Joseph Schooling stormed clear of the field to triumph in 50.39 seconds and earn Singapore’s first Olympic gold, with Phelps, Chad Le Clos and Laszlo Cseh all three-quarters of a second back.
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Astonishingly, all three touched out in 51.14 seconds, behind Schooling’s Olympic record 50.39 in the second dead-heat in a final in two days.
Despite teammate Ryan Lochte’s inkling that Phelps would be back in four years for Tokyo, the 27-time medalist says he’s done after Rio. It was great to be part of such an incredible race. And he needed the whole day to rest after a grueling Thursday slate that included his victory in the 200 individual medley and preliminary and semifinal swims in the 100 butterfly.
“I simply needed to lay everything out there”, Ledecky said.
“It’s taken a lot of time to get here and there’s been times where I haven’t believed in myself but my family and all my support staff around me have believed in me from the bottom”.
In 2013, Ledecky broke it, by.24 sec, with a time of 8:13.86. “So just to get my hands on second, I’m so happy”.
In swimming, Michael Phelps settled for a silver medal after finishing second in the men’s 100m butterfly, while Katie Ledecky set another world record in women’s 800m freestyle.
Friday’s two other finals were won by Americans. Bronze went to Canada’s Hilary Caldwell. She’s the first woman to sweep the 200, 400 and 800 freestyle races since Debbie Meyer did the same in Mexico in 1968.
The remarkable American teenager Ledecky won her fourth gold medal in a time of eight minutes 04.79 seconds, smashing her own world record and finishing more than 11 seconds ahead of Carlin.
Noting that this was her last race in Rio, Ledecky added, “The Olympics is the pinnacle of our sport and I have to wait four more years to have that moment again so I wanted the last one to be special”.
Great Britain’s Jazz Carlin finished in silver with 8:16.17, while Hungary’s Boglarka Kapas rounded out the podium with a time of 8:16.37.
Dirado swam down Hungary’s Katinka Hosszu, who starred at USC, in the final 25 meters of the 200 backstroke and touched the wall an instant before the race’s heavy favorite.
Meyer has been rooting hard for Ledecky all week, and she’s traded texts with Ledecky’s mother, Mary Gen, throughout the meet.
“I hit all my goals right on the nose this week”, Ledecky said.
She also followed fellow swimmers Amy Van Dyken and Missy Franklin as the only American women to win as many as four golds in a single Olympics.
Beyond that, Ledecky pointed to a US trials format that sets up the team to perform well at the Olympics.
In the blink of an eye, Ervin went from one end of the pool to the other in a furious dash, edging the defending Olympic champion, Florent Manaudou of France, by a mere hundredth of a second.
As for Zagunis, she’s now the first American fencer to win a medal in three different Olympic Games.
“I was only at a gas station”, she quipped, “so I didn’t think I was going to hurt anyone”.
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Turns out, it was swimming all along. Instead, he won by one one-hundredth of a second, and only one competitor to make it to the finals finished more than half a second behind him.
