“I did the best I could but I can’t explain my feelings – perhaps you could swap places with me?”
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King’s win came moments after the USA had just earned another gold medal, this one courtesy of Ryan Murphy’s win in the backstroke at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium in Rio’s Barra da Tijuca district.
After Efimova won her semi-final round on Sunday, she wagged No. 1 with her finger.
She added: “Do I think somebody who has been caught doping should be on the team?” You nearly felt sorry for her. “1, ‘ and you’ve been caught for drug cheating”, King said.
“I do think it’s a victory for clean sport to show you can do it after competing clean all your life”, King said.
King’s victory was one of two for the Americans on Monday night.
Teammate David Plummer was also in the medals – he took bronze, with China’s Xu Jiayu claiming silver.
It had not seemed likely to end that way when China’s Sun Yang, another with a contentious doping record, stormed to 200m freestyle gold.
Yang rallied from his customarily slow start to pass South Africa’s Chas le Clos, who went out fast and tried to hang on.
In the women’s 100 back, Hungary’s Katinka Hosszu won her second gold of the meet, touching in 58.45 seconds to edge American Kathleen Baker (58.75).
It proved a great night for Team USA at the Olympic Aquatics Stadium as Americans took six of the 12 medals awarded Monday.
The semifinals of the women’s 200 free featured a particularly compelling matchup between Ledecky, the two-time Olympic gold medalist from Bethesda, lined up to face Swedish standout Sarah Sjostrom.
Racing in adjoining lanes in the same semifinal heat Monday, Sjostrom out-touched Ledecky by sixteen-hundredths of a second, 1:54.65 to 1:54.81, to set up a rematch in Tuesday night’s final, in which they will be the top two seeds.
“It was a tough race”. “I’m not a fan”.
“For me it is very hard to swim. It’s the third round that counts”. Meili, second at the turn, finished in 1:05.69, just 0.05 slower than the personal best she swam at the Pan Am Games past year.
“You just put it behind you”, Franklin, 21, said. “I’ll talk to my coaches and see what happened”. It’s just one of those things I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around this year – what’s been going wrong. “But I haven’t been able to figure it out”.
The 21-year-old from the University of California raced home in a time of 51.97 seconds. “If that’s his, that’s his”.
If the race itself was nail-biting, the aftermath was excruciating given King had stoked the flames beforehand, speaking out against the inclusion of Efimova after she successfully appealed a ban imposed for past doping suspensions.
Efimova was also given a provisional ban for testing positive for meldonium earlier this year, but Swimming’s governing body FINA overturned the decision on advice from the World Anti-Doping Agency. An IOC spokesman was even forced to issue a plea to athletes “to respect their fellow competitors” following the particularly pointed weekend spat between Yang and Horton. “But they (made) that decision. They are the highest court in sport, and so we accept that”.
When asked what she knew of Russia’s doping crisis, Efimova probably made her situation even worse by suggesting the world was using sport to attack a “strong Russia”.
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With Efimova booed every time she stepped onto the pool deck, the pressure had been on the American to beat the Russian world champion, though the 19-year-old said she felt that any Olympic final was full of tension.
