Two-hundredths of a second are beginning to become a curse for the British swimming team.
A night after Adam Peaty had missed out on gold by that margin in the 100metre breaststroke, the same fate befell teammate Matt Richards in the 200m freestyle on Monday night.
Richards had come into the Olympics as one of the form athletes in the world but had struggled for his best in the heats and semi-finals.
But outside in lane one, he nearly timed his form and his race to perfection to cause a major upset to Romania’s David Popovici, the clear pre-race favourite.
But Popivici only managed to touch two hundredths ahead of Richards in a blanket finish, which saw Duncan Scott edged out into fourth.
Richards had partly trained for the last Olympics in Tokyo during the Covid lockdown in a pop-up pool his parents built for him effectively with a bungee cord attached to him in order to train. He went on to win gold as part of the 4x200m freestyle relay team, this was his first individual Olympic medal.
And he readily admitted it felt like there was a 0.02seconds curse for Team GB. "It seems that way,” he said. “But I can't be too disappointed with that. My first individual at an Olympic Games so to come away with a silver is great. To be two one hundredths off gold is excruciatingly frustrating.
"I thought I had got it, it felt as if I had touched it first. The time says differently. It is not a sport that is up for debate, it is black and white. It wasn't my best finish, I would be lying if I said it was fantastic. We move on, we get better and try to get it next time."
Scott had warned he needed to swim the fastest 200m of his career but he came up just short and his wait for a first individual gold continues. He will have another chance in the 200m individual medley later in the Games.
Richards and Scott’s British teammate Freya Colbert had been expected to be in the medal mix in the 400m individual medley and so it proved.
She began the final leg, the freestyle, in third place but she was edged out by less than a second to agonisingly finished fourth.
It was a first gold for Canada’s Summer McIntosh, at 17 the new rising star of swimming who had toyed with following her sister into figure skating before opting for the pool.
She pulled out a lead in the opening few metres of the butterfly and her rivals never closed the gap as she took the gold by six seconds.
