TRIUMPH IN THE RACE TOO TOUGH FOR PHELPS
Swim finals from 11.30am AEST
HERE’S the race that proved too hard for Michael Phelps.
The lung-busting event that amounts to four 100m sprints. A butterfly sprint and then a backstroke sprint, and then a breaststroke sprint, and then a freestyle sprint.
When the great Phelps finished fourth in the 400m individual medley at the London Games, he climbed out of the pool and told his coach he was never doing the bloody thing again.
Here’s a race for the ironmen. In shorter races and even the longer freestyle races, normally one thing hurts. You’re doing the same stroke and using the same muscles over and again. In the 400m individual medley, everything hurts.
Here’s the 21-year-old Victorian Brendon Smith, the fastest qualifier for the final of the Tokyo Olympics, standing where he hasn’t expected to be. Lane four for the gold medal race.
In prospect, he’s another Duncan Armstrong and Jon Sieben, another bolt from the blue. But any medal will do when you’ve come from nowhere.
Here’s a young fella who’s tough as nails after spending most of the past 18 months trapped in the darkness of Victorian lockdowns. He’s been restricted in his training and his life, unable to travel to Queensland and prepare with the rest of Australia’s team in a warmer climate, swimming instead in freezing ocean waters.
He has been going it alone, to a degree, but he’s gone all right. Ranked 26th in the world two years ago, he’s knocked 5.5sec from his personal best in the past six weeks. Good timing.
Here’s Smith staring down his lane, his road to an Olympic medal if all goes to plan. There shall be no easy way to do it; everything’s about to hurt. He crouches, leaps, gets going.
He’s fourth after the butterfly leg. Which is OK. He’s third after the backstroke. Great. The breaststroke is the make-or-break leg. Usually everyone’s weakness. Smith falls to last.
We should have known it was too good to be true. But then he rips through the freestyle as if his life depends on it, snatching a bronze medal that leaves him absolutely stoked.
Americans Chase Kalisz and Jay Litherland are top of the time sheets.
Smith has clocked 4min 10.38sec. His semi-final time of 4:09.2 would have won gold; Kalisz has won a relatively slow final in 4:09.42. Smith may have spent too much gas the previous evening, but here he is on the podium, breaking Australia’s duck.
The Australian banner goes up with a couple of star-spangled ones.
Bronze? He’d have taken that before he got here. He raises his left arm and pumps his fist. There’s only one winner in any sporting battle, but at an Olympics you sort of get three.
“Unbelievable. I can’t believe it,” Smith said. “When the Games were postponed, I thought, ‘Give me another opportunity, another year to better my preparation from last time’.
“To improve that much and to be able to get on the podium is incredible. Thank you so much for supporting me. I can’t believe it.”
The 400m IM gets a bad rap in Australia because we’ve never been any bloody good at it. Only one medal had previously come from it - the bronze to Rob Woodhouse at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.
Ironically enough, that race was won by Canadian Alex Baumann –
who’s now Australia’s boss of high performance.
Smith was buoyed by bronze. He said of his long, long months in Melbourne’s lockdown: “It did feel like the Olympics was never going to come. There was a long time there where I didn’t really know what I was aiming for.
“To get up in the final and do the swim I did, I’m really happy with it.
“I’ve gone through hell to get here, having to swim in the ocean for two months in Melbourne when it was getting to 12 degrees. I’m really happy with how I built that final hundred and got to the wall.”