And he couldn’t wait to face his rival again in the same event here.
Advertisement
“It’s the closest I’ve come to throwing up at the end of a race”.
Le Clos, whose preparation for the Games has largely been overshadowed by the news that both of his parents were diagnosed with cancer, just missed out in fourth. The kid’s got talent.
Friday: 100-meter butterfly finals, 6:12 p.m.
The most decorated Olympian of all time sported his own brand of swim gear to win his 25th Olympic medal Tuesday night.
“The way he raced, everything he had was in there”, Bowman said.
And when he finally received his gold medal and the national anthem played, it brought everything back home – literally.
“I haven’t had bad ones like this in in a while”, Phelps said on Sunday, a day after the relay. He then burst into laughter because his friends belted out “O!” during the anthem, a Baltimore Orioles tradition.
For Phelps, the butterfly victory was especially sweet after the sting of the London defeat, where he misjudged his final lunge for the wall to let Le Clos steal the gold medal. When he is competing in an event where victory is measured in fractions of a second, any little edge could make the difference.
“It’s everything and more than I’d hoped it to be”, said the tiny 19-year-old Texan who has set gymnastics alight with 10 world titles in the past three years.
“That event is kind of like my bread and butter”, Phelps said. “I think I succeeded in giving them momentum”, said Hagino, who swam the opening leg. In the 200-metre event he clocked 1:53.36, while in the relay, the team finished at 7:00.66.
“There was so much emotion and so much build-up for that race over the past four years”.
“Mission accomplished”, he said after claiming the 20th Olympic gold of his career, a number that became 21 after he helped the U.S. team win the 4x200m freestyle relay in the evening’s finale.
This time, he can fade away with the gold he really wanted in the 200 fly. It made sense for Lilly King.
Amid the Phelps party, fellow American standout Katie Ledecky seized another gold, this time in a tightly contested 200 freestyle. His turn, so good in the relay, nearly proved disastrous at 150 meters – Phelps nearly ran into the wall and had to compensate, quick and hard.
“Doing a double like that is a lot harder now than it once was”, he said.
Equipment mishaps are part of Phelps lore. Most famously, his goggles broke and filled with water during the 200 butterfly final in Beijing, which he still won in world-record time.
South African Le Clos, who won by a fingertip four years ago in London to rob the American of a hat-trick of titles, faded badly down the stretch to finish out of the medals.
Should have known: as a young teen Phelps could spot the pace of a split at half a mile and has known his numbers ever since.
Advertisement
History will show that Phelps 20th Medal was not won in a particularly fast time, certainly not when one considers the times in London 4 years ago, but there has hardly been a more openly fought and anticipated show down.
