't interested in managing the race. She thought only about pushing to the maximum. It's a choice that sport psychology can read through achievement goal theory, developed by John Nicholls and later applied to sport by Joan Duda: the distinction between a task orientation and an ego orientation.

The difference lies in the yardstick used to judge one's own success. A task-oriented athlete evaluates her performance by comparing it with herself: “did I swim better than yesterday? Did I execute my underwater phase better?”. An ego-oriented athlete instead evaluates her performance by comparing it with others: “did I beat my rivals, and did it take less effort to do so?”. To give a simple example: two swimmers both finish first in their qualifying heat. The ego-oriented one, having already reached her goal (“beat the others”), can afford to ease off on the final lengths to save energy. The task-oriented one keeps pushing all the way to the wall, because her goal — improving her own limit — hasn't been reached just because she won the heat.

Research in sport psychology links task orientation to motivation that's more stable over time and less dependent on context. Those who measure themselves against themselves stay motivated both in a decisive race and in an apparently minor stage, like a “stepping-stone” semi-final. It's a pattern consistent with what Curtis said. It helps explain both why a non-decisive semi-final still became the stage for a world record, and why the following day, with the pressure even higher, that same drive could be repeated.

The takeaway for coaches and athletes

Sara Curtis's story is, first of all, a story of talent and years of work. But the way she navigated the most delicate twenty-four hours — those between a dream just realised and the race that still had to come — offers a practical lesson that applies to any athlete, at any level. A big goal reached should immediately be placed back within a wider sequence, with the next step already visible. The yardstick for success should stay anchored to one's own improvement rather than to the result of a single race alone. This, probably more than technical quality alone, is what allowed Curtis to keep pushing when she could already have felt she'd arrived. Organisation, method, and a challenge… with herself!

Note: the statements by Sara Curtis quoted in this article are taken from post-race interviews given to Sky Sport and Rai Sport after the semi-final and final of the 50m backstroke at the 2026 European Championships in Paris. The psychological reading proposed here is an application, for informational purposes, of established theories from the scientific literature to a public case, and not a clinical analysis or an authorised reconstruction of the athlete's experience.

References

Ben-Shahar, T. (2007). Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-10897-020

Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.

Bandura, A., & Schunk, D. H. (1981). Cultivating competence, self-efficacy, and intrinsic interest through proximal self-motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 41(3), 586–598.

Nicholls, J. G. (1989). The Competitive Ethos and Democratic Education.

Duda, J. L. (1992). Motivation in sport settings: A goal perspective approach.