The times are slow and margins are slim in the Olympic pool, where the Great Britain team won their second silver medal of the championships on Monday night. It was the Welshman Matt Richards who did it, with a superb swim from lane one in the men’s 200m freestyle.
He finished up just two-hundredths of a second behind the winner, the 19-year-old Romanian David Popovici. Which just happened to be the very same margin between Adam Peaty and Nicolò Martinenghi, the gold medallist in the 100m breaststroke, the night before.
British Swimming’s performance director, Chris Spice, always calls this a “fingertip sport”, but here in Paris races are being settled by the whites of the nails.
This one came down to a ferocious final 50m in which Popovici, Richards, the USA’s Luke Hobson and Great Britain’s Duncan Scott jockeyed back and forth for the winning millimetre. For the briefest moment, Richards was convinced he had won it. He believed that he had touched the wall first, but hadn’t managed to do it with enough force to beat Popovici.
He was good enough to admit that “times don’t care about feelings”, and said that if he really did touch before Popovici without triggering the stopclock, then it was his technique that was at fault, rather than the mechanism.
“It’s not a sport where it is up for debate, it is black and white, so we’ll just have to do better next time.” He goes in the 100m freestyle later this week. “Obviously two-hundredths off gold is excruciatingly frustrating but look if anything it’s added more fire to my belly, and I’ve got a lot more to go.”
It wasn’t his only mistake. He made a mess of his semi-final, which is how he ended up being drawn in an outside lane. “It wasn’t ideal, I’ll be honest, that semi-final last night – I misjudged it a bit.
“Being out there meant I was a little bit out of the race so I had to call it on my own which in a close race like this one can mean you end up on the wrong side of it.”
Still, it could have been worse. Ask Scott. There was only .15 of a second between the first four, but it was Scott’s sorry lot to be last among them. He had been dreaming about winning this race ever since he took the silver medal behind his teammate Tom Dean in Tokyo; he’s 27, and unlike Richards, it’s not necessarily clear he will get another chance. But he too has more racing to do, in the 200m medley, when he will take on Léon Marchand, and of course both go in the 4x200m relay on Tuesday.
For Richards, 21, the result was a measure of vindication for his decision to step away from the high-performance training centre at the University of Bath and move to Millfield in 2022. He was part of the quartet that won gold in the 4x200m relay in this event in Tokyo, along with Scott and Dean, which taught him a lot about what it takes to succeed at this level. But he felt he had stalled when he failed to win a medal at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, and decided he needed a change of scene. For the past two years he has been working in a small training group with the coach Ryan Livingstone.
Since the switch, he has won a world championship gold, and now an Olympic silver. He will need to carry on improving if he is going to beat Popovici, who is almost two years younger and, at his best, almost two seconds quicker. Popovici only took up swimming to help with his scoliosis when he was a kid, but turned out to have an extraordinary talent for it.
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He is one of a handful of young swimmers making a breakthrough at these Games. Another of them, the 17-year-old Canadian Summer McIntosh, won the women’s 400m individual medley by a streak ahead of the two USA swimmers Katie Grimes and Emma Weyant.
Great Britain’s Freya Colbert, who won the world championship earlier this year, was fourth. No one was ever going to catch McIntosh, who was six seconds clear, but Colbert held on to third place all the way up to the final 50m of freestyle, when Weyant pulled ahead of her.
Three other young British swimmers – the breaststroker Angharad Evans, the medley swimmer Katie Shanahan, and the backstroker Ollie Morgan – finished down the field in their own finals: Evans sixth, Shanahan seventh, and Morgan eighth. Like Richards and Colbert, who is 20, they are all young enough to come again, and Colbert has another chance in the shorter medley later this week.
But they’ll learn, too, sooner rather than later, that chances like the ones that got away from them here in Paris are few and far between in a sport as brutally competitive as this one.