TOKYO — On the pool deck just 10 minutes after noon Monday, the four men hugged, then bent at the waist, dripping and heaving as they blew kisses into the camera. This is the ecstasy and exhaustion that the Olympics can produce, when four — or in this case, five — years of unrelenting work pay off in gold and somehow seem worth it. That’s what it was for Caeleb Dressel, Blake Pieroni, Bowen Becker and Zach Apple, worth it. That quartet produced a powerful, disciplined swim that won the men’s 4x100-meter relay at Tokyo Aquatics Centre — an expected result, even when it’s unfair to expect such achievements before they happen. Their time of 3 minutes 8.97 seconds left no room for over-analysis. They led after 100 meters, after 200, after 300 and at the finish, when Apple touched the wall.“I wasn’t ever scared,” Dressel said. That’s Olympic joy. And then there is what Torri Huske endured. There is virtually no way, when a swimming race ends, for the competitors to accurately assess what just happened by looking at the competitors around them. Rather, they must clear the chlorine from their eyes and whip their heads around to focus in on a massive scoreboard at the opposite end of the pool. The numbers posted there change lives. Dressel and his mates are gold medalists Monday and forever. Huske is not — not yet. On Monday, she put her hand on the wall after the women’s 100-meter butterfly, an event in which she had posted the fastest time in the world this year. But when she blinked her eyes and begin processing those numbers, what they revealed was nothing but cruelty.“I hit the wall, and I don’t know,” Huske, the 18-year-old from Arlington, said immediately afterward. “I kind of didn’t really know what was happening until I looked at the scoreboard and saw it.”Look away if you can’t stand the worst kind of Olympic emotion. Gold at these Tokyo Games went to Canada’s Maggie MacNeil in 55.59 seconds — faster than Huske’s best-of-2021 time at the U. S. trials last month. China’s Yufei Zhang was all of five-hundredths behind, silver by a breath. And then there were the following numbers: 55.72 beside the name of Australia’s Emma McKeon and 55.73 beside the name of Huske. Fourth, by one-hundredth of a second. Missed a medal, by one-hundredth of a second.“Heh,” Huske said, trying to do just that, searching for the right words even though she had almost no time to find them. “Obviously, that’s kind of like — not disappointing, but, like, I did … you always want to medal. It always comes down to the little things, and that’s what I need to keep working on.”On the second day of swimming finals, there was all manner of drama — though Huske’s near miss is up there for most excruciating. Great Britain’s Adam Peaty, who has no peer in the 100-meter breaststroke, backed up the gold he won in Rio de Janeiro with another here. Peaty’s swim of 57.37 is just the fifth-fastest time of his career, which happens to be the fifth-fastest time ever.
All data is taken from the source: http://washingtonpost.com
Article Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/olympics/2021/07/26/torri-huske-us-mens-relay-tokyo-olympics-swimming/
#huske #newsamerican#newsworldnow #newstodaycnn #kingworldnews #newstodayinusa #
0 Comments