Swimming is not supposed to be a team sport, but there are not many tighter units on the British Olympic squad than the quartet of James Guy, Matt Richards, Tom Dean, and Duncan Scott. They made a little history on Tuesday night, when they became the first four swimmers to successfully defend an Olympic 4x200m relay title, a race with a pedigree that stretches right back to the early 20th century. They did it in some style, too. They led from wall to wall, and finished in 6min 59.43sec, more than a second ahead of the US team who won silver.
Scott’s time, 1min 43.95sec, was the quickest split anyone turned in all night, and it needed to be. The USA’s Kieran Smith pushed him hard through the first 100m. “There’s so many great athletes in that team, and whenever we come together it’s always really special,” Scott said. “I’m so proud of what we were able to do out there. Up on the blocks I look at those guys in front of me, and you’ve got an Olympic champion in the 200m free, a world champion in the 200m free, and a world champion in the 200m free, so all I have to do is float home at the end.”
It was Scott’s seventh Olympic medal, but it was also Guy’s sixth, which was a just reward for a man who had driven the team through the two rounds of the competition. They had been in storming form in the morning heats, when Guy led them off with the fastest 200m free of his career, breaking a personal best he had set back in 2015.
The coaches trusted Guy to lead them off again in the final, and he broke his best all over again. It was some swim for a man who was thinking about quitting just last year, before he changed his mind and moved to train at Millfield.
All four of them felt that this win was a little sweeter than the Tokyo one, just because they had their families there to see them do it. “My mum and dad moved down to Somerset, my girlfriend moved jobs for me, so with all the sacrifices they’ve made it was very, very special to have them there in the stands,” said Guy.
“It does feel different,” said Dean, “for so many reasons, my family and friends were there in the crowd and that’s all I’ve been thinking about since Tokyo, is doing this again in front of them.”
Dean has had to come through a fair bit in the last three years, not least the disappointment of missing out on a place in the solo event, which he won in Tokyo, because he was beaten by Scott and Richards at the trials. “The last three years haven’t been in a straight line for anyone, me, Jimmy, Matt or Duncan,” he said. “We’ve all had our challenges, and we’ve all made a lot of changes, but we’ve all stepped up here in the Olympics and that’s what really unites us. We know how important the Olympic Games is, for us as individuals, for us as a sport, and for us as a nation, and we know that when it comes to the Olympics we will all step up.”
“We’re good friends, we’ve won together, lost together, we’ve fought hard at trials to beat each other,” said Richards, “so the four of us share a bond that we’re going to have together for the rest of our lives.” They’re already talking about Los Angeles ‘28. “We’ll just have to do four more years,” said Guy, who is the oldest of them, “so we can beat the US again on their home turf.”
Before all that, Ireland’s Daniel Wiffen won the country’s first gold of the Games in the men’s 800m freestyle. Wiffen, 23, is from County Down but trains at Loughborough alongside Adam Peaty. It was a grand swim, full of grit. He took the lead at 400m, lost it again with 150m to go when he was overtaken by the Italian Gregorio Paltrinieri who was one lane over, and then fought like hell to win it back again coming into the final turn. He covered the final 50m in just 26.94sec, and finished in a new Olympic record of 7min 38.19sec.
Wiffen is the first Irishman to ever win an Olympic gold medal in the pool, and only the second Irish athlete ever to do it after, ahem, Michelle Smith de Bruin, who won three of themat Atlanta in 1996 and was banned for four years soon after when she was caught tampering with her urine samples. Wiffen wasn’t even born when all that happened, and while it won’t much worry him either way, some of the older people around Irish swimming will feel awfully glad they finally have another Olympic champion to celebrate after all these years.
