Doubles for Titmus and Ohashi

Women’s 200m free

After winning the 400m, Ariarne Titmus was an even more towering favourite as she also led the world ranks by a huge margin coming to these Games, having clocked the second best-ever time in June. Indeed, here she seemed to face the real challenge not from title-holder Katie Ledecky (USA) but from Hongkong’s Shiobhan Haughey and China’s Junxuan Yang. Indeed, these two charged ahead at the first 100m but Titmus’ strategy was the usual ‘coming-from-behind’ approach, to stage a blistering second 100m.

And that worked brilliantly like two days ago: even though she turned third at 150m, her top gear had already been switched on and she passed the others with ease to clinch it by a gap of 0.42sec. The splits of the last 50m tell it all: Titmus stormed to the wall in 28.80, runner-up Haughey swam 29.74 and Penny Oleksiak, from Canada, who managed to grab the bronze, clocked 29.75 in the homecoming leg. 

So Titmus completed the 200-400m double here – Ledecky had those two in Rio, and added the 800m as well –, an outstanding feet. Haughey was happy too to claim Hongkong’s first-ever swimming medal at the Olympics.

On her feelings right after the race, she came with a pretty straight-forward response: “Bloody exhausted. That was a hell of a tough one. I knew Siobhan really wanted this. I could tell by the way that she swam yesterday morning, so I knew it would be tough to beat her. It's not the time (1:53.50) I thought I could do this morning, but it’s the Olympics and there's a lot of other things going on. So, it was just about winning here. I'm very happy.”

Regarding her busy schedule, Titmus offered this: “I feel like I am pretty good at containing my emotions, I know that’s something I had to do really well after the 400m event because the 200m was right after, so it was a bit of a skill trying to contain it and now that I don’t have a swim tonight I kind of let it out a little bit."

Women’s 200m IM

While Yui Ohashi’s victory had never been in question in the 400m IM on the first day, this race offered fantastic thrills. China’s Yu Yiting launched the initial assault and set the pace for the first 100m, Ohashi was a close second at the halfway mark – then Yu faded over the breaststroke leg and USA’s Alex Walsh rushed ahead, passing the home hero en route but only 0.07sec were between them at the 150m turn.

And it was Ohashi who had more left in the tank, she gained 0.2sec on Walsh as she charged towards the wall and won by a relatively small margin of 0.13sec. Fellow US teammate Kate Douglass, turning 6^th at 100m and still 4^th before the last leg, could hit the wall 0.11sec ahead of GB’s Abbie Woods for the bronze.

Ohashi admitted that she had had to go through some difficult times. "I had times when I wanted to give up swimming, but I learned to accept it and turned it into a strength." 

On a sidenote, title-holder and WR-holder Katinka Hosszu finished a distant 7^th – the Hungarian had ruled this event as no other swimmer did in any race between 2013 and 2019 when she posted a 68-event winning streak at all FINA and LEN sanctioned events (short- and long-course, from Olympics to World Cups), but the pandemic admittedly ruined her ‘race-to-train’ approach with no competition held for long months and she could never rebound from the lockdown’s effects. (This day witnessed the fading of the reigning world champions: just like Hosszu, Italy’s Federica Pellegrini finished 7^th in the women’s 200m free…)

It was Ohashi, who took over the reign and did what Hosszu repeated at each major event between 2013 and 2019: made the IM double. It’s also a long-standing Olympic tradition: in each of the past six editions the same athlete came first in both events – but Ohashi still achieved a historical first: no other Japanese woman could claim two golds at the same Olympics.