Katie Ledecky, the swimmer with the most Olympic gold medals of the century, emerged from the waiting room with determination. She walked with a firm step along the platform that leads to the starting gates of the Paris swimming pool, this Saturday at nine o’clock in the evening in the first session of the Olympic swimming championship race finals. The 27-year-old American was wearing her sunglasses, dark, as if a blinding sun was shining in the sky of the closed hall of La Défense, packed with people who cheered her with a circus-like roar. She pressed her lips together with the fierce rictus of someone who concentrates all her energy and her aggressiveness on a purpose of fighting. She had little time left before she knew the truth. Just five minutes later she would drag herself out of the pool, wet and exhausted, her shoulders slumped in defeat, slowly moving to collect her shoes after sinking into the whirlpool of Ariarne Titmus, undisputedly the new queen of swimming after being proclaimed Olympic champion in the 400-meter freestyle for the second time in a row.
Ariarne Elizabeth Titmus, born 23 years ago in Lauceston, on the Australian island of Tasmania, won gold with a time from five years ago: 3 minutes 57.49 seconds, which she beat in 2017. An old record. Unbecoming of the progress that this event has made since she and Canadian Summer McIntosh have been battling over the distance. If the pace of reductions had been extended, the Paris public would have witnessed an absolute record. But Titmus touched the wall much later than her body was capable of. The record that she herself set last year at the World Championships in Fukuoka, 3m 55.38s, is due to a speed and split times that the La Défense race never offered.
Rarely in the history of swimming have three world record holders, two Olympic champions and four world champions come together in an Olympic final. There were all four: Katie Ledecky, Olympic champion in Rio; Ariarne Titmus, Olympic champion in Tokyo; Erika Fairweather, world champion in Doha in February; and Summer McIntosh, the prodigious swimmer from Toronto, just 17 years old, four times world champion in butterfly and medley. Some recalled the meeting of Phelps, Van den Hoogenband and Thorpe at the Athens Games, in the 200m freestyle final, to gauge what happened in La Défense. The reality was slightly less epic. In a race that allows for tactical back-and-forth, Titmus did not allow speculation.
The Australian followed the plan from the Fukuoka final. First, she let herself go in the preliminary session. The Tasmanian Devil played dead. She allowed Ledecky to advance first, as if she had no more strength. She even let her win in the last length. She acted stealthily. She played at confusion. They swam lane by lane and Ledecky finished in 4.02 minutes. A good time and little else. Perhaps enough to give her hope. Perhaps the girl from Washington felt strong. Able to relive her epic from a decade ago, when between 2013 and 2019 no one could dispute her dominance of the middle-distance event par excellence. The golden days when Titmus had not yet appeared on the scene.
Ledecky’s hegemony was abruptly interrupted at the Gwangju World Championships in the summer of 2019. On the way to the Tokyo Games and the unexpected pandemic, Titmus emerged at that tournament as an uninhibited and uninhibited teenager. She was afraid of nothing. She seemed inexhaustible and, to the misfortune of her opponent, she had tremendous leg power. An added weapon to her freestyle swimmer’s arsenal. The kind of instrument that in the final phase of endurance tests provides her with a devastating push. This Saturday in Paris she displayed it clearly when, after passing through the wall that marked the 200 meters, she increased the pace of her kick. An outboard motor, suddenly. The foamy wake she left in her wake contrasted with the stroke made by Ledecky, who barely stirred the water with her feet, with a kick cycle that was lower in average number of strokes and in strength.
Titmus was only followed by McIntosh, who entered the arena looking frightened but did not back down in the final meters. The champion kept her as a reference at her side, while advancing with little pressure towards the finish line. Her 30.13 seconds in the last length were not the kind of display that her cardiovascular system treasures. They were simply what she needed to reach the plate first that interrupted the stopwatch counter and gave her the gold. “You can see that people were eager to witness the Games, after eight years and a pandemic. The noise in this arena is crazy!” said the winner. Ariarne Titmus has not lost a major 400 freestyle event since 2019.
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