You see Leonidas was a sprinter, perhaps the best of all-time and according to Olympic scholars, until last night held the record with 12 individual wins.
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Michael Phelps says he was never going to lose the 200 metre butterfly final in a revenge matchup with Chad le Clos in Rio.
As hard as it may be to believe, this wasn’t Ledecky’s first brush with an Olympic gold medal victor.
Hali Flickinger will swim in the 200-meter butterfly. “We’ll have one more time to hop in the pool and duke it out”.
The only Olympians to win four consecutive titles in the same individual event are athletes Al Oerter in the discus (1956-68) and Carl Lewis in the long jump (1984-96).
Phelps retired after the London Games, so it looked like he wouldn’t get a chance to make up for his defeat.
Lochte finished second swimming in an adjacent lane to Phelps in their semifinal Wednesday.
Lochte, 32, said: “This week, we’re just getting started”. “He won’t give up and that’s awesome”.
“It’s good consistency, I guess”, she said nonchalantly. He and Lochte, who turned 32 last week, have been swimming against each other since the mid-1990s, when the Lochtes lived in NY and the Phelps family in Maryland.
Rows over doping, and the way tarnished swimmers have found their way into the Games, saw 19-time gold medallist Phelps admit he is “heartbroken” by what is happening to his sport.
Regardless of the outcome, the atmosphere back in their room at the Olympic Village will stay chill.
The rivalry is great: It’s completely authentic and entertaining history where the two have oscillated between friends, frenemies and rivals.
The 200 IM semifinals are set for Wednesday night. The other swimmers who won medals weren’t the men who were expected to.
United States’ Melanie Margalis competes in a heat of the women’s 200-meter individual medley during the swimming competitions at the 2016 Summer Olympics, Monday, Aug. 8, 2016, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Also in the qualifying heats, Yusra Mardini, representing Team Refugee, finished seventh in her heat with a time of 1:04.66, off her entry time of 1:03.12. He and I have not spoken that much here.
But the pair, who won gold together in the 4×200-meter freestyle relay on Tuesday, will have to overthrow Japan’s Kosuke Hagino for the top spot in the world this year. The gold medalist bested him by seven tenths of a second. Evgeny Rylov was the leading qualifier in 1 minute, 54.45 seconds.
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“That’s a lot of medals”, grinned the American.
