SWIMMER HAYDEN TO DIG DEEP
To anyone else, Tuesday night might have been a preview of the thrill to come, not yet worth getting worked up about.
To Brent Hayden, whose Olympic setbacks have left the one gaping void in an otherwise wonderful career with the national swim team, qualifying for the final of the men’s 100-metre freestyle was … well, shattering.
“What does it mean?” the 28-year-old from Mission, B.C. said, then began to tear up and couldn’t continue.
“Sorry,” he said, after gathering himself. “Third Olympics, first individual final. Its like, it’s what I’ve dreamt of as a little kid. “It means everything.” Hayden finished fourth in his semifinal, sixth overall, to get himself a lane in Wednesday evening’s final of the race that tests power and courage and staying power in an all-out dash from the start through the turn, and the pain of the second 50, to the touch at the wall.
“That hurt a lot,” said Hayden, who was 32/100ths faster in the evening (48.21 seconds) than his morning heat time, but had a few mishaps along the way that took away precious fractions.
“Every major competition I’ve always gone a little bit faster throughout the competition — Beijing aside. I definitely know where technically I have room for improvement. I was a little too shallow coming off the wall on the turn, got nailed by an incoming wave so I had to build up my speed more than I wanted to. My goggle’s strap wasn’t done up tight enough and sort of fell down a little bit …,” he smiled.
“Then I misjudged the wall coming in. I probably should have touched it with the other arm. All those things aside, I’ve got a little room on the technical aspect. But I’m going to have to find even more speed, just start digging down deeper and finding some of that I never dived into before.”
Hayden has been a world champion, world record holder, commonwealth games gold medallist ... but in the fivering circus, he hasn’t been able to rise to the occasion.
At Athens, his first Olym- pic experience, he swam four races with a best finish of fifth — in a relay — and ended his Games in a rhubarb with Athens police, who, after mistaking him for a protester, dragged him out of a nightclub and beat him with their riot truncheons.
In Beijing, as defending world champion at the 100 metres, he didn’t make it to the final, finishing 11th.
“I had a relay that night and I think it kind of played into my head,” he said after Tuesday morning’s heats, when he had the fifth-fastest time among 60 entrants, “and combine that with a little too much confidence being world champion the year before, I thought I had room to save energy so I didn’t really focus on just making sure I got into the final.”
Tuesday morning, he knew the semifinal could be the last time he raced an individual 100-metre freestyle, and said “I gotta swim it like it’s my last race.”
His time was nowhere near his personal best 47.27, let alone Brazilian Cesar Cielo’s three-year-old world record 46.91 — before the controversial bodysuits were banned — but no one came close to that speed Tuesday evening.
Reigning world champ James Magnussen of Australia qualified first in 47.63, with American Nathan Adrian, Hanser Garcia of Cuba and Sebastian Vershcuren of the Netherlands in line ahead of Cielo and Hayden. Double gold medallist Yannick Agnel of France was seven, 2/100ths behind Hayden.