As it was in Tokyo, so it goes again in Paris. The Great Britain quartet of James Guy, Tom Dean, Matt Richards and Duncan Scott defended their Olympic 4x200m freestyle relay title, and won Team GB’s first gold medal of the swimming competition at these Games. They beat both the USA and Australia, and did it with more than a second to spare.
The victory means Scott has won his seventh Olympic medal, which raises him right up alongside Chris Hoy in third place on the list of the country’s most decorated Olympic athletes. He will be especially glad this one was gold. He already has five silver medals, which he will tell you is more than enough.
It means only Bradley Wiggins and Jason Kenny have more medals than Scott, albeit there are a fair few athletes who have won more than his two gold medals. Still, he has a couple more chances to do something about that in just the next four days when he competes in the 200m individual medley and then the medley relay.
The four finished in a time of 6min 59.43sec, which was a second or so off the European record they set in Tokyo. Scott’s time, 1min 43.95sec, was the quickest split anyone turned in across all 32 competing swimmers. It needed to be, the USA’s Kieran Smith pushed him hard through the first 100m. In the end the USA came in second, with Australia third. They led from near enough start to finish, the only time anyone overtook them was when Australia’s Flynn Southam caught Dean in the middle of the second leg, but Dean had recovered the lead by the time he had finished his 200m.
It was Guy’s sixth Olympic medal too, which was a just reward for a man who had really driven the team through the two rounds of the competition.
They had been in storming form in the morning heats, when Guy led them off with the fastest 200m free of his career, breaking a personal best he had set in 2015. They used their two relay swimmers, Jack McMillan and Kieran Bird, in the middle, and Dean, the 2020 Olympic champion, on the anchor leg, and finished in 7min 5.11sec, which was the fifth‑fastest time in the world this year. And, of course, they still had Richards, and Scott, who had finished second and fourth in the individual event the previous evening, to come into the team.
They chose to keep Guy on the lead‑off leg, move Dean on to the second, then put Richards third and have Scott as the anchor.
Richards was having a busy old day of it. He swam in the heats of the 100m freestyle in the morning, and again in the semi-finals at the start of the evening session. He was stuck out in lane one again, just like he had been in the 200m final the previous evening. It had worked out well enough for him then, but the 200m is his stronger suit, and in the semi‑final of the shorter event he suffered from being so far away from the 2016 Olympic champion Kyle Chalmers. Richards was first off the blocks, and turned in third, but was sixth at the finish.
He was not the only one doubling up. Léon Marchand had to do it too, in the semi-finals of the 200m butterfly and 200m breaststroke, which were spread just an hour and 15 minutes apart. He won the first, and then he won the second. Now he will have to do it all over again in the two finals on Wednesday night.
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In between it all, Ireland’s Daniel Wiffen won the country’s first gold medal of the Games in the men’s 800m freestyle. Wiffen, 23, is from County Down but trains at Loughborough alongside Adam Peaty. It was a grand swim, full of grit. He took the lead at 400m, lost it again with 150m to go when he was overtaken by the Italian Gregorio Paltrinieri who was one lane over, and then fought like hell to win it back again coming into the final turn. He covered the final 50m in just 26.94sec, and finished in an Olympic record time of 7min 38.19sec.
Wiffen is the first Irishman to win an Olympic gold medal in the pool, and only the second Irish athlete to do it after, ahem, Michelle Smith de Bruin who won three of them back at Atlanta in 1996 and was banned for four years soon after when she was caught tampering with her urine samples. Wiffen was not even born when all that happened, and while it won’t much worry him either way, some of the older people around Irish swimming will be awfully glad that their sport finally has another Olympic champion to celebrate after all these years.