It’s more usual for a sports story to begin with a line about how an athlete or a team defied predictions, so it’s gratifying to be able to report here that what was most impressive about the Australian women’s 4x200m team, as they swam into history at La Defense on Thursday night, is that they validated predictions.
It’s a deceptively brilliant feat.
Ariane Titmus swam final leg to claim a predictable gold in an Olympic record time.Credit: Getty Images
It’s natural and human to make predictions, projections, forecasts, call them what you will.
Sport is about the contest, and foretelling the result is the contest within the contest. As any number of office and school tipping competitions demonstrate, it’s not enough to barrack, you must also demonstrate your superior foresight as you do. Two related industries, horse racing and bookmaking, exist only because of this certainty.
But predictions weigh and pinch and sometimes mock, and every now and then crush. They distort the discourse, because a prediction often takes on the gravitas of a prophecy, and when it is not fulfilled, it is as if the competitor has failed when it might be the prediction that was awry.
More to the point, predictions create expectations that often are not reasonable, and on some settle like millstones. Even the very best feel it. Indeed, it’s usually the very best who feel it, because it’s their special cross. You can be certain that it sat at the back of those four minds on Thursday night (Friday morning AEST), knowing their country’s eyes were upon them. This was one Australia just knew it would win, right?
It was because of this sort of dwelling that the Australian Olympic Committee stopped making medal forecasts two Olympic cycles ago. But human nature being what it is, the void was quickly filled. Agencies bob up everywhere with their divinations, including in this paper’s Gracenote. It’s sophisticated and comprehensive, and yet it is already substantially wrong on an item by item basis, though its quantum forecast about Australia is tracking well.
That’s because so much can go wrong, and does, and always will. A bout of COVID – it disrupted Lani Pallister’s Games – an injury, a lesser known swimmer emerging from nowhere, a little over eagerness on the blocks – it happened in the heats this day when the Australians narrowly avoided disqualification after a lightning changeover – or just sheer bad luck: occupational hazards all.
They’re just the physical dimension, before you even get to what became of Mollie O’Callaghan and Shayna Jack in the 100 metres free, for instance, and that’s before you get to the duress that elite athletes create for themselves; Ariarne Titmus is one.
It’s the uncertainty within the certainty that so absorbs. Dealing with it is its own science. Jessica Fox was thought as good as certain to win two golds, even three, here, and it takes only the most rudimentary knowledge of her history to show how naive that it is to project in that way, and it takes only the most cursory glance at her sport to see how fraught it is; while negotiating raging waters, the merest clip of a pole is death.
She’s won two gold medals here anyway; that’s her genius.
The 200 women were perhaps the only true certainties pre-Games, the one you could take to the bank, for a small service fee. They were seven seconds faster than everyone else in the semis, then added the gold and silver medallists from the individual race to book-end the final. Instant gold, just add to water, surely?
Mollie O’Callaghan, Lani Pallister and Brianna Throssell cheer Titmus home.Credit: Getty Images
Not so fast. Australia have become unassailable in the 4×100 relay, but have won the 4×200 only once, and in Tokyo three years ago made a bit of hash of it. Titmus was the lead-off swimmer then, and it was still on her mind this night.
“A bit of redemption for us. Tokyo was not the result we wanted,” she said after this night had been won. “I personally wasn’t happy with the way I swam in Tokyo. I put pressure on myself to lift for this team. I’m proud that they had faith in me in the back to put me last and get the job done.”
Then there was the race; it wasn’t going to swim itself. O’Callaghan gave them a flying start, Pallister – who said she had bawled her eyes out when she learned she was in the final four – held her ground, before it fell to Bri Throssell in the third leg to stare down the challenges of North American stars Katie Ledecky (US) and Summer McIntosh (Canada). The Chinese were ever looming, too.
“When I saw I had Summer and Katie, I was pretty nervous,” she said, “but I just had to swim my race. I was breathing to Katie’s (side) and I was trying to hold her off, knowing that Arnie is on the blocks waiting for me.”
In her last Olympic race, after 12 years on the team, Throssell did enough. Titmus smashed the final leg out of the park and at last these great expectations were fulfilled. The full house at La Defense was generous enough to recognise the greatness they’d beheld.
After winning the 200 free from Titmus, O’Callaghan had invited her teammate to share the top of the dais with her at the singing of the national anthem. Now she went to Jack and Jamie Perkins, the pair who had to stand aside in the final, and hung her gold medal around Perkins’ neck. O’Callaghan had been a heat swimmer in Tokyo, so knew the inside-outside feeling.
To swim as the Australians quartet had this night, it takes a big heart. For the second time this week, O’Callaghan demonstrated hers.
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