selkie

On paper the Chinese 4x200 actually looked pretty good, but it's always a question if they get everyone to show up on a given day. And today they made everything fall into place. It wouldn't really be a proper Olympics without a puzzling underperformance by Australia somewhere and they were kind of due.

Sad to hear that- great competitor and seems like a really decent human being.

That Greg Louganis was gay was an open secret in the aquatics world at the time.

Have heard something about the Olympics not allowing race radios for the cyclists like pro events have, so it's somewhat easier for a solo breakaway to fly under the radar.

Ato Bolton and Sanya Richards-Ross are pretty regular track and field commentators.

She's the world record holder and defending champion in the 400M free. Why wouldn't she swim it? Ledecky's hit the point of her career where she's very aware of her own legacy and place in the sport's history- the litany of American distance women who had come before her who didn't get to swim an Olympic final in the 1500M free was very heartfelt- and she seems to be wanting to mentor the next generation who's going to follow in that great tradition. Nice to hear Rowdy Gaines give Tracy Caulkins a shout-out tonight- she was amazing and I think the only woman to fin a US national championship in every stroke plus the IMs. Unfortunately her peak was right around 1980.

And the memory of sports fans are long when it comes to federation misbehavior. China's figure skaters are generally well-liked, their divers are well-respected (the complaint is that they're often so perfect no one else has a chance) but in other areas like gymnastics and swimming ,there have been issues and there's not a ton of confidence that said issues were ever fully resolved. There are no slackers in the distance land and every man or woman who makes an Olympic final in that kind event knows what kind of work every other athlete in the final put in to get there. So the default setting is typically 'extreme respect' and it takes a Sun Yang type (ie-anger management and doping issues) to drop below that default setting.

While the prelims-only athletes on swimming and track relays get the medals that the finals squad does, they aren't part of the formal medal ceremony. Unless Caleb Dressel is involved and he can flip his medal from the 4x100 FR to prelims-only swimmer Brooks Curry in the stands. Nice gesture of respect bettween teammates.

What else Lydia Jacoby does for fun-

She's straightforward enough to be kind of complicated- fierce competitor who sees no need to be particularly nice in the ready room but by all accounts a really great teammate when the race is over and will go from trying to stare down Lydia Jacoby in the ready room to being one of the first to go congratulate her and declare her the new queen. Brutally honest and is more than willing to say that yes, she did screw up and deserved to get DQed at a big meet. The finger wagging thing is probably a one off until she's drawn a lane to another big name swimmer who seems to have had a doping ban reduced for political reasons. (And there are a lot of swimmers who loved the finger wag because she did something they wouldn't have the guts to do) The tone toward her in the media has changed a bit in the last year or two when people seemed to realized if it was Liam King out there instead of Lily King, that person would draw great praise for their approach to the sport.

Each global sporting federation sets its own age criteria for World Championships and Olympic qualification. Pool swimming has no age minimum and there's always a talented 14 year old or three floating around (hi Summer McIntosh!) while water polo, which is run by the same organization, is an 18 minimum for athlete safety reasons- it's a full contact sport and there are age minimums in diving (I want to say 14 or 15) because of the concerns over whether diving from a 10 meter tower is good for physical development of preteens.

Per NBC, she's self-coaching for Tokyo. She's at the point in her career where no one knows better than she does what works and doesn't work for her. I suspect she's been moving around to wherever the pool access has been good the past year.

He did try to apologize to the Hungarian swimming federation for that screaming fit at the 10 year old girls on the pool deck and get back in their good graces. But as long as Katinka is still swimming he's probably still persona non-grata in Budapest.

Someone over on SwimSwam just compared Titmus' coach to Shane Tusup, Katinka Hossozu's ex-husband and ex-coach and yeah I can see the unfortunate similarity. It's a yellier coaching style than you typically get in the USA at that level.

For anyone who got the sense that Michale Phelps is not a huge Michael Andrew fan, background on Andrew is that he pretty much has the swim parents from hell and when he turned pro at age 14 the parents were talking about a) Andrew would be better than Phelps b) in part because Bob Bowman coached Phelps all wrong and Andrew's parents know the one true way by which all swimmers should train (and in a way that came across as evangelizing as vegans or paleo-eating Crossfitters) Up until recently, the back channel on Andrew was that he was actually a nice kid despite his cult-like parents (he was both homeschooled and home-coached) but something's changed with that in the past year or two and he seems to be taking more like his parents now.

The camera angles are off in the pool- it's like they don't have the side view running perfectly parallel to the lane lines and it's making it a little hard to judge close races.

I'm kind of glad the worst of the whistling breaststroke coaches seem to have retired from the sport. Every *tweet* single *tweet* time *tweet* their swimmer put head above the water.

That was the greatest collection of women's 100M butterfly talent ever assembled in one pool. Going a 56 and only getting 7th is crazy. Congrats to Maggie and the medalists! On the divers- in their discipline, they want to stay warm so it's easy for their muscles and joints to feel loose and limber. The problem is that a typical competition pool sets the temperature for swimming and not diving and 78F/25C is a pretty cold water temperature if you aren't doing hard aerobic work constantly like the pool swimmers are. So you end up with assorted ways like the hot tubs and hot showers on deck so the divers can work around the too cold water issue.

The 400IM is brutal and he left so much in the pool he could barely crawl out of the water afterwards. And NBC (and Games organizers) has zero sympathy in giving athletes decent recovery time as long as they're still conscious because they want to stay on schedule. They did the same thing to Alex Walsh at Trials and I found myself yelling at the screen to just let the poor girl go vomit in peace rather than dragging her to interview right away.

Ous Melouli is the Oksana Chusovitina of swimming. And likely the reason why Ahmed Hanaoui became a swimmer. The crowd over at SwimSwam noted that the second Rowdy got into 'I don't think he can hold on' was when it was guaranteed that Hanaoui would indeed be successful outside smoke. (The swimmer who makes it into an outside lane in a final by a literal fingernail and then just goes for it and finds glory)

Shut Up, Al. Wish they'd gone with Elizabeth Beisel for the swimming prelims instead of Amy VanDyken, who doesn't seem to be adding very much useful info. Also bummed that Phill Liggett apparently didn't want to do Olympic cycling coverage this time around. Yeah he's getting up there in age and his heart isn't in ot quite as much since Paul Sherwen died but he's just the voice of big time cycling for me.

I realize that goal differential is an important tiebreaker for pool play in a lot of team sports, but dang, it gets ugly when a team feels like they have to run up the score like that against the weak spot in their pool.

I managed to get Fubo.TV's cycling pass for $40 for the rest of the year and am currently watching a rebroadcast of today's Giro d'Italia stage. The announcers just had an extended discussion of fines issued for a rider in the race taking a nature break in someone's yard and the resident getting pissed about the piss.

The Giro d'Italia is set to roll on October 3, and Fubo TV is finally offering a standalone cycling pass instead of only offering the cycling coverage as an add on to their other $50/month streaming packages. https://www.fubo.tv/lp/cycling-pass/

Froomie could probably still check the ego and take on a domestique role but his form just isn't good enough to offer much help to Bernal at this point. I'm sadly not surprised to see the crash causing such long term effects.