Now, he’s the first swimmer ever to win the same event at four straight Olympics.
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Le Clos’ fourth medal broke him out of a tie with fellow swimmers Penny Heyns and Roland Schoeman.
“I think what it means is we have just a great sporting culture and a really incredible system of sport in our country”, said Alan Ashley, the USOC chief of sport performance.
Phelps has already won gold in the Men’s 200m medley, as well as the 200m butterfly, 4×100 freestyle relay and 4×200 freestyle relay. It’s something you dream of, I’m living a dream come true. His tone immediately changed from excited to gutted and he corrected himself, saying: “I apologize, I got my lanes mixed up”.
“I think it’ll be pretty cool to see someone else break 50s.”, said Phelps, glancing in Schooling’s direction.
“My heartiest congratulations to Joseph Isaac Schooling for his historic gold medal win, and Olympic record of 50.39 seconds for the 100m butterfly!” Who inspires you so much that you’re committed to do them the honor of committing to be even better than they are?
It seems only fitting that his final race included rival Chad le Clos of South Africa.
“That would be wonderful”, Debbie Phelps said. I couldn’t really smile.
Michael Phelps was adamant there would be no retirement U-turn this time as he was beaten to gold by a Singaporean who used to idolise him.
As if that wasn’t enough, Phelps also beat an ancient Olympic record, surpassing Leonidas of Rhodes’ 12 individual Olympic titles with a 13th individual gold medal.
“After the race I was like, “This is out of this world”, Schooling added.
Like Schooling, Le Clos asked Phelps to continue. I had to take that blow and I’m thankful and blessed that I have the ability to accomplish the things I dreamt of as a little kid.
“In many ways I felt I let a lot of people down by not winning”.
In the race immediately preceding Schooling’s victory, Maya DiRado barely edged Katinka Hosszu by a margin of 0.06 seconds. Danish Paul Elvstrøm won four consecutive golds (1948-1960) in sailing as did Britain’s Ben Ainslie (1996-2012).
Ervin retired from swimming in 2003, aged 22, and spent time drinking and taking recreational drugs – as chronicled in his book.
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While in track and field, ties can be broken to the ten-thousandth of a second, swimming races are called a tie if the times are equal to the hundredth of a second.
