Phelps, Ledecky putting on a show
RIO DE JANEIRO — As he looked up at a boisterous crowd, triumphant for the 20th time in his unmatched Olympic career, Michael Phelps raised his hands and flicked them in his direction as if to say: “Bring on the world.”
Because he has won so relentlessly, Phelps has rarely needed to seek retribution. Hence the exquisite tension as he prepared to meet South African Chad le Clos in the 200-metre-butterfly final Tuesday night.
Le Clos is the man who beat Phelps in the same event four years ago and also the rival who seems to irritate him most. So after Phelps won his second gold medal of these Games and vanquished le Clos, who finished fourth, he seemed to defy anyone to come and beat him.
A little more than an hour after his butterfly final, Phelps picked up another gold medal, anchoring the United States to a comfortable victory in the 4x200-metre freestyle relay. That pushed his record totals to 21 gold medals and 25 medals overall.
Just as he did Sunday night, Phelps shared the stage at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium with Katie Ledecky, the Bethesda, Maryland, teenager who’s primed to replace him as the world’s most dominant swimmer.
The 200-metre freestyle is not an event in which Ledecky overwhelms. She’s still relatively new to being a world-class sprinter and was considered a co-favourite with Sarah Sjostrom of Sweden.
But Ledecky showed she’s just as good in a dogfight as she is when swimming away from the field, winning her second gold medal of the Games in 1 minute, 53.73 seconds. Sjostrom pushed her hard over the last 50 metres and won silver in 1 minute, 54.08 seconds.
Asked if she’s the future of American swimming, Ledecky said, “I’m kind of the present, too.”
The 200 butterfly was more than Phelps’ first individual final of these 2016 Games. It was a chance for him to wipe away one of his few Olympic disappointments.
Four years ago, he sought his third consecutive gold medal in the event, the same one in which he qualified for his first Olympics at age 15 and the same one in which he lowered his own world record seven times between 2001 and 2009. But an undertrained and unhappy Phelps did not account for a late surge from le Clos, the confident young South African who wanted to be, well, the next Michael Phelps.
The possibility of a Rio rematch has intrigued the swimming world ever since.
The story became that much richer with the late-career improvement of Hungarian Laszlo Cseh, a five-time Olympic medalist who has never managed to beat Phelps in the biggest races but who came in with the fastest time of 2016. And then another Hungarian, Tamas Kenderesi, asserted himself by swimming the fastest semifinal time.