Titmus despairs Queen Ledecky

Adam Peaty became the first British Olympic swimming champion to validate his title and the second, after Kitajima, to win two successive golds in the 100 breaststroke. Peaty prolonged his reign at the Tokyo Games with the authority that characterizes him. Katie Ledecky, the 400-meter freestyle champion in Rio de Janeiro, did not have the same fate, who in the Japanese pool encountered the same barrier that prevented her from winning the 2019 World Cup. Then Ariarne Titmus was a stumbling block in her teenage years. Now the Australian acquires cliff relief. Not only has he eaten the morale of his great adversary, four years his senior. Swim faster and faster. This Monday morning he did all eight pitches in 3m 56.69 seconds.With some partials and rhythms that suggest that he has within his reach what in the last Games seemed accessible only to Ledecky and the generations that will follow in his wake in the next decade: get into the spectrum of 3.56 and drop to 3 , 55.

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Titmus decided that the future was today. Monday, July 26, 2021. Eleven in the morning in Tokyo. Twilight in the upper steps of the aquatic center, spotlights on the water mirror. Exit from the final of 400. Simultaneously fast and tactical test. With planning margin. Something Ledecky knows how to do. Accustomed from the age of 15, since her Olympic debut in London, to prevailing by several bodies even in the most demanding stages, she entered the water to command. She wrote the score for the first 200 with the cadence that devastated great swimmers in its wake. Titmus, in the next street, developed what seemed his own plot. In the first 100, the Australian followed her rival by a hand. Shoulder to shoulder. In the second 100, as if faltering, he began to lag behind. For the 150 meters that followed, Ledecky, who had felt the initial threat,he could think that his pursuer had been swept away by the current. Nothing is further from reality.

Perhaps Titmus, a meter away, leaned against the whirlpool produced by the American to save some energy. Between 200 and 300 meters the race entered the limbo that seemed to suit Ledecky, a political science student, daughter of patricians of Washington, a vocational governor. Comfortable while she can exercise her authority, she must have been unsettled to discover the round, rustic face of the Australian growing larger and larger in the rearview mirror. On the penultimate turn Titmus increased the frequency of his stroking and kicking cycles and instead of skidding, as is the case with uncoordinated or fatigued swimmers, he pulled as if the water were solid support.

A natural long distance runner, Ledecky possesses unprecedented acceleration in the final meters. A power that, combined with its long-winded ability, makes it a rare demolition machine. When he set the world record in 3m 56.46s in the final of the Rio Games, he completed the feat with a final blow of force. He made the penultimate 50 in 29.92 seconds and the last 50 in 28.92. In Tokyo, perhaps because she was unexpectedly assaulted in her fiefdom, perhaps because she got nervous, or because she lacked an energy that she was 19 years old and now 24 years old, she swam the penultimate 50 in 30.13s and the last in 29 , 12s. She was seen to be heavy in those culminating 10 meters, when on the way to the wall Titmus slipped away after swimming the last length in 28.67s. The American secured silver with a 3m 57.36s stopwatch. One dimension, that of the 3m57s,that until recently she could only frequent her. Now there are two. The rest of the poster did not go down than 4 minutes.

"I didn't know I was going first"

"I didn't know I was going first until I looked at the scoreboard," Titmus said as he got out of the water.

At the limit of its physiological capacity, it seemed, his brain had stopped computing back and forth, up, down, self, other, and otherness.

"It's an honor for me to compete with someone like Ariarne and swim at these fast, fast times," Ledecky said after losing his first individual race at an Games.

"I wouldn't be here if it weren't for her," acknowledged the Australian.

"If I couldn't hunt down someone like her, I wouldn't be swimming like this."

Before the 400-meter freestyle final of the 2019 World Cup, the impulsive Dean Boxhall, Titmus's coach in the pool at St. Peter's Lutheran College in Queensland, addressed the girl to harangue her, perhaps because he noticed that the myth of Ledecky gripped her.

Then he said something very simple to her that sounded like a symphony to her: “This can have two outcomes: that you swim very well, and that you swim very poorly;

but tomorrow you will surely get up ”.

Since then, this 20-year-old swimmer in love with her coach has not stopped growing.

In Tokyo it rose above a giant.

Psychologically and physically.

The pool was his.

Camino del Oro did a time that places it on the threshold of infinity: 23 hundredths of Ledecky's record in Rio.

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