Matt Fallon’s Journey From Penn to Paris
Only about 200,000 people have competed in the Olympics since their revival a little over a century ago. In the same time frame, roughly 13 billion people have been born. In other words, the odds of becoming an Olympian — setting aside the fact that some countries have produced disproportionately many, and that the most recent Games were the first to achieve gender parity — are about 0.0015%.
Put differently, it’s hard to get into Penn — the Class of 2027 had a 5.8% admit rate — but it’s about 3,800 times harder to become an Olympian, which makes it all the more awe-inspiring that Matt Fallon (CIS’25, W’25) has done both.
This past summer, Fallon represented the U.S. (and Penn!) at the Olympic Games in Paris, coming in 10th in the 200-meter breaststroke, after setting an American record in the event and winning the national title at the U.S. Olympic Trials, his third in a row.
“It’s tremendous,” says Chinedum Osuji, Eduardo D. Glandt Presidential Professor and Chair of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, who represented Trinidad and Tobago in Taekwondo at the 2004 Athens Games. “The odds of even a very, very good athlete making the Olympics are slim, so it’s an absolutely incredible achievement.”
Roots at Penn
Growing up, Fallon had swimming — and Penn — in his blood. His parents both swam for Penn; his father, William (EE’84, W’84), graduated from the Management & Technology Program, going on to a career in quantitative finance, while his mother, Norma (NU’86, GNU’89), studied nursing. His siblings also swam, his older brother at Penn. “My entire family swam,” recalls Fallon. “My parents really brought me into it.”
When Fallon arrived on campus, he initially enrolled at the Wharton School, but happened to take a course at Penn Engineering in Computer and Information Science and found he had a knack for programming. Before long, he applied to Penn Engineering, becoming the rare uncoordinated dual-degree student–athlete. “I see sets in the pool and how I’m doing them as different data points,” Fallon says. “The way you organize a training cycle throughout the year and the way you organize a project in code — it’s not identical, but it’s very similar.”
Mike Schnur (C’88), the Lou and Rene Kozloff Head Coach of Swimming, describes Fallon as quantitatively gifted. “He’s a math master,” says Schnur. “He knows how fast he’s going at all times. And he knows what he did seven years ago, and how he compares to it and what he did a month ago and what he’s going to do a year from now — he’s very analytical.”
Swimming With a Strategy
Breaststroke, Fallon’s specialty, is perhaps the most technical swimming discipline, since it requires swimmers to repeatedly enlarge the surface area they present to the water, spreading their arms and feet wide before snapping back into a streamline, all the while trying to minimize drag. “You have to make sure you have a fast recovery,” Fallon points out.
What makes Fallon distinctive as a breaststroker is his “back half” strategy, in which he typically lags behind his competitors for the first half of a race, then chases the field down. “I’ve always been a more endurance-oriented swimmer,” Fallon says. “I’ve never been able to get out there with the fastest people.”
In high school, Fallon, who swam for the Greater Somerset County YMCA in his native New Jersey, set multiple national YMCA records, not just in the 200-meter and 200-yard breaststroke, but also in the 400-meter individual medley. In some cases, Fallon didn’t just come from behind to win, but “negative split” his races, meaning that his second half was actually faster than his first.
Back-halfing requires meticulous pacing — if the field gets too far ahead, even a swimmer as gifted as Fallon will simply run out of pool, as unfortunately happened in Paris. Fallon missed the Olympic finals by less than a tenth of a second — the equivalent of a finger’s length.
Still, just by making the Olympic team, Fallon accomplished his two aquatic goals for the year: make the team and break 2:07 in the 200-meter breaststroke, which he did by setting a new American record of 2:06.54 at the U.S. Olympic Trials. “I’m a bit odd for a swimmer in the sense that I don’t necessarily set a goal at the start of the year,” says Fallon, “but this was really a year where I thought about the sport differently.”
From Penn to Paris
Like most elite swimmers, Fallon practices nearly a dozen times a week, swimming tens of thousands of yards — eight sessions in the pool and two in the weight room — a grueling schedule when you tack on coursework at both Penn Engineering and Wharton.
Whenever those practices don’t translate into results at meets, Fallon revises his training, much like a programmer debugging faulty code. “I know that frustration all too well,” says Fallon. “You’re trying to fix something and that creates a whole other set of new problems, and then you’ve got to go back and restart.”
Last year, one change Fallon made was to focus on the front half of his race. If he just stayed even with everyone else, he figured his strong back half would carry him to victory. Indeed, at the Olympic Trials, Fallon started in fifth place, then moved up to third by the halfway mark, giving him plenty of room to lay down the fastest back half in the field, easily winning by more than two seconds.
“I know I’ve had it in me this entire time,” says Fallon, who qualified first in the 200-meter breaststroke at the 2020 Olympic Trials, only to finish eighth in the final. “I just wanted to really be able to get out and do it on the biggest stage.”
After his victory at the Olympic Trials, Fallon joined the U.S. National Team for training trips to North Carolina and Croatia before arriving in Paris. He spent two weeks in the Olympic Village, which turned out to be much like college — a lot of downtime between high-stakes assessments. “What they’re putting on TV are all of the glamour shots,” Fallon says. “There’s definitely a lot that goes on between those moments that’s more low-key.”
In the Village, Fallon had the chance to meet swimmers from around the world, some of whom he’d encountered before at events like last year’s World Championships, where he claimed bronze in the 200-meter breaststroke. “They’re all very nice people,” Fallon says. “I didn’t have a bad experience with a single one of them.”
Fortunately, Fallon largely avoided the Olympic Village–related hardships that other swimmers shared with the media, like having to sleep outdoors to beat the heat (Thomas Ceccon, a backstroker from Italy), or finding worms in his fish (Adam Peaty, a breaststroker from Great Britain). “The U.S. gave us air conditioners and mattress pads,” says Fallon. “There was one time where I went to the salad bar — there are four salad bars — and there was no lettuce at any of them, so I couldn’t really make a salad, but other than that, the food was pretty good.”
Now, as a senior, Fallon looks forward to delving into AI and the nuances of information storage — he’s enrolled in both CIS 4210/5210: Artificial Intelligence, the flagship lecture taught by Chris Callison-Burch, Professor in Computer and Information Science, and CIS 4500/5500: Database and Information Systems — and returning to competition with his fellow Quakers. “I’m excited to just get back into the swing of things,” says Fallon. “With the Olympic experience under my belt, I think I can handle just about anything.”
Story by Ian Scheffler / Photos by Steve Boyle