Phelps was seeking his 23rd Olympic gold medal and his fourth straight in the 100-meter butterfly, but he was denied by Singapore’s Joseph Schooling, who got off to a blistering start and built a lead that even Phelps couldn’t overcome.
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Social media caught fire after the resullt, with old photos posted of Schooling together with Phelps when the younger man was a boy. “I’m between the two of them”.
2016 Rio Olympics – Swimming – Final – Men’s 100m Butterfly Final – Olympic Aquatics Stadium – Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – 12/08/2016.
“I wanted to race a better race”. I’m in a better state of mind this time than I was four years ago.
Knowing he was one of the few to push Phelps continuously for his entire career may be something Lochte can smile about when he does eventually call it quits.
He has won four golds and a silver in Rio so far, taking his tally to 22 golds, and is not finished completely yet even if Friday was his last individual race. But he’ll have to do with some help from his team-mates, swimming in the butterfly leg of the 4x100m medley relay on the final night of swimming on Saturday.
Phelps was given company by his countryman, friend and rival Ryan Lochte, and the Brazilian Thiago Pereira for the most of the race as the three of them edged ahead after the first split.
Astonishingly, all three touched out in 51.14 seconds, behind Schooling’s Olympic record 50.39.
Meanwhile, Lochte finished in fifth place, which marked the end his journey in Rio.
This time, she was limited to a single gold, which came for swimming the preliminaries of the 4×200 freestyle relay.
“A three-way tie is pretty wild”, Phelps said.
“Joe (Schooling) is tough”.
Ethiopia’s Ayana smashed the 23-year-old 10,000m record by almost 14 seconds as the athletics competition got underway without Russian Federation, whose track and field team are suspended over a doping scandal. Lochte has won every world championships 200 since 2009 and holds the world record of 1:54.00.
There are no women in the world who can swim faster than Katie Ledecky in her freestyle events.
It’s fitting that Ledecky closed out these games with the 800: Back in 2012, it was her shocking win in this event (at age 15, she beat then-world record holder Rebecca Adlington) that announced Ledecky’s presence as a swimmer with superstar potential.
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Ledecky was merely racing the clock as she powered away from the field to touch in eight minutes, 4.79 seconds, eclipsing the mark 8:06.68 that she set at a grand prix meet in Texas back in January.
