Forgive us if we break with tradition and tell the news from yesterday after we've told the news from the day before yesterday. The swimming weekend just past needs to be recounted chronologically and in order of sensation. On Saturday in Sydney the Games exploded. We had four swimming finals. Five world records. If it gets better than that anywhere put us down for tickets. Any price. We saw the arrival of a legend. Ian Thorpe, a 17-year-old local kid who hasn't been to school in two years but who speaks with calm and professorial deliberation, won the 400 metres freestyle event and had no sooner calmly digested his achievement than he came back out and anchored the Australian 4x100 relay team in one of the most sensational races in swimming history. Words can't describe that race, nor the long visceral roar that accompanied it. Swimming is fundamental to the Aussie heart. Beating the Americans at swimming is the national dreamtime.
What a race. Australia staked the house on a good start and a strong finish. Michael Klim, the sprint specialist, was given the job of lighting the rocket. He broke the 100 metres freestyle world record on the first leg of that relay, swimming 48.18, just three-hundreths of a second inside the six-year-old record of his friend and training partner Alexander Popov.
By the time it came to the turn of Australia's third swimmer, Ashley Callus, the race was an epic. Callus lost a half-second lead, pulled it back and sent Thorpe off in the lead. Gary Hall, the sprint specialist who swam the fastest relay leg in history in the Atlanta final four years ago, went after Thorpe like a greyhound after a rabbit, albeit a rabbit with size 17 feet.
Half way down the pool he caught Thorpe. Hall stayed in front through the turn. The Australian kid eyed his rival, though, drew a breath and dug his way through the water, all guts and technique now. He got ahead with maybe 10 metres left and, with the aquatic centre in bedlam, touched the wall two-tenths of a second before Hall. The Aussies broke the world record by a clear second-and-a-half, coming home in 3:13.67, well inside the old US mark of 3:15.11. The race provided a novel twist to this old rivalry. Gary Hall Jnr had said of the Aussies last week that his squad would "smash them like a guitar". There are few match-ups in the individual races, so all the edge is concentrated in relays. So when the Australians reduced the strongest American squad to splinters, they played a little air guitar in American faces.
Hall, the original instrumentalist, took it all in context. "No feelings were hurt," he said.
If that had been all the business of Saturday night, it would have been a feast, but Ukraine's 18-year-old sensation Yana Klochkova swam a, well, sensational 4:33.59 in the 400 individual medley. The prior record holder, Chen Yan of China, failed to make the final. Neither did any of her team-mates, a suspicious and conspicuous failure which recalled the tame Chinese exits in Atlanta.
Then there was the women's 4x100 freestyle relay. It was a demonstration event almost, as the American team of van Dyken, Torres, Shealy and Thompson wiped out another Chinese record, winning in 3.36.61 comfortably ahead of the Netherlands and Sweden.
So Saturday brought the bounty of five world records in four finals. Already we were into the territory of the greatest swimming meet ever. It scarcely eased up yesterday. Thorpe, whom many were encouraging to merely walk across the water in the heats of the 200 freestyle, saw a remarkable thing happen in the first semi-final. The Dutchman Pieter van den Hoogenband beat his world record. Thorpe came out in the next semi-final and just missed beating van den Hoogenband's record by .02 of a second. He gave a little smile to himself as he surveyed the board.
Even the Dutchman had the feeling that his record would be short-lived. "I have a little bit left for the final, a little bit. I think Ian has a lot more."
The night thundered on. The rise of Italian swimming continued with Domenico Fioravanti winning the 100 breaststroke final, a feat barely celebrated by a spoiled attendance because it didn't involve a world record.
Inge de Bruijn, the Dutch woman who has drawn accusations of drug-taking after several immense improvements in the last year, duly broke her own world record in the 100 butterfly final. She dealt with the Michelle Smith comparisons at a press conference later:
"I don't why I am compared. I've always been ranked in the top 10. In 1992 I had a bronze in the World Championships, I set lots of European records. I haven't come from nowhere like she did. Our names aren't the same. She is not family in any way. There are no comparisons."
The last two races of last night fell to America. Brooke Bennett, coached in Florida by Dubliner Peter Banks, won the 400 freestyle. The men's 400-medley title was retained by Tom Dolan, the prominent asthmatic from Virginia. An appropriate capper to an extraordinary weekend, Dolan obliged by beating his own six-year-old world record in the process.
