FINISHES LIKE THIS ARE RARE
B.C. swimmer tries for another medal but gets left in the wake of the winners
“It is not the going out of Poort, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage.” — Henry Ward Beecher
Well, the actual quote said port, but in Tuesday morning’s Olympic men’s marathon swim in the surf off Copacabana beach, Aussie Jarrod Poort was living proof that Beecher had it about right.
Going out, for an hour and a half of the gruelling 10-kilometre endurance test, Poort was so far ahead of the 24-man chase group, he looked like a lone dolphin being trailed distantly by a thrashing, roiling school of piranhas. But the coming in is when the bill had to be paid.
That is when Richard Weinberger, Surrey, B.C.’s 26-year-old Olympic bronze medallist four years ago, thought he was poised to be in the front row of the pack as it reeled in Poort and began to sprint for home. It didn’t work out that way. Fourth as he entered the last 2.5-km lap, having skipped his feed of electrolytes to move up from 13th, Weinberger found himself muscled out of the way as the big boys took over. He passed Poort all right — most everyone did, as the Aussie rabbit finished 21st — but when push came to shove, he couldn’t shove hard enough to be in the conversation when Ferry Weertman of the Netherlands snatched the gold medal right out of the hand of Greece’s Spiros Gianniotis in a photo finish.
It was a magnificent finish, at that. The 36-year-old Gianniotis appeared to cross the line first but missed the overhead touch pad with his lead hand and actually passed under the finish before his right hand could make contact, giving Weertman the chance to touch first by the tiniest fraction. Both were timed at 1:52:59.8.
Weinberger finished 17th, 16.6 seconds back.
At the end of a painful 10 kilometres of bobbing and fighting the waves and each other, to have it come down to a touch — and with five others finishing less than four seconds back — is hard to comprehend.
It was a far cry from the calm, flat pond of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, where Weinberger won his London bronze. The 2012 gold medallist, Tunisia’s Oussama Mellouli, finished 12th Tuesday. World champion Jordan Wilimovsky of the U.S. finished fifth.
“Polar opposites — swimming in Rio is a real ocean water race. And it’s probably as wavy as it gets,” Weinberger said. “The course changed last minute. That adds just a mental challenge. You train, you study the course, and then 48 hours before the race, a big surf comes in and sinks the pontoon.”
He wasn’t blaming the ocean, though.
“As the fourth lap started, there was a lot of fighting and openwater tactics used by these experienced guys that don’t cause yellow cards,” Weinberger said. “And they were really putting pressure on me, so I kind of fell back.”
“That last lap, that’s where things started to open up and some of the bigger players started to go,” the Canadian open-water coach, Steve Price of the University of B.C., said. “His tack was to try to break those guys early (in the lap) and he couldn’t do it, right? And he got caught up in the pack on the way back.
“As you saw at the end, when that frenzy goes on, that’s not his strength. He’s not the biggest, strongest guy in the pack and those guys can muscle him out. So I think he did everything right — it was just a much tougher, harder race, and you’ve just seen the evolution of the sport in four years.
“It takes nothing away from what he’s done in the past — he swam his guts out today — but he didn’t have the speed at the end to overtake those guys.”
The water quality, after all the scary talk, turned out to be a nonissue. It wasn’t exactly Evian, but no one ran into a severed body part or inhaled a lungful of sewer run-off — that they know of.
“The water is fine here. I think one of the docs said the water’s no better or worse than Vancouver out in English Bay. Richard swam this course last summer in a test event with just a few guys and he never came away sick at all,” Price said.
Weinberger wasn’t surprised to see the Dutchman, Weertman, come out on top. The open-water swimmers are a close community.
“I talk to a lot of my competitors before. I kind of like to get a lowdown on where they are mentally,” he said. “I actually messaged him and I was like, ‘I guarantee you’re going to be a medallist. I don’t know what colour.’ In my mind I was thinking silver or bronze because I was going for the gold, but he’s the toughest guy out there, and he proved it today.”
Weinberger intends to keep swimming.
“Yeah, I’m really pissed off. I gotta race,” he said. “I gotta keep going. I can go harder. I can go farther. I can perfect my sleep. I can do better with my diet. I can do it.”
Besides, he plans to take up mountaineering, and said he has convinced Japan’s Yasu Hirai and a couple of others to climb Mount Fuji after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’re all crazy.”