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Adam Peaty missed the chance to join Michael Phelps in an exclusive club but he was not the only Great British swimmer dashed by fingertip finishes at the Paris Olympics.
Peaty could have become only the second male to win a third straight Olympic title in the same event but was pipped to the wall by 0.02 seconds in the men’s 100 metres breaststroke final.
The margin was identical 24 hours later in the men’s 200m freestyle final for Matt Richards, who also settled for silver, as did Ben Proud, just 0.05 secs off winning gold in the men’s 50m freestyle showpiece.
While they won three fewer medals than than the record eight they amassed in the pool at Tokyo 2020, Team GB’s haul of one gold and four silvers could just as easily have been the other way around.
There was also a historic artistic swimming silver Kate Shortman and Izzy Thorpe to soothe Team GB, while there were near-misses for several others.
Max Litchfield had his third fourth-place finish after the same heartbreaking results at Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 while Duncan Scott and Freya Colbert missed out on bronze by less than a second as well.
Scott became Scotland’s most decorated Olympian although his overall tally of two golds and six silvers saw him squirm uncomfortably when compared to champion cyclists Sir Chris Hoy and Sir Jason Kenny.
“I’m in a totally different bracket to these guys,” he said shyly. “They’ve won gold after gold after gold and I’m scraping silvers and jumping on the backs of others in relays.”
If he was being teed up by James Guy, Tom Dean and Richards then Scott certainly knows how to close the show with a commanding final leg in the men’s 4x200m freestyle relay final that saw Team GB become the first swimming team in history to defend an Olympic title with the same quartet.
That was Britain’s only relay medal, with Peaty’s positive Covid test meaning he was not part of the team that defended their mixed medley title and finished a disappointing seventh in the final.
Leon Marchand hogged the headlines on home soil at a Games where world records were scarce, blamed on a shallower pool than normal, but Pan Zhanle shaving 0.4s off the men’s 100m freestyle benchmark brought fresh scrutiny on China’s swimmers following the doping scandal that preceded Paris 2024.
While Summer McIntosh and Katie Ledecky also caught the eye, Britain’s female swimmers failed to attain one podium place at La Defense Arena and it is now eight years since they last won an individual medal.
