Phelps powered past the world Tuesday night in the 200-meter butterfly to win an individual gold, then he anchored the 4×200-meter freestyle relay team to pick up his second gold. With just the 800 free remaining, Ledecky is trying to become just the second female Olympian in history to win three individual freestyle gold medals in the same Games.
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The rivalry seeds between Phelps and le Clos were planted four years ago at the London Olympics when le Clos beat Phelps for the gold medal by five-hundredths of a second.
Her time of 1 minute, 57.56 seconds was actually slower than what she swam in the preliminaries earlier in the day.
Sunday night it produced a world record for Ledecky and showcased Phelps nearly singlehandedly putting the US men at the top of the podium in the 4×100 freestyle relay with a scintillating second leg that clocked in at 47.12.
They were on world record pace, as Ledecky took the lead at 150, but while she fell off record pace on the final stretch, she still came home a victor.
For Ledecky, this is already her third event of the games.
“I’m just so disappointed that I feel like I left my team down”, she added. “I didn’t realise it was a world record”, Sjostrom said. “I’ll race my heart out”. Ledecky also holds the world record in the 400, 800 and 1,500.
“It really hurts”, Ledecky later said.
“On the block I thought my heart was going to explode, I was so hyped, so excited”, said Phelps, competing in his fifth Olympics. She didn’t qualify to swim individually in Rio, but participated in the 4x100m freestyle relay which won gold on Saturday and is expected in the 4x200m freestyle relay lineup on Wednesday.
From Maryland to Rio, swimmer Katie Ledecky is preparing for her biggest meet yet – the 200 meter freestyle finals. With his head almost at the wall, he took one more stroke to make sure he got there first, his arms slamming against the timing pad. “I took it pretty fast and forced everyone and once I was ahead I was not going to let it out of my hands”. It had turned a murky green since Monday night’s events.
China’s Xu Jiayu won silver.
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MEDAL STRIPPED: A Ukrainian javelin thrower was stripped of his silver medal from the 2012 London Olympics, becoming the latest athlete disqualified after the retesting of stored doping samples. The others came thanks to Williams’ 37 unforced errors and 17 forced errors. The first, in the 26th minute, was Colombia’s first ever Olympic goal, and first ever goal against the United States. The women are a round ahead, and players reaching the quarterfinals included Madison Keys of the US, Johanna Konta of Britain and Petra Kvitova of the Czech Republic. Oleksandr Pyatnytsya tested positive for the steroid turinabol and was retroactively disqualified from the London Games and ordered to return his medal, the International Olympic Committee said. For his relay team mates Caeleb Dressel and Ryan Held, it was their first Olympic medal.
